Roman Conquests

Toni Servillo is a writer adrift in Rome in a new movie directed by Paolo Sorrentino.Illustration by Robert Nippoldt

The face of Toni Servillo is one of the treasures of modern cinema. If it is not a wholly modern face, that only increases the depth of its appeal. Certainly no better face could be imagined for a film like “The Great Beauty,” which takes place in Rome, and which draws all its energy, as well as its majestic lassitude, from that city. Servillo, playing a writer named Jep Gambardella, is the ever visible star. Our first sight of him, typically, comes in mid-bacchanal, on his sixty-fifth birthday, with rooftop revellers cavorting around him. We see gray hair, swept back and curling at the nape. Then he turns, in closeup, to confront the camera, and reveals a long visage creased in delight, with a cigarette stuck in the smile—half Pulcinella, half deposed emperor, already tasting the mournfulness that rises like smoke from every explosion of fun. Within seconds, we feel that we know this man. He yields to the moment’s embrace, yet surely he is wise to a heritage of ancient sins. What Servillo gives us, in other words, is Rome made flesh.

Forty years ago, Jep wrote a book, “The Human Apparatus,” which made his name—a name that he has lived and thrived on ever since, contenting himself with spurts of journalism. Asked why he produced no further books, he claims that he went out too much at night, and adds, “Rome makes you waste a lot of time.” That wastage is laid forth by the film as a jeweller displays his wares. Most writers lounge and loaf, if only to strengthen their delusions of blockage, but Jep does it in swinging style—rocking in a hammock on the terrace of his apartment, a glass of golden booze in his dangling hand. When he gets up, we see the view; he resides across the street from the Colosseum. It is two and a half centuries since Gibbon “sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol,” and decided forthwith on the Roman task that would consume more than twenty years. Jep is the anti-Gibbon, hemmed in by history, but too diverted by the pleasures of the now to add to the lumber room of literature with another book. You could set “The Great Beauty” in America, but only if Harper Lee had spent her evenings at Studio 54.

The director is Paolo Sorrentino, waltzing back to form after the misstep of “This Must Be the Place.” That movie took him abroad, but now he is returned to home ground, and to Servillo, with whom he worked on “The Consequences of Love” and “Il Divo,” and who is as crucial to Sorrentino as Marcello Mastroianni was to Fellini. Remove Mastroianni from “La Dolce Vita” and you get a circus without a ringmaster—the acrobats and other human beasts collapsing into clownish disarray. And so it is with Servillo, the unhurried flâneur, hands clasped behind his back, like a suave Italian cousin of Monsieur Hulot, ushering us through a string of episodes that, without his mild gaze, would fray into inconsequence. Pure force of character makes a plot out of a picaresque. Jep attends a piece of performance art at the foot of the Roman aqueducts—the same ones over which the figure of Christ is borne, by helicopter, at the start of “La Dolce Vita.” He interviews the artist, unpicking her pretensions. Later, he anatomizes a fellow-guest over drinks, stripping bare her personal and professional selves. With a less sympathetic actor in command, this could have been simply cruel, but Servillo gives Jep the shrug of a clever, kindly soul who rates his own existence no more highly than anyone else’s. “You’re fifty-three, with your life in tatters, like the rest of us,” he tells her. We all decline and fall.

Mastroianni, of course, was a helpless seducer, with those rueful eyes; he appeared to be saying sorry for the power of his own allure. Jep has his moments, too, taking up with a middle-aged stripper, Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli), but look at the dates they go on: roaming at night through a private palazzo, inspecting statues and paintings by lamplight; or attending a fashionable funeral, for which he helps Ramona choose a black dress. The movie is light on its feet, the sun often blazes, and the camera cannot stay still, yet the shades of mortality cross every corridor and street. Hence the tourist in the opening scene, who photographs Rome from one of its hills and then drops to the ground, as though felled by rapture; the near-naked Ramona stretched out, as still as a corpse, on Jep’s couch; and the unknown man on his doorstep, bringing news of a woman who has died. Jep last saw her in 1970, but she was his first true love, and he, we learn, was her only one. For an instant, diplomacy and charm desert him; he and the visitor weep like little boys, and the rest of Jep’s meanderings through Rome are a quest, you might say, for a grail that is gone. As his editor reminds him, over bowls of reheated risotto, “The old is better than the new.”

