Television Series Reviews

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2013, vol. 8 Television Series Reviews The Borgias, Season One, Showtime When the title credits flash on the screen, intercut with carefully selected details from Renaissance paintings at the start of each of the nine 45-min- ute episodes of The Borgias, Season One, it is immediately evident that this television series will not be revising the infamous Borgia legend that grew up around the notorious family during its reign and after its demise in the mid-sixteenth century. As the inspiration for Mario Puzo’s novel, The Family, and very likely of his blockbuster films, The Godfather and its sequels and prequels, the Borgias continue to be depicted as the original mafia dynasty (“meet the original godfather” is one of the omnipresent taglines for Showtime’s series), a family accused of debauchery, incest, murder, torture, and fratricide. This visual pastiche introduces the spectator to what will dominate each episode: male lechery pitted against innocent female purity as anachronistically symbolized by Philippe de Croy’s hands holding a rosary while a dagger pierces the pearly-white flesh of Roman heroine Lucretia’s martyred body (Philippe I de Croy by Rogier van der Weyden and Lucretia by Lucas Cranach the Elder); and brutality and revenge suggested by the lecherous Holofernes’s severed, bloody head gruesomely dangling in the corner of the screen after his decapitation by Judith (Judith and Holofernes by Lucas Cranach the Elder). These details, however, provide the false hope that virtuous pagan and holy women will prevail unaided against male coercion and female victimization. Not so. Rodrigo Borgia’s (Jeremy Irons) illegitimate daughter Lucrezia (Holliday Grainger) receives merely cursory nods at independent thought or action. 341 342 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Television Series Reviews When she transgresses gender lines in order to fight against male cruelty, she does so only at her father’s request. Female power does not concern this series’ creators. Garry Waller, the designer of the montage, affirmed in an interview that the details he selected were meant to emphasize the Borgias’ dynasty as synonymous with corruption during their precipitous rise to power and their fight to keep it against enormous obstacles. The spectator participates, therefore, more as a voyeur of the scurrilous family legend passed down by their many enemies than as an informed interpreter of the many complexities and contradictions in an immensely powerful family that succeeded in reshaping Italy’s dynastic map through marriage alliances, political bribery, and diplomatic cunning but that could not prevent French troops from invading, taking over the kingdom of Naples, and pillaging town after town for over fifty years, the most brutal warfare ever seen on European soil until then. Neither the Borgias’ political savvy nor their calculated corruption for personal gain prepared them for, or could measure up to, the French army’s fast-moving and lightweight artillery. It would have required a careful reader and researcher to sort through the rumors that permeated even the official chronicles and diplomatic reports issued during Rodrigo Borgia’s reign as Pope Alexander VI and the meteoric political rise of his illegitimate eldest son Cesare (François Arnaud). Irish Catholic filmmaker Neil Jordan, the mini-series creator, producer, some time director, and writer (best known for The Crying Game, Mona Lisa, and Michael Collins), relies more upon legend to con- struct his story than on the well-documented portrait of a man obsessed with occupying the most powerful seat in Christendom and driven to buy his children’s love with power, fame, and money at all costs. These compul- sions led to some of Rodrigo’s most devastating political mistakes during his lengthy career. Jordan’s sumptuously designed Season One is a $49 million visual spectacle of a man’s ruthless search for power while aided by his sociopath son Cesare, whose lack of empathy and political brutality were described by Machiavelli in his political treatise, The Prince, as characteristics nec- essary for a model prince. Although Jordan claimed in an interview that “history is for textbooks” and what we see on screen is, of his own admis- Television Series Reviews 343 sion, “the product of his [Jordan’s] imagination,” he does concede that “a lot of the history was written by Rodrigo’s successors, especially by Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere (Colm Feore), who became Pope Julius II. There was no Gibbon or Niall Ferguson to write about the Borgias, and so they become a little demonized.” Irons also acknowledged when interviewed that the complexity of Rodrigo’s character was more than the sum of diametrically-opposed dualities of good and evil. He was, he said, “a man of different colors and many different behaviors. He’s completely different when he’s being persuaded by his daughter or bullied