This winter, Paolo Sorrentino returns with a film that trades some of his usual baroque excesses for a more pared-back, reflective tone. La Grazia, which opened the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, follows Mariano De Santis, an aging Italian president played by Toni Servillo, as he confronts a cluster of moral dilemmas in what increasingly feels like the final stretch of his public life. The film is less about political theater, however, than about the interior weather of a man whose decisions will echo far beyond his lifetime.
Catch La Grazia in theaters beginning December 12th at the Laemmle Royal and Glendale.
Servillo gives a performance that folds restraint into thunder. He embodies a figure who has been both admired and mocked, nicknamed “reinforced concrete” for his resolute public persona, yet now hesitates in private. Mariano must weigh whether to sign a bill legalizing euthanasia, he must decide on clemency petitions for men convicted of killing their partners, and he wrestles with a decades-old suspicion about his late wife’s fidelity. These are not simple plot devices but moral fulcrums that expose what power leaves behind in the chambers of the self.
Sorrentino’s camerawork here is unusually intimate. Where his earlier films luxuriated in spectacle, La Grazia presents more subtly. At times, the director allows a whisper of the surreal—a gaggle of policemen humoring a president’s joke, a rain-soaked banquet that slips into the uncanny—but mostly he leans into silence and the slow erosion of certainty. The result is a meditation on conscience rather than a polemic about institutions.
What makes La Grazia especially compelling is how it links public choices to private loss. Mariano’s deliberations are haunted by grief and a stubborn loyalty to principle; the final refuge of a man who has spent a lifetime making hard judgments and is forced, at the end, to reckon with the consequences.
In the end, La Grazia is neither an easy dismissal of political life nor a blind exaltation of following one’s conscience. It is, instead, a film that asks what grace looks like when measured against law, tradition, and love. Sorrentino frames no tidy answers; he simply enlarges the questions, and in so doing paints a picture of an office whose decisions are at once juridical and profoundly human.
For viewers who appreciate films that interrogate the emotional cost of leadership, Sorrentino’s latest is a modest but resonant triumph: a film that listens, and then lingers in the mind.
“Paolo Sorrentino has rediscovered his voice, his wan humour and his flair for the surreal… a welcome reassertion of his natural style.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“The beauty of the script is the way the turbulent thoughts of De Santis’ past… feed into his most important final responsibilities and his state of mind as he steps away from his seat of power.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter