Jude Law’s War on Youth

This weekend, HBO premieres its buzzy new series The Young Pope, starring Jude Law as the first American pope in history. As the title suggests, a man of Jude Law’s age (he just turned 44) would make for a very young pope, relative to the history of the position. The Young Law Student would not work for Jude Law, but The Young Pope? Totally. Law has managed to find one of an ever-shrinking subset of roles where he, as a man of 44, could be considered young. His next film might end up being about how his character is an especially young grandfather.

If you think I’m obsessing about the youth of Law’s Young Pope character, you should watch the show. That title is not for nothing. Director Paolo Sorrentino has been pretty attuned to the concept of youth in his filmmaking. Youth was the title of his most recent movie, after all, a film where two old friends (Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel) sit around at a retreat and contemplate their own lost youth. In Sorrentino’s previous film, the Oscar-winning The Great Beauty, a great Italian bacchanalia also had the feel of an elegy for lost youth. Now, with The Young Pope, this obsession with youth finds its most direct subject. But as much as the subject of The Young Pope is a fascinating comment on Sorrentino’s filmography, it’s also an important next step in the career of its star.

Jude Law is an actor whose looks have never not been a major part of his star persona. His big break came in 1999’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, playing the character of Dickie Greenelaf, a man possessing such magnetism and sun-kissed good looks that he’d drive another man to jealous rage and murder just to have him. The omnisexual appeal of Dickie — men wanted him, women wanted him, all of Italian society seemed to want him — was one of the strongest elements of the film, and since it was the movie that made him famous (and nabbed him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod), Law’s career has always been a bit indebted to this kind of appeal.

It wasn’t just Ripley, of course. Even before his big break, Law’s roles all relied heavily on his magnetism. In both Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Wilde, Law played the object of desire to gay men, leading them to risk life and liberty because he drove them so wild (no pun intended). In 1997’s Gattaca, a crucial text on Law’s on-screen persona, Law plays an embittered member of the upper-crust in a future society where eugenics has relegated all physical flaws to the have-nots. His character was paralyzed in an accident, and this imperfection haunts him to the point where he schemes to end his life and grant his perfect existence to Ethan Hawke. In A.I., Law plays an actual sex robot, Gigolo Joe, with a plasticine sheen on his perfectly-structured face. He played Errol Flynn in The Aviator and was the ultimate womanizer in Alfie.

During his most successful period, Law was handsome enough that he was able to play with his perfect aesthetics, whether it was uglying himself up to play against type in Road to Perdition to playing an utterly hollow marketing executive whose good looks mask his inner emptiness in I Heart Huckabees.

Some time around the late 2000s, things began to change. Age … happened. I should be perfectly clear that Jude Law has never stopped being a handsome man. But time does pass. Hairlines do recede. And for a while there, it seemed like Law was being very canny in the roles he took. He played the title boy’s father in Hugo, a thief who’s put some miles on in Dom Hemingway, and a weirdo conspiracy theorist in Contagion. Most interestingly, Law played the role of Alexi Karenin in Anna Karenina, casting himself as the aging husband destined to lose his wife to the roguish young cavalry officer. Law was fairly spectacular in the role, and it seemed like we were seeing the dawn of a new era of distinguished, vintage handsomeness to Law. This was backed up by Law’s performance in Spy, where he played a suave secret agent with a not inconsiderable nod to the idea that the James Bond idea is a bit weathered.

So what, then, to make of The Young Pope, a series that once again casts Law’s youth front and center? Is this a step backward from the aging-gracefully Jude Law we’ve been enjoying as of late? After all, he’s only 44. Male movie stars have pretended to be young for longer. And perhaps this Young Pope will wield his relative youth in ways that aren’t just designed to make him seem hot and youthful. There’s a soulfulness to the pretty young thing who’s not so young anymore. Jude Law could play that role phenomenally well if he pursues it.