Paolo Sorrentino makes up for his 136-minute ogling of the impossibly beautiful bikini’d Celeste Dalla Porta in 2024’s Parthenope by making us stare at an old balding slightly paunchy white guy for two hours in La Grazia (now streaming on Mubi). And that aging gent is Sorrentino’s true muse, Toni Servillo, who now appears in his seventh Sorrentino feature, playing a fictional President of Italy during his final months in office. And of course, no Sorrentino protagonist can get through a couple of hours without contemplating and philosophizing, especially a guy who’s been rock-solid for his entire life, except when he’s obsessing over who slept with his late wife 40 years ago. Multitudes! Inside us all!
LA GRAZIA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: His nickname is Reinforced Concrete. Such is President Mariano De Santis’ (Servillo) reputation. He’s composed, steady and respectful to tradition, law, the Catholic church and the Constitution. If he said a curse word had never passed through his lips, you’d believe him. A former judge of high standing, Mariano is renowned for being a great jurist who wrote a law book that, if I’m reading the room correctly here, would bore most civilians into a coma. There’s even a moment where he espouses the virtues of bureaucracy, which is rather telling. Additionally, his presidency appears to have staved off a maniac of an opposing candidate in the last election, furthering his credibility in the public eye. One imagines his campaign slogan was something along the lines of Steady As She Goes. No exclamation point.
But he’s a lame duck now, six months away from vacating the office. A few things await his attention, though, and they’re all rather thematically trenchant for a widower whose work has rendered his adult children strangers, is on the cusp of retirement and is in the throes of late-life existentialism: First and foremost is a euthanasia bill, a hot potato he’s most likely going to toss to the next guy. Then, a pair of pardon petitions: One, for a woman who murdered her abusive, torturing husband by stabbing him 18 times in his sleep, and now claims it was euthanasia because there’s no cure for his mental illness. The other, for a man who strangled his wife to end the misery of her Alzheimer’s battle. And finally, Mariano’s beloved horse Elvis is ailing, suffering, lying there in misery, and he refuses to put the poor creature out of his misery.
Mariano would rather be doing two things: Solving the mystery of who was the willing partner in his wife’s infidelity, which has dogged him for decades and nearly rendered him asunder considering how much he adored her. He also secretly listens to crass Italian rap music. The latter might be an attempt to better understand his son, a pop songwriter in Montreal. The rest of his circle tends to be flummoxed and frustrated by him. His lawyer daughter Dori (Anna Ferzetti) is his closest adviser pushing him hard to sign the euthanasia bill; their relationship suffers from a see-each-other-all-the-time-but-know-nothing-about-each-other dynamic. She’s on the verge of walking out and leaving him to his druthers.
Coco (Milvia Marigliano) is a firecracker of a woman, an old friend and arts patron who knows the identity of Mariano’s wife’s partner, but refuses to break the promise she made to her late friend. Ugo (Massimo Venturiello) is the Minister of Justice with ambitions for the Presidency – and Mariano’s primary infidelity suspect. Mariano’s loyal security guard Massimo (Orlando Cinque) is the only one showing true affection for the guy, sneaking him verboten cigarettes on the rooftop, knowing that when Mariano smokes, he’s thinking about his wife (Mariano occasionally narrates an open letter to his dearly missed spouse, conveyed via voiceover). Mariano banters with the Pope (Rufin Doh Zeyenouin) before he zooms off on his papal moped, robes fluttering; Mariano watches stoically as the president of Portugal nearly blows away in a sudden thunderstorm; Mariano is taken aback when the younger, taller, female Lithuanian ambassador asks him out on a date. There are so many things Mariano should say yes to, but he keeps saying I dunno. Maybe it’s just a phase.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Sorrentino explored similar themes in the underrated Youth, which starred Michael Caine as a famous composer doing very little besides reflecting on his life in his retirement.
Performance Worth Watching: Servillo assures La Grazia’s thematic depth beyond the calculated machinations of the screenplay, all but carrying the film on his able shoulders.
Sex And Skin: How we got a Sorrentino film without any gaze-y admiration of the human body is a stunner.
Our Take: La Grazia is rather tidy in its composition for a film that’s essentially about a man facing a slew of pending uncertainties: What’s he going to do when his career ends? How should he feel about his wife’s secret? Will the public turn on him if he signs that bill? And let’s take that a step further – we know what comes after the cow is put out to pasture. Mariano’s clearly contemplating his mortality. What’s next after what’s next?
As is his style, Sorrentino couches big questions – the biggest – within his meticulous and lush style. If he’s not getting philosophical as he oversees exquisitely photographed, blocked and art-directed frames, call an ambulance. I’ve yet to see one of his films that isn’t at least mildly overwhelming in its beauty, and he captures the stately interiors of Presidential libraries and offices and corridors with reverence. This, even as he renders them frequently windowless and claustrophobic, trapping Mariano within elegant rooms full of stale air.
Sorrentino’s work always has that tug, that quirk, that offbeat humor, that draws you close to his characters’ humanity. But despite its ambitious set pieces and smart literary conceits, La Grazia is emotionally arid – rather odd from a filmmaker who usually directs with such overflowing, sometimes overbearing, passion. Perhaps it’s the film’s languid pace and lack of narrative urgency, or the understated dynamic of Mariano’s intellectual struggle to balance the personal and impersonal. Servillo is excellent in the role, his nonverbal performance saying more than the dialogue as his character tries to apply reason to situations that call for some, you know, guts. Although the subtitles tell us La Grazia translates to The Pardon, a more direct translation of “grazia” is “grace,” a notion our protagonist might just embrace by movie’s end, and a quality that reinforced concrete notably lacks.
Our Call: La Grazia ultimately will be minor Sorrentino, but it still offers enough fodder for the eye and mind to warrant a watch. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.