“Bureaucracy is meant to be slow,” the President of Italy (Tony Servillo) explains to a member of his inner circle. “That’s the point: to give people time to reflect.” But how much time is too much, and what good is reflection for a lame duck politician with six months left in his final term and a seemingly clinical inability to make any difficult choices before he leaves office?
So far as we can tell at the start of Paolo Sorrentino’s uncharacteristically sedate and sexless “La Grazia,” which feels like forced Catholic penance for the Neapolitan flesh parade of last year’s poorly received “Parthenope,” reflection is just about the only thing the unnamed President has done for most of the last seven years. A widowed jurist whose even-keeled — or completely dormant — personality convinced the people of Italy that he was the right man to rescue them from an economic crisis of some kind, the President bored the problem into submission pretty fast, and has spent the rest of his residency at the Quirinale staring into the middle distance and thinking about his dead wife, Aurora.
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The guy is so bricked up inside his own head that his nickname around the palace is “Reinforced Concrete.” Indeed, our dear leader is so oppressed by political responsibility — so weighed down by the question of how and why to live without love in his life — that he doesn’t even know he has a nickname around the palace.
But a storm is coming to stir up his subconscious, and it arrives on several fronts at once. The President’s daughter and chief advisor Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) hopes that her dad will sign a law permitting euthanasia despite the protestations of the Pope, his potential successor Ugo (Massimo Venturiello) urges him to pardon a woman for killing her abusive husband despite the fact of her guilt, and his close friend Coco (Milvia Marigliano) taunts him about the affair his wife had 40 years ago despite refusing to divulge the identity of Aurora’s lover. It’s enough to give the old man an existential crisis, as he soon finds himself wracked by the sordid tension endemic to so many of Sorrentino’s movies: That between the sacred and the profane.
In “The Great Beauty” (in addition to several of the director’s other films, including this one to a degree), that tension was explored by slurring the past into the present against the backdrop of an eternal city. With his achingly personal “The Hand of God,” Sorrentino reapplied the same approach to the relationship between reality and imagination, and to the delicate balancing act of keeping one foot planted in each realm. “La Grazia” puts a more introspective spin on the same formula, its focus concentrated on the incongruities that can form in the ever-widening gap between a man’s principles and his doubts. Over the course of this strangely muted film (a deliberate curveball from modern Italian cinema’s most unbridled maximalist), that gap seems to widen further behind the camera than it does on the screen — and in far more compelling fashion.
Sorrentino can’t resist the temptation to introduce a few garish flourishes — along with the occasional jag of Proustian techno, and a third-act rap about “Metal Gear Solid” — into this otherwise colorless portrait of a colorless man, but his decision to confine so much of “La Grazia” to the dens, hallways, and gardens of the Quirinale feels like an act of self-denial from an artist who no longer trusts in the truth of his palette. So austere by the director’s usual standards that it seems practically Bressonian when compared to the “I wonder what life is like for an insanely hot woman?” excesses of “Parthenope,” Sorrentino’s latest is the work of someone who’s immobilized by the disconnect between their ethos and their aesthetic; someone who’s spent his entire life in search of a truth that has just slipped out of his fingers, and is naturally sympathetic to the pressures that come with trying to rediscover it in the public eye.
“La Grazia” endeavors to make us sympathetic to them as well. The President is a sullen bore, but Servillo’s performance is always a hair less moribund than the movie around it, and held tight by the sincerity of his ambivalence. The President is open and closed to everything all at once; he listens to idle gossip with the same curiosity that he entertains serious counsel from the Pope, and he’s as deeply confounded by a pass from the beautiful editor of Italian Vogue as he is by the life-or-death stakes of the pardons he’s asked to consider. He’s spiteful but open-hearted — cloaked in a power so immense that he can hardly move under the weight of it. He is, as someone puts it, suffering from the “burden of sensibility” that jurists and soldiers hope that law and duty will spare them from having to carry on their shoulders.
Servillo earns his character’s lightness with a gentleness that can make it tender and touching to watch the President get his groove back, but “La Grazia” struggles to support its leading man. Freighted with Sorrentino’s usual symbolism, which is clumsier and more suffocating than ever in the context of a film so claustrophobic (R.I.P. to Elvis the racehorse, who dies in pain as a result of the President’s indecision about mercy killings), the film is at once both too vague and too prescriptive in its framing of the President’s doubt.
Sorrentino leads the character on a long and winding road towards being at peace with uncertainty, but the signposts are as clear in their intent as they are confusing in their content, with the clemency judgments that hang over the story representing a kind of banality that’s been missing from even the gaudiest of the director’s previous work. In those more exuberant movies, many of them bursting with a horniness so profound that it became rightly inextricable from the stuff of history and religion, that gaudiness could be more of a feature than a bug. Here, in an airless drama whose protagonist has long been immune to any such pleasures, and who occupies his lavish Roman palace as if he were a prisoner in need of a pardon himself, Sorrentino tries to look for the same thrill in gray skies, wounded egos, and legal debates.
He doesn’t find it. Style has always been the vehicle for his substance, and while it’s easy to imagine why an overdone misstep like “Parthenope” might inspire Sorrentino to rein things in a bit for his next feature, it’s funny that said feature turned out to be the story of a man who threatens to unravel from self-doubt at the height of his power. Perhaps bureaucracy is meant to be slow enough that people have time to reflect on the substance of the issues at hand, but a Paolo Sorrentino movie isn’t. I suspect he made “La Grazia” to prove that to himself. It’s the only point that sticks.
Grade: C
“La Grazia” premiered in Competition at the 2025 Venice Film Festival. MUBI will distribute it in the United States.
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