by the mother of his children or negotiating with the Spanish ambassador. I never judge. I just try to link all those attributes.” Unfortunately, Irons’s interpretation lacks believability for precisely that vast array of attributes he mentions. With an unequal number of scenes devoted to his cavorting in bed with his mistress Giulia Farnese (Lotte Verbeek) than performing ecclesiastical duties as a pious cardinal, he is hardly credible in his role of pious pontiff. Similarly, he altogether lacks the magnetic sexual appeal that Johannes Burchard (Simon McBurney), Alexander VI’s German chief of protocol and master of ceremonies, dubbed the pope’s “endless virility.” Instead, Irons seems bored, even exhausted and overwhelmed by his character’s misdeeds. Painters and chroniclers alike saw Pope Alexander VI as larger than life both physically and politically. His broad forehead, full lips, hooked nose and immense energy, wit, and sense of humor, which made him appear much younger than his years, were repeatedly noted in the personal letters and diaries of his contemporaries. Irons, regrettably, is wizened, stiff, and awkward. His measured yet ponderous drone is laborious and over-calculated, and each gesture and declaration — and there are many of them — move at an agonizingly slow pace. Nothing about him bespeaks an over-abundance of sexuality or charisma. Nevertheless, Irons’s many loyal fans helped him to win a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by a Television Actor in a Drama, and the Showtime series in the sec- ond season went on to accumulate a total of ten Emmy nominations for Outstanding Costumes (Gabriella Pescucci, an Oscar winner for The Age of Innocence and much acclaimed for her Renaissance dress in Dangerous Beauty) and Outstanding Original Main Title Music (Trevor Morris). Pescucci’s costumes are wonderful and appropriate to the period. Silks 344 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8 Television Series Reviews and velvet brocades decorated with gold threads and bejeweled borders abound; nets of silk and snoods crafted of precious beads fasten the noble women’s hair; cloth of gold and richly woven robes of white and golden silk make up the newly-appointed Pope’s ceremonial robes; slashed leather doublets fit snugly against the male character’s torso. Morris’s score, however, is another pastiche of mismatched pieces by composers dating some eighty to a hundred years after the action. Paul Sarossy’s cinematography, however, is superb even though there is not even one atmospheric shot of Rome; the entire mini-series was filmed on location at the Korda Studios in Hungary. In reality, Rodrigo Borgia’s greatest liability was not that he was cor- rupt, as legend would have it, but that he was a foreign interloper, a fact that receives only lip service throughout the season. Italy, made up of a small number of states ruled by family dynasties, loathed the prospect of a Spanish pope from Valencia. This was his most daunting obstacle throughout his rise to power. Although he had succeeded in becoming one of the richest and most influential churchmen in all of Rome on account of the many benefices he accrued over many years, he found it extremely diffi- cult to go beyond his well-appointed, lucrative position as Vice-Chancellor to the Pope, a position he first acquired at the age of twenty-seven. But this fate finally changes thanks to chance and a little cunning when Season One begins. Set during the family’s rise to power in 1492, the season’s opening episode moves at a faster clip than many of those that follow. In “The Poisoned Chalice” Pope Innocent VII gathers his most trusted cardinals to his death bed. Representing the powerful dynastic families of faction- ridden Italy — the House of Sforza in Milan, the Medici in Florence, the Este in Ferrara, and the Spanish House of Aragon in Naples — he asks each cardinal to promise to wash away the greed and lechery that infects the Holy City. We are never told, however, how he himself sullied the church. In reality, he employed the same means as Rodrigo will during the first episode, that is, he obtains his papal tiara by granting favors to vari- ous cardinals right before the election. Jockeying for political influence and appointment as papal successor, Cardinals Giuliano della Rovere Ascanio Sforza (Peter Sullivan) and Rodrigo Borgia emerge as major rivals. Television Series Reviews 345 Rodrigo has set out to rig the conclave of twenty-three cardinals when two public scrutinies leave the contenders in a deadlock. Rodrigo cleverly con- vinces the youngest and most inexperienced cardinal, Giovanni de’ Medici (the future Pope Leo X) to cast his vote in his favor, although Jordan does not question whether Giovanni saw through Rodrigo’s posturing and lies. What he does emphasize is that Giovanni’s vote gives Rodrigo the major- ity, thereby achieving the position that he has long coveted and will hold for thirteen years.

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