Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:
A fanciful jaunt through modern-day Rome seen through the eyes of a nearing-the-end-of-the-road libertine, “The Great Beauty” consciously evokes Fellini, though it’s free of Fellini’s attenuation and his lordly high-handedness. Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino has the advertising-soaked sensibility of an up-market vulgarian. Rather than fussily poke at decadence, as Fellini often did, Sorrentino revels in it; he has a love for polished surfaces and fever-dream exaggeration that rivals that of Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma. Sorrentino’s hero, Jep (the gallantly hangdog Toni Servillo), is a well-known writer. As a young man he wrote a novel that even he now considers pretentious. But rather than devote himself to his talent, he’s spent life in pursuit of leisure and sensual pleasure. (In his happier moments, Jep is proud to be Rome’s most beloved gadfly.) Though the movie offers scant explanation for his lavish lifestyle, he maintains his notoriety by puttering on the occasional magazine piece. This he takes only half-seriously. After interviewing a vapid performance artist — her act involves painting the Soviet flag on her pubis, then running face-first into a stone wall — he casually, bemusedly eviscerates her. Perhaps because Jep has so little time remaining (he’s just turned 65), he has little patience for moral or artistic preening.
The success of “The Great Beauty” is, I think, inseparable from its cynicism. It’s a cynicism that derives from Jep’s predisposition, his outlook. In its best moments the movie has a wry, observational quality that is reminiscent of the Italian social comedies of the ’60s, movies like “Divorce, Italian Style” and “Seduced and Abandoned.” And it’s often pleasingly, genially caustic. When Sorrentino tries to make points — about lost love, the death of high culture, the irrelevancy of the Church — he stumbles, as he does when he allows the movie to slip into the gloop of magic realism. Still, Sorrentino’s visuospatial sense is so keen, and Cristiano Travaglioli’s editing so quicksilvery, that you cruise right over the flaws. Watching it I felt as I do when a particularly mellifluous talker whisks away my better judgement in a gale of flimflammery. I hesitate to praise Sorrentino for what amounts to tricking me. But that trick is so much a part of the movie’s fabric that it hardly seems fair to complain. It’s part of Sorrentino’s (and Jep’s) Pirandellian put-on.
The Rome of “The Great Beauty” is a city shorn of its cultural heritage. Even its nobles have been reduced to sullen theme park attractions. When they’re not furtively visiting the public museums that were once their homes, they’re renting themselves out for parties thrown by the nouveau glitterati. While it’s tempting to compare the movie’s bustling, life-as-a-big-buffet vibe to the films of Robert Altman, “The Great Beauty” is perhaps too tightly wound to support the analogy. Structurally as well as metaphorically, it’s a death spiral. When we’re shown revelers engaged in a nightmare-lit conga, the face of each frozen in a rictus of semi-voluntary pleasure, it’s hard not to think of the danse macabre, or to wonder at Sorrentino’s ability to invest corrosiveness with a melancholy joie de vivre. (More than once I flashed on the work of that great contemporary nihilist, Gaspar Noé.) Sorrentino’s central conceit — that life is a phantasmagoria, a stream of highly personal sensations that abruptly ends when you die — isn’t much. But when a movie is this consistently fun to watch, I guess it’ll do.
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Uncouth Reflections 
Been meaning to watch this. This review might be just the push I need to do so. BTW, if you have a Hulu account, this was just added to the Criterion Collection so you can watch it there.
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Thanks. Didn’t realize it was on Hulu.
It’s sort of “too much” in a number of ways, but I still liked it quite a bit. It’s trying to get at something. Not sure it succeeds, but it’s fun to watch it try. Plus, it opens with a quote from Celine, which is interesting.
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I saw “The Great Beauty” at a theater earlier this year, and its complacency about the emptiness and boredom in the lives of the Italian elite made me think, “so what?” If I were as comfortably well off as Jep, not needing to worry about royalties, I would be enjoying the decline as well.
I am not sure your comparison to the movies of Pietro Germi. Germi’s movies have a savagery and fast comic style this movie lacks. Also, Germi was making fun of a moral, ultra Catholic, honor obsessed society in those movies—something the rich Romans in “The Great Beauty” definitely are not.
The last satisfying movie I saw that was set in Rome might be Gianni di Gregorio’s “Mid August Lunch.” However, none of the scenes or actresses would make it into the Uncouth Reflections Tumblr site ; )
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Thanks for the comment on “Mid August Lunch.” That’s been in my Netflix queue forever! Maybe I’ll push it up on the schedule. Did you see the follow-up, “The Salt of Life”? Wondering if that was any good.
I like Silvio Soldini’s sappy romantic films, though I haven’t seen the most recent one.
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Well, I wrote that the wry, observational qualities of the best moments of TGB reminded me of Italian comedies of the ’60s, not its style or pace. I do think TGB is fairly savage when it wants to be. Also fairly sharp about the hang-ups and predilections of Italians — in this case rich, decadent ones.
I referenced the Germi films because they’re widely available. Probably a better comparison are the related films of Antonio Pietrangeli, things like “I Knew Her Well” and “La Parmigiana.” They’re melodramas with a withering satirical bite — but part of the same “commedia all’Italiana” scene as Germi.
I didn’t take Jep as enjoying the decline. In fact, I think I’d like the movie more if Sorrentino wasn’t so intent on showing us Jep mulling over his emptiness and regrets. I’d enjoy him more as a character if he didn’t have many regrets and the movie was a more straightforward social satire about beautiful people blowing through the end days (which goes back to my point about ’60s comedy). When it slows down to make points, the movie becomes kind of dumb — though still pretty fun to watch, I think.
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Yes, I did like the botox party scene and the scenes inside the Palazzo Colonna and other Roman places of interest. When it tries to get too moral, regretful or reflect on religion, it feels a bit silly– maybe a case of the characters having their cake and eating it too. I felt that Sorrentino’s earlier film about the Andreotti, “il Divo” suffered from manic editing, even more indignation and heavy handedness, so “The Great Beauty” counts as an improvement for him.
I don’t know the movies of Antonio Pietrangeli, but I hope to watch his movies if they show up in schedules at the repertory theaters in NYC. I looked him up on Netflix, and it of course suggested American Pie and the various spinoffs.
Peterike, I have yet to see “Salt of Life.” Silvio Soldini’s movies aren’t bad.
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I’ll have to try “Mid August Lunch.” Thanks for the rec.
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