Review of The Great Beauty (2013) by Statlerwaldorf — 27 Oct 2015

I feel like this movie has a similar origin story to The Fall, except that instead of trying to do and be a lot of different things, The Great Beauty just is and somehow breezes by everything else that came before it with nouveau cool.

This is not for people that have seen The Expendables on purpose. It’s art, and while the characters are often pretentious it is not so itself. It touches upon everything by being true in everything it touches.

There is poise, and brilliance, and perfection in the performances, the script, the direction, and the exquisite cinematography. The only complaint I can possibly think of is that it has the ambiance of that old world sexism in it, the kind that is unintentional but also unapologetic.

There’s nothing overt, but the protagonist Jep smacks of those older white male intellectuals that get to go around feeling like they get something that no one else can. He is not that, because no one in the film feels like a trope, but throughout young women appear as poseurs disproportionately to their male counterparts.

I don’t know if that’s true of Italy, but where everything else in the film feels like it resonates on a universal level, this feels temporal, and it drags the achievement down a little from where it might have otherwise been.