The Long Goodbye: Sorrentino Returns to Familiar Remembrances of Things Past
Paolo Sorrentino reunites with his onscreen alter ego Toni Servillo in La Grazia for yet another odyssey on regret from the vantage point of one’s golden years. Arguably a return to form for Sorrentino, his latest simultaneously feels like another chapter in a series of recurring episodes featuring powerful, well-established men consumed by memories of women from their past whilst pursuing a May-December romance with a suspiciously beautiful younger woman. Amidst a vast array of profound sentiments sprinkled throughout Sorrentino’s latest script, it’s also a science-fiction fantasy for the old guard. Broad comedic strokes, meant to convey levity in a film which hinges on, of all things, euthanasia, suggests a narrative trying too hard to please by shying away from despondency or despair, resulting in sentimentality which never breaks through platitudes.
Mauricio (Servillo), the current President of the Republic of Italy, has only six months left to go of his term. His daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) has advised him through his political tenure, and is eager to have him sign a bill legalizing euthanasia in the country. However, it appears Mauricio has a hard time making decisions on controversial subjects and may delay signing the bill until his successor takes over. Currently, it would appear he will endorse his closest friend, Ugo Romani (Massimo Venturiello), who he’s known since their school days. But Mauricio has increasingly been preoccupied with thoughts of his dead wife, Aurora, who he misses terribly. Aurora had taken a lover forty years prior, carrying their identity to her grave. Since her funeral, Mauricio is certain that lover was Ugo, and has been harassing their other shared friend, Coco (Milvia Marigliano) with unveiling who it was. Meanwhile, on top of the euthanasia bill, Mauricio is being pressured by Ugo and Dorotea to make a decision on commuting the sentences of two different people who murdered their significant others, each involving a potential euthanasia scenario.
Servillo is, as usual, a wryly amusing screen presence, and his sequences with Milvia Marigliano (who co-starred in Sorrentino’s Loro, 2018), who overwhelms her scenes like a hurricane, are amusing. The agonizing secret of who his dead wife Aurora slept with forty years prior, whose identity only Coco knows, is eventually resolved, but, like most aspects of the film, isn’t fully examined for what it meant. What really drove Aurora into the arms of another? When we find out who it was, more obvious questions Sorrentino has no interest or ability to answer are bulldozed over in favor of a laborious epilogue in which Mauricio pursues the editor of Vogue magazine, a vacant but supposedly infatuated woman who appears to be younger than his own daughter.
Basically, Servillo is playing a continuation of his aging playboy from 2013’s The Great Beauty (read review), but even with less sensational surroundings in this political mausoleum, Sorrentino foregoes none of his self-indulgent tendencies. Less would be more, including with a handful of bombastic blasts of music tying together various elements and themes, many repeated too often, lessening their resonance. What could have felt akin to anything from Capra to Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952) instead gets wrapped up in distractions similar to Inarritu’s Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022). And with Sorrentino’s own filmography, which includes similar fixations in his 2015 English language debut Youth (read review), there’s a hollowness accentuated by this latest simulation of regrets and resistance to embracing one’s final chapter. Something like Mario Martone’s Nostalgia (2022), with Pierfrancisco Favino, straddled the essence of these feelings more effectively, unwilling to relieve the audience through meaningless humor.
La Grazia does sometimes hit its roving target in quiet exchanges, often between Mauricio and his daughter, who has been painstakingly lobbying him to sign the omnipresent euthanasia bill along with the two pardons haunting his thoughts. The script also plays like the fantasy of someone who hasn’t quite researched what the final days of a sitting president might look like considering these are the only three decisions he’s being bothered to complete. “Who owns our days?,” she asks in a final attempt to motivate him to sign the bill, which he’s neglecting because he would be defined as a murderer if he does and a torturer if he refuses. But then, gears drastically shift into hyperbole, with Dorotea admitting she’s ‘broken’ by an observation during a visit with a prisoner awaiting news of her pardon. Likewise, Mauricio is told the banal worship of his dead wife is ‘heartrending.’ Actions speak louder than words, and there’s nothing certifiably heartbreaking about anything its principle characters are faced with.
The melancholy mined through the quiet disappointment of living, including failed expectations, and the nagging regret of inaction are certainly evident in La Grazia, but these are fragile elements which dissipate quickly in the corny ether of Mauricio supposedly being secretly obsessed with contemporary rap music. But certainly, Sorrentino does ask questions worth pondering. But the corresponding answers are often monosyllabic.
Reviewed on August 27th at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – In Competition (opening film). 131 Mins.
★★½/☆☆☆☆☆
