What lies beneath

As giant and glorious and empty as a parade float, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza) boasts swooning visuals that are sumptuously over-the-top, and every frame reels with grandeur and invention. The Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language Film, The Great Beauty is a vision of modern-day Rome as a disco ball-lit crypt, a place where even youthful decadence is in decay. It’s as though the vapid La Dolce Vita partygoers only paused long enough to update their musical tastes and lifestyle accessories.

Director and co-writer Sorrentino is clearly in debt to Fellini here, but he and his cinematographer Luca Bigazzi (Certified Copy) do the maestro proud on a visual scale, making glorious use of color, composition and camera movement. You want to swim around in Sorrentino’s imagery, and not without coincidence, one of the most potent recurring images here is of the writer protagonist Jep Gambardella laying in bed and watching his ceiling dissolve into an endless blue sea of memories.

Jep (Toni Servillo, who also starred in Sorrentino’s 2008 film Il Divo) is a long-time lion of Rome’s fashionably debauched scene, a writer who only produced one highly regarded novel before wasting the next four decades as a sleazy journalist and professional party animal. Upon turning 65—Jep’s outlandishly excessive birthday bash forms the film’s brilliant opening showpiece—he begins to question his life of nihilism, especially reflecting on the adolescent love he can barely remember.

In other words, Sorrentino and Servillo take the Marcello Mastroianni paparazzo from La Dolce Vita, age him several decades, stir in some 8½-like stylized self-analysis, and shoot it all with the lavish colors and swirling memory structure of later Fellini works like Amarcord. However, Sorrentino’s take is icier than would have been possible for Fellini, whose movies tended to evoke a gregariousness of spirit often in contrast to the director’s jaundiced view of humanity.

Above all, The Great Beauty is a story of Rome, and the many dichotomies of the city that keep Jep simultaneously bewitched and benumbed. In Sorrentino’s eyes, Rome is a city of mold and debauchery, religious piety and unending decadence, culture and vapidity, deep spirituality and deep despair. It’s a place where the only people who take the pursuit of beauty and art seriously are deranged, pathetic, delusional, suicidal, or all of the above.

The Great Beauty works better as an absurdist sketch of an ancient city filled with ghosts and contradictions than it does as a full-fledged satire of modern-day depravity. Scenes self-consciously intended to be funny and skewering, such as a Gilliam-esque visit to a plastic surgeon’s chambers where the posh clientele blather about their “amazing dysentery” and the supremacy of Ethiopian jazz, more often than not fall flat.

On the other hand, Sorrentino performs miracles of storytelling and insight through purely cinematic means. Jep attends a surreal exhibition where an abused child celebrated as an avant-garde artist throws a tantrum on canvas, and then transforms her anguish into a work of transcendent beauty. A tracking shot of Jep strolling next to a gliding river cruiser, or the sudden and startling images of wildlife roaming the cityscape, have infinitely more potency than the script’s occasional cheap shots.

As Jep’s journey through the city grows increasingly bleak and absurd, he sees that everyone around him is in decline. Fellini’s hard-partying gargoyles have become reality stars, mummified princesses, aging strippers, and social-media vampires. There is a sense that Jep’s Rome is stuck somewhere between a molding museum and a thriving mausoleum. It is a place where debased pseudo-royals will rent themselves for dinner parties, but only if it does not upset any centuries-old family rivalries.

For all of its opulence and introspection, The Great Beauty ends up perversely reveling in its own beautiful vacuity—the “blah blah blah” closing narration is the equivalent of a thumb to the nose. However, Jep’s ultimate embrace of insularity as a form of self-knowing fits perfectly with a film that produces some of the most stunning visuals imaginable, and then questions whether or not shallow beauty is its own reward.