“The Great Beauty” is Paolo Sorrentino’s love letter to Rome, told through the eyes of a man who has spent his life chasing its surface. Toni Servillo plays Jep Gambardella, a 65-year-old journalist and theater critic who has spent decades drifting through the city’s elite parties, seducing women and living off his wit. After his 65th birthday, a shock from the past forces him to look beyond the glittering nightlife and find something deeper.
The film opens with a quote from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night, setting the tone for a story about imagination, memory and the distance between fantasy and reality. Sorrentino frames Rome as a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty, a city that rewards those willing to wander its streets and lose themselves in its history.
Trailer, via PalaceFilms.
Rome as the Real Star
Rome is the film’s true protagonist. The film spends much of its runtime roaming the city’s landmarks, statues and fountains, capturing the layered grandeur of a place that has stood for centuries. Sorrentino’s camera lingers on these details, letting the audience absorb the visual spectacle.
The film is a co-production between Italian Medusa Film and Indigo Film, alongside French Babe Films. It was financed with support from Banca Popolare di Vicenza, Pathé and France 2 Cinéma.
Jep’s Friends and His Block
Jep’s circle is a gallery of grotesques. Romano is a playwright perpetually led by a young woman who exploits him. Lello is a mouthy, wealthy toy seller. Viola is a wealthy bourgeois whose son Andrea suffers from serious mental problems. Stefania is a self-centred radical chic writer. Dadina is the dwarf editor of the newspaper where Jep works. Each friend represents a different facet of Rome’s upper class, and each fails to satisfy Jep’s hunger for meaning.
The film’s central tension comes from Jep’s creative block. He wrote one book, The Human Apparatus, years ago, and has never published another. His fame as a critic and his many awards have not driven him to write again. Laziness is part of it, but the bigger problem is a creative paralysis that leaves him unable to escape the superficial world around him.
Elisa’s Diary Changes Everything
One morning, Jep meets the husband of Elisa, his first and probably only love. The man announces that Elisa has died, leaving behind only a diary. In it, she writes of her love for Jep, a confession that her husband discovered too late. This discovery shakes Jep’s complacency. He begins to see the emptiness of his life, even as he continues to enjoy its pleasures.
The film’s emotional core is Jep’s realization that the world he has built is a fiction, a novel he has been living out since his youth. The quote from Céline serves as the film’s framing device, reminding the audience that Jep’s journey is entirely imaginary, going from life to death.
Where It Falls Short
Not everything lands. Some subplots feel like sketches rather than stories, and a few characters exist mainly to provide color rather than depth. The film’s pace can also slow to a crawl during its middle stretch, when the plot stalls while Sorrentino luxuriates in Rome’s visual splendor.
These are minor complaints against a film that is otherwise ambitious and confident.
Hard Numbers
- Title: The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza)
- Director: Paolo Sorrentino
- Writer: Umberto Contarello, Paolo Sorrentino
- Runtime: 142 minutes
- Budget: €9.2 million
- Box office: Over $24 million worldwide
- Awards: Won Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards, Golden Globe, BAFTA
The Verdict
“The Great Beauty” is a flawed but essential work of cinema. Its strengths — Servillo’s performance, Sorrentino’s direction, the breathtaking cinematography — outweigh its weaknesses. It is a film about aging, about the failure to grow, and about the strange comfort of living in a world you know is not real. It is funny, sad, beautiful and occasionally exhausting, but never boring.
The film is a reminder that sometimes the best way to see the world is to step outside it, even if only for a moment.
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