Paolo Sorrentino is, and I apologize if I’m blowing your mind right now, Italian. Like, very Italian. My last name is “Bibbiani” and I will never be one-tenth as Italian as Paolo Sorrentino. His films are often love letters to his country, and “La grazia” is no exception. It literally begins with three jets soaring across the sky, spraying the Italian flag like a canopy over the world in vast plumes of green, white and red. If any American director did this we’d all roll our eyes — but to be fair, the jets would also transform into $100 million action figures, so it would probably strike a different tone.
The point is, Paolo Sorrentino’s movies — especially the ones about Italy — can be a little opaque if you don’t get all the frames of reference. It’s easy to watch his Oscar winner “The Great Beauty” and declare it “Fellini-esque” and call it a day, like that guy who’s only seen “The Boss Baby” and says every other film has “Boss Baby vibes.”
To be fair, “The Great Beauty” actually is Fellini-esque, but let’s not get stuck in those weeds. His new film “La grazia” is about Italian politics, Italian morality and, at the risk of sounding repetitive, very Italian Italians. The film reunites Sorrentino with his frequent collaborator, Toni Servillo, who plays a fictional Italian president in the waning months of his term. He spends his time contemplating his life, his late wife and the ethics of euthanasia — all while listening to hip-hop, sneaking cigarettes and fantasizing about life on a space station.
That’s basically it. That’s the movie. “La grazia” is a film about a president saddled with a lot of doubts, and from an American perspective this plays — at least in 2025 — something like a romantic fantasy. It’s hard to imagine our current Commander-in-Chief seriously pondering the moral complexities of his decisions, let alone admitting to them. Without an in-depth understanding of contemporary Italy, it’s unclear whether Sorrentino is commenting on perceived national norms or if he’s also engaging in creative license, but it’s still his vision of the leader of his country, and in that vision the president is a pensive old-timer wrestling with the baggage of the past and the uncertainty of the new. And he doesn’t have a strong preference.
To hear Sorrentino tell it, euthanasia is an all-encompassing human philosophy, a stand-in for nearly all moral complexity and the literalization of a selfish need to never let anything, or anyone, go. In “La grazia” the president takes a meeting with a particularly chill version of the Pope, who says ending a dying person’s life is murder, but respects the president’s lack of certainty anyway. Those two pardons the president’s daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti) puts on his desk are of similar cases: one where a man ended his wife’s life in her final stages of Alzheimer’s, and another in which a woman killed her abusive husband in his sleep. If those don’t sound similar, let Sorrentino cook, he’ll get to it eventually.
The president also struggles with memories of his late wife, who died years ago but still haunts him in beautiful and ugly ways. She appears to have ruined him for all other women, but also ruined their marriage by having an affair. The president never found out who her lover was, and eyes his prime suspect — the man who will run for president after him — with constant suspicion.
Paolo Sorrentino envisions Italian politics as a world of unusual solitude, with empty halls, minimal staff and endless delays. Bureaucracy, it seems, is an excuse for indecision. Here’s a guy who’s approaching the end of his career, and the end of his life, and even though he’s literally the president of a country it seems like he’s never made one confident judgment call. At least, not without thinking about it for months or years beforehand.
The magic of “La grazia” is that Paolo Sorrentino makes a convincing argument that doubt is a beautiful thing. He envisions a universe where people go sane with power, not the other way around. As an American in the 2020s, that’s a very alien concept, but it’s pleasant to consider and the conclusions Sorrentino ultimately comes to are hopeful and even slightly amusing. Sorrentino’s filmmaking is, as always, confident and piercing, and he only occasionally indulges in protracted, extravagant cinematic flourishes, which sometimes overpower his stories and reduce them to artifice.
“La grazia” has, all puns intended, more grace than that. It’s a robust inhalation of clean air, and a long, invigorating exhale afterwards. This is cinema as oxygen.
