The Great Beauty (2013)
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The Great Beauty Movie Review
The Great Beauty is a 2013 Italian drama film directed by Paolo Sorrentino and starring Toni Servillo. It’s such a bad movie.
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“The most important thing I discovered
a few days after turning 65 is that
I can’t waste any more time
doing things I don’t want to do“
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An aging writer has spent many years seducing his way through the lavish nightlife of Rome for decades, but after his 65th birthday, he starts to look past the nightclubs and parties to find a landscape of exquisite beauty. That premise sounds nice, but the movie itself is so badly plotted with no messages, themes or point to it whatsoever. There is some commentary here on emptiness and hedonism, but it’s mostly brushed aside in favor of style over substance.
What Paolo Sorrentino did here is literally copy the style of Federico Fellini in its entirety. Firstly, that made the film utterly unoriginal as just another ‘La Dolce Vita’. It doesn’t have a single ounce of authenticity to it. Secondly, I have never been a fan of Fellini’s work so of course its imitator does not to appeal to me in the slightest too.
The film’s not only derivative, but also overly indulgent, pretentious and simply way too long, running at over two hours. It overstayed its welcome very quickly for me, and I was immensely bored throughout its runtime. Some found this film ruminative and riveting, but to me it’s quite the opposite – tiresome and becoming as empty as the society that it satirizes.
The Great Beauty has some positives in it. Naturally, the central performance from Toni Servillo is very strong. He’s the standout part of the film, delivering a complex performance in a memorable role. But all other characters are entirely forgettable.
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I found its technicalities strong. The production design is splendid, there is some memorable imagery to be had here and the cinematography is great. However, some of the imagery frustrated me how aggressively off-putting and odd it was with no purpose to it at all (the various modern art scenes instantly spring to mind). Its take on modern art is interesting, but again not well explored owing to an excessive emphasis on repetitive, dull scenes. It unfortunately ended up winning an Oscar, thus ranking possibly as the worst winner in the foreign category ever.
The Great Beauty is quite possibly the worst foreign Oscar winner of all time. It looks good, the central performance is strong and it does deal with some interesting themes, but only slightly as it mostly brushes them aside in favor of aggressively off-putting, odd, pointless imagery, so obviously imitating the work of Fellini in the process. Sorrentino doesn’t provide any respite from all this strangeness at any point, he hasn’t an ounce of originality to offer, and the result is an overly pretentious, simply very tedious, derivative shallowness.
