The Great Beauty (Paolo Sorrentino) [124 points / 12 votes]
"We all remember the last scene from La Dolce Vita, right?
That haunting, mostly wordless coda had Marcello Mastroianni’s party-boy journalist exchanging words with a young girl he previously met, across a noisy beach. As much as he tries to engage in a faraway conversation with the girl, he eventually gives up and moves back to his party, as the girl – his last, fleeting reminder of innocence – smiles and waves goodbye.
It’s not that surprising that The Great Beauty, Italian filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino’s most Fellini-esque film yet, ends almost the same way, with a playboy writer and a nubile sweetie on a beach, trying to find the right things to say as crashing waves kill the silence. But instead of Sorrentino’s writer (wonderfully played by Toni Servillo) saying bye-bye to innocence, he closes his eyes and wonders what it would be like to experience it again before he leaves this damn place.
Beauty pulls off the amazing hat trick of being the most lively, vivacious, downright fun movie about the inevitability of death ever made. It begins with a Japanese tourist croaking during a snapshot-taking spree. But before you get doused with the morbidity of it all, the movie then cuts to an insane rooftop birthday party – the writer’s birthday party, by the way – that could wake the dead.
But even Servillo’s Jep Gambardella knows this is all smoke and mirrors. Now in his sixties, this dapper gadfly is in a lonely, cynical haze. He roams the streets late at night, like a protagonist in a Steely Dan song. (I’m shocked no one calls him Deacon Blues during this whole movie.) As much as his Rome home is a town full of eccentric, contradictory, breathtaking wonder, filled with fascinating people and characters I would love to see in movies of their own, he is always reminded how fleeting all of this is. Friends, young and old, start passing away at a feverish pace. He finds an ally in a mysterious, fortysomething stripper (Sabrina Ferilli, gorgeous and devastating), who also unfortunately disappears from Gambardella’s life just as quickly as she entered it. It isn’t long before he starts consulting with some people of the cloth about what the hell this all means.
But as much as Beauty is about death, it’s also about life and getting as much out of it as you can, whether you’re an aging bachelor living the glamorous life or some schmo spending a quiet evening at home with your girl. Much like the idols he listed off during his acceptance speech for his much-deserved Best Foreign Film Oscar win (Fellini! Scorsese! Talking Freakin’ Heads!), Sorrentino went about making a wildly eclectic, unpredictable work about how wildly eclectic and unpredictable life is. Also, just like his heroes have done, Sorrentino’s film embraces high and low culture, the pretentious and the profane. In Sorrentino’s worldview, there’s beauty in the bullshit, and vice versa. Great living – and great art – usually requires both." -- Craig Lindsey
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