Are there things to tire of, in this tale? Plenty. Socially, it confines itself to the stratosphere, and, if you’d had enough of the haute bourgeoisie and its discontents by the time Antonioni made “La Notte,” in 1961, you may be less than thrilled to see it rear its coiffed and anguished head once more. Likewise, the satirical murmurs against the clergy, in the later stages of the film, are fairly old hat, although I did like the cardinal who, questioned on any subject, immediately talks about food. All in all, there will be a strong temptation, once “The Great Beauty” is over, to resort to its obvious antidotes—to watch “Rome, Open City” again, or Pasolini’s “Accattone,” or “The Grim Reaper,” the equally tough Roman fable that he wrote for Bertolucci. Yet, for every viewer who hungers for the harshness of those works, and for their loyalty to the marginal and the dispossessed, there will be another who comes out of Sorrentino’s movie and books a ticket to Rome. “I was destined for sensibility,” Jep says, and every frame of the film honors that exasperating fate, right up to the final, heartbreaking shots of the Tiber, on its sweet glide through the freshness of early morning. Henry James, who loved the place, accused himself of “making a mere Rome of words, talking of a Rome of my own which was no Rome of reality.” Sorrentino has made a Rome of images, and taken the same risk. But it was worth it.

As a visual adventure, Stephen Frears’s “Philomena”—deft and brisk, so confident of its emotional effects that it finds no cause to linger over them—lies at the furthest possible remove from “The Great Beauty.” But then the life of Jep, drenched in indulgence, would seem like science fiction to Philomena Lee (Judi Dench), who was schooled in deprivation. More than fifty years ago, as an Irish teen-ager (Sophie Kennedy Clark), she got pregnant, out of wedlock, and, like many such girls, was sent to live with nuns. Her child was born and raised at the convent, but she could see him for only an hour a day. Eventually, without any warning, he was given up for adoption—sold, in fact, to a wealthy American couple. And now she wants to find him.

Philomena’s plight, a true one, was recounted in a book by Martin Sixsmith, a former BBC correspondent. Now it has been adapted, with fine constructive skill, by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope. Coogan also plays Sixsmith, who is alerted to the story of Philomena, and who disdains it as “human interest.” One task of the film is to test the value of that much derided phrase; after all, what other interests should we pursue? The whole enterprise could hardly be more pertinent for Coogan, a famous comic performer, who has fallen foul of a prying British press; in 2011, he gave evidence to the Leveson Inquiry into media standards. Now he finds himself playing a cynic who helps an innocent woman explore her past but also proposes to make it public—an exposure that makes her uneasy, to say the least. He argues that the Catholic Church treated her brutally; she, being more charitable, seeks the truth but hates the idea of having to cause a fuss.

To start with, they make an odd couple—the trusting provincial versus the metropolitan snob—and the oddity is easily milked for laughs. Too easily, I think. When Philomena, in a restaurant, spoons croutons onto her salad, saying, “I love these little bits of toast on mine,” we are meant to hear the line through Sixsmith’s scornful ears, but the film itself complies with his condescension. The knowingness slowly fades, however, and what could be a plain tale—and is in danger of becoming a sappy one—grows surprisingly inward and dense. The landscape changes from Ireland to America, and back again, and Dench changes, too. There is always something awkward about watching an actress of fierce intelligence play a more simple soul, and I was relieved, later in the film, to observe M-like dashes of Dench’s natural imperiousness—“I did not abandon my child,” Philomena declares. Frears, as a director, is interested in modesty, and in its ability both to refine and to smother what we honestly feel. That is why he inches ever nearer to Philomena, with her daunting faith in forgiveness and restraint, and also why her last closeups, clawed with age and pinched with cold, strike us as Shakespearean: like patience on a monument, smiling at grief. ♦