There was a time in the mid-00s when the prospect of a new film by Italy’s newest favourite son, Paolo Sorrentino, was a cause for celebration. Titles such as The Consequences of Love (2004), The Family Friend (2006) and Il Divo (2008) heralded a mercurial talent, one who might finally be able to hold the mantle of Italian auteur giants such as Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. But as time ticked on and the lure of maudlin sentimentalism became too much, Sorrentino seemed to lose that early mojo – or perhaps he retooled it to the point where the films lost the daring edge and sincerity that made them so special.
La Grazia sees him re-team with his most regular and reliable leading man, Toni Servillo, who this time plays the apocryphal Italian president, Mariano De Santis, a wise old owl, widely beloved, but known for his contemplative inaction when it comes to passing legislation. He’s a thinker more than a doer, a retiring bureaucrat of the type who rarely seems to hold such positions in public office these days. We join him on the home straight of his tenure as he sneaks in ciggies on the roof of his presidential palace and ponders the wider ramifications of a far-reaching bill which would massively liberalise euthanasia in Italy.
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Servillo, as always, makes for a compelling lead, and somehow manages to subtly showcase the stores of wit and charisma hidden by this apparently dull, dithering man. If Sorrentino has a special power as a filmmaker, it’s his ability to draw the very best out of Servillo in any type of terrain, and it’s this wholly committed and natural lead performance which holds together an otherwise slipshod and fatally schematic tale how the cold realities of life and death can feed into the process of politics.
By strange quirk, two condemned murderers have been put forward for presidential pardons ahead of De Santis’s retirement, and though he initially dismisses both as mere bagatelle, he eventually sees how their cases could help him arrive at a vital decision about the assisted dying bill. Meanwhile, he privately mourns the death of his wife many moons ago, and becomes obsessed with discovering the person she allegedly had an affair with, forever tainting his idealised memory of their union.
Throughout the film, Sorrentino tosses in little stylistic digressions, such as De Santis’s sudden fondness for hardcore hip-hop, and his connection with an Italian astronaut living alone on the ISS. There are also regular blasts of techno music, creating a sharp aural contrast with the buttoned-down formalities of the cloistered political life. But all these moves come across as a filmmaker throwing down his predictable trump cards with no real feeling for what the audience has in their hand.
The set-up for La Grazia is intriguing for sure, and Sorrentino writes dialogue that is buoyed by some satisfying literary flourishes. Yet it’s a film which, in the end, settles for trite banalities across the board, tying up its many threads with either the most obvious or the most saccharine bow. Its proposed discussion on the ethics of euthanasia and attempts to objectively present all the warring intellectual factions, eventually come to nothing, as the film ends up saying that everything comes down to one person’s (usually a man’s) opinion, and we’ve just got to pray that they’re learned enough to not unsettle the balance. In addition, its depiction of the political process as one that’s completely divorced from any modern cultural realities suffuses the whole project in an air of emotionally-distancing inauthenticity.
