Review of The Great Beauty (2013) by Alison S — 01 May 2014

Messy, overlong and over-indulgent, Paolo Sorrentino's Oscar-winning The Great Beauty is nevertheless an often fascinating piece of art house cinema that has plenty of visual brilliance, ambiguous themes, and philosophical and satirical elements compensating for its lack of coherent narrative and emotional payoff.

Luca Bigazzi's cinematography is ravishing, Toni Servillo is fantastic in the lead role, and the film asks some interesting questions, like does that "great beauty" disappear with age, or is it only then when we find it? There are also some unforgettable individual scenes; most notably the one where Servillo's character Jep is spending an evening with his friends, and verbally tears one of his lady friend's life to shreds.

That scene has such tension and power it makes the viewer hope the film had more of it. As it is now, the film is less than the sum of its parts, too often wandering to fumbling, tedium and stagnation.