The premise of The Great Beauty (2013, Paolo Sorrentino) is seductive. Jep Gambardella turns 65. Hes a journalist specializing in culture and interviews with celebrities, skating on a literary reputation based on a novella be wrote in his 20s, a devotee of high society and passion. Now he ruefully questions his mortality, his importance and usefulness (or uselessness) and the essential aimlessness of his life, wandering through the ancient city of Rome, visiting old and new friends and the vagaries of the past. This is all beautifully filmed, rueful, autumnal -- it won Best Foreign Language Film from Oscar, Golden Globes and BAFTA -- and Toni Servillo is excellent as Jep (still with his boyish nickname), and those with long memories will be reminded of La Dolce Vita (1960, Federico Fellini), though the truth is that Servillo does not have the depth that Marcello Mastroianni displayed in that masterpiece. Where I part company with the reviewers and judges who showed praise and awards on The Great Beauty is the disjunction between Jeps life and sensibility and the outrageous hyperbolic decadence of the world he inhabits, like a brutal, vulgar marriage of the late unwatchable Fellini and the present unwatchable Baz Luhrmann. One cannot fathom why Jep tolerates the grotesque characters, the losers, the snide superficial pseudo-intellectuals that make up his crowd. This disjunction completely upsets the elements that I find so important in movies and that I harp on again and again, and what are those, friends? Repeat after me: Tone, consistency, coherence, narrative arc. Now its true that the excesses that the movie depicts may reflect the hedonistic buffoonery of the Berlusconi era, but in this setting and with this theme of Proustian memorialization, I find them way off the mark. Great to look at, though...
Posted on: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:18:56 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015