Considering that this year’s Oscar
winner for Best Foreign Language Film centers upon a despairing older man
confronting the void of his empty life, The
Great Beauty is a surprisingly giddy ride.
After a brief prologue, we are introduced to the lead character Jep
Gambardella at his over-the-top, cacophonous 65th birthday
party. A partygoer informs her neighbor
that the middle-aged woman emerging from Jep’s huge birthday cake is an actress
“now in full physical and mental decline.”
We soon learn that this former star is a fitting stand-in for Jep and
his circle of acquaintances.
Through an early first-person
voiceover, Jep tells the viewers that as a child, he was highly sensitive and
thus destined to become a writer. At the
age of 18, he met his one true love who later left him. At 25, he wrote an esteemed novella entitled The Human Apparatus. A year later, he moved to Rome, where his
downfall began.
Again through voiceover, Jep informs
us that upon arriving in Rome, he determined not only to enter high society but
become its king, wielding the power to make or break parties. He became so distracted by these Roman
festivities that he never again wrote a work of significance, nor formed another
lasting attachment with a woman despite sleeping around copiously.
In the ensuing 39 years, Jep has
become a jaded journalist who knows all of the important people in Rome: we watch him mingle with a major newspaper
editor, Italy’s greatest poet, a famous pop singer, and the leading Catholic
cardinal. He attends parties that last
until dawn and hosts soirees at his apartment overlooking the Colosseum with
his circle of similarly shallow acquaintances.
We meet Stefa, an ex-communist who now produces trashy reality
television and lives in a luxurious home tended by seven servants; Lello, a
lecherous toy exporter; and Orietta, an indolent rich woman who takes nude
selfies but is lousy in the sack. Jep
tells his friends in one memorable scene that they are all petty, self-deluded,
and on the brink of despair, and no-one disagrees.
Actor Toni Servillo adeptly plays the
part of Jep, almost never deviating from a stylish, blasé comportment. Only rarely does real emotion break through,
with sadness at the passage of time as he contemplates a modern art
installation, bereftness after the death of a woman for whom he’d begun to feel
genuine affection, and wonder at chance encounters with wildlife.
In the hands of director Paolo
Sorrentino, who also co-authored the screenplay, Rome itself has the lead
supporting role. Courtesy of
Sorrentino’s frequent narrative ellipses and wildly varying camera angles, Rome
overwhelms, seduces, and disorients the viewer (we can see how a younger Jep
was so easily led astray). We are served
a jumbled smorgasbord of visual art, ranging from ancient sculpture and
architecture to bizarre contemporary performance art. Similarly, the musical soundtrack joyously
overwhelms with a mix of sacred classical music, pulsing dance pop, and folk
music, along with the alternately ethereal and sentimental film score by composer
Lele Marchitelli.
A lesser director would’ve made an
unpleasantly vertiginous mess out of these elements. But Sorrentino’s efforts planted an exuberant
smile on my face when I watched this on the big screen, in part because the
story, sound, and visuals were consistently unpredictable. One night Jep greets a group of old ladies
playing cards in an ancient darkened palace, then another evening he happens upon
a magician friend who makes a giraffe disappear (“It’s just a trick,” Jep is
thrice reassured.)
The screenplay is also a web of
parallels and contrasts, which I’m just beginning to unweave after three
viewings. Most notably, Jep is compared
with two other older male characters.
The first, a fellow writer ironically named Romano (or Roma for short),
has spent the same amount of time in Rome as Jep, yet has managed to cling to a
heartfelt sincerity in his creativity and some degree of austerity in his
lifestyle. Romano manages to find
salvation when he chooses to return to his hometown, telling Jep, “Rome has
been a real disappointment.”
Second, Jep is curiously on a
parallel track with Cardinal Bellucci, next in line to be the Pope. Like Jep, the cardinal was once an idealist,
even serving as the church’s leading exorcist.
But as he’s aged, he has become befuddled and avoidant when faced with
spiritual matters, preferring to steer the conversation towards mind-numbing
monologues about his favorite recipes.
Jep’s worldly cynicism and detachment
are also held up against recurring images of youth and innocence, as we watch
frolicking children in a formal garden and young lovers in a college dorm heedless
of the world around them. There is even
a childlike Mother Teresa-like figure.
And though her handler’s tales are too fantastic to be believed (surviving
on 1 ½ ounces of roots while still working hectically for 22 hours daily at the
age of 104), she contrasts sharply with the Roman nuns and priests who flirt at
fancy restaurants and visit a celebrity plastic surgeon.
So what does all of this mean? To answer that question reductively about
such a gorgeous work of art feels akin to pinning a butterfly to a specimen
board, but I’ll tentatively offer an answer. One of the most helpful philosophical and
psychological guides that I’ve found on facing the challenges of life is Irvin
Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy. In this masterwork, Yalom posits that there are four “given’s” to life
that we all must face in order to live fully:
death, isolation, freedom, and meaninglessness.
Jep (and the city of Rome by
extension) has failed all four of these tests.
Jep uses frantic busyness and detached cleverness to deny the reality of
death. Shallow acquaintances replace
intimacy. He has squandered his freedom
on empty frivolity, and his considerable artistic abilities have failed to
produce a meaningful work of art since his 20’s. The Great Beauty of
existence eludes Jep, and even more tragically, he stopped trying to find it 40
years ago.
(The
Great Beauty is unrated in the U.S., but its graphic nudity and sexual
situations would make me feel uneasy about showing this to any but the most
mature and sophisticated of adolescents.
I suspect most teens would find its subject matter too adult-oriented
for their interests anyway.)
5 out of 5 stars
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