Review of The Great Beauty (2013) by Nick D — 19 Dec 2013

Sorrentino has slayed me before (Il Divo), and he's done it again with an homage to La Dolce Vita in a Rome that makes you cry its so beautiful. The people, including our protagonist, played by the divine Toni Servillo, are monsters.

They sleepwalk thru empty lives to the boring rhythms of self-deception and toxic levels of self-obsession. Fortunately, they do so in some of the most beautiful places on the planet. The parties serve as a kind of nightmarish palette-cleansing between sequential courses featuring different key players in journalist/novelist Jep Gambardella's life -- his midget editor, his new lover who is daughter to a gangsterish disco owner, a tour guide of empty palazzo rooms, his best friend who has a giraffe, a Mother Teresa-like sister, a corrupt cardinal, his anonymous next door neighbor, who turns out to be a financier who is hauled away by the law.

... and on and on. Tis a tad long, but, like a fever dream, worth it for the pictures.