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Elegance, in Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, is not a decorative principle but a moral one. It resides in restraint, in the weight of silence, in the geometry of a dining table where nothing is said too loudly and everything is understood. It lives in the sober grandeur of the Quirinale Palace library, in the way characters approach one another without urgency, without theatrical insistence. Even the humor obeys this ethic: a raised eyebrow, a pause held half a second too long, a forbidden cigarette smoked with the furtive pleasure of a minor transgression. After years of maximalism, provocation, and what often felt like a fetishization of excess, Sorrentino has made a film that trusts quiet. That trust, more than anything else, is what makes La Grazia one of his finest and most reflective works to date.
This is not praise I arrive at lightly. For much of the past decade and a half, Sorrentino has been a filmmaker I have resisted more than admired. While others exalted The Great Beauty, Youth, The Young Pope, or Loro, I found myself alienated by their grandiosity, their leering self-regard, their tendency to mistake accumulation for insight. Since Il Divo in 2008, a film whose icy precision felt purpose-built for its subject, Sorrentino seemed stuck replaying a single melody: powerful, aging men circling their own decay, surrounded by grotesques and distractions, forever mistaking baroque excess for profundity. La Grazia initially appears to return once more to that well. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, it reveals itself as something rarer: a revision, a softening, perhaps even a reckoning.
Toni Servillo, Sorrentino’s most enduring collaborator and alter ego, plays Mariano De Santis, the President of Italy in the final months of his term. Servillo has embodied Sorrentino’s obsessions before—aging men, politicians, embodiments of institutional power—but here his performance is stripped of the actorly bravura that once defined these roles. De Santis is not flamboyant, not monstrous, not mythic. He is melancholic, tired, and paralyzed by indecision. A widower still bound to the memory of his late wife, he drifts through his days with a kind of cultivated inertia, listening to Italian rap on headphones in his office, postponing decisions that carry enormous moral and political weight.
Those decisions form the film’s quiet spine. Before his term expires, De Santis must decide whether to sign a bill legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide, a choice freighted with religious, legal, and personal consequences in a country where the Catholic Church still exerts immense influence. He must also rule on a pair of presidential pardons involving murders shaped by circumstances far more complex than their legal summaries suggest. These are not abstract dilemmas. They are questions about suffering, mercy, responsibility, and, ultimately, about who has the right to decide when a life has reached its limit.
Sorrentino has explored similar terrain before, but rarely with this degree of patience or empathy. La Grazia is notably less horny, less leering, less eager to shock than its predecessors. The film unfolds almost entirely within institutional spaces—the halls of power, offices, libraries—settings that Sorrentino renders not as carnivals of decadence but as mausoleums of habit. Daria D’Antonio’s cinematography favors refined, muted tones that emphasize age and weight rather than spectacle. The camera observes rather than pounces. Even Sorrentino’s characteristic flourishes feel recalibrated, bent toward poetry instead of provocation.
At the center of the film is Servillo’s extraordinary performance, arguably the most generous Sorrentino has ever written for him. De Santis is described by those around him as immovable, incapable of being swayed, yet Servillo plays him as a man in slow, almost subterranean motion. His arc is not explosive but accumulative. Each encounter—a confession to a Black Pope who offers questions instead of answers, the sight of a horse dying in agony, the image of a lonely astronaut floating weightlessly in space—adds another layer to his internal reckoning. These moments are not symbols hammered into place but invitations to contemplation, echoes of a mind circling its own exhaustion.
The film’s most affecting relationship is between De Santis and his daughter Dorotea, played with grounded intelligence by Anna Ferzetti. As both his closest advisor and emotional counterweight, Dorotea represents a version of moral clarity her father can no longer access on his own. Their dynamic is one of the great surprises of La Grazia: a relationship defined not by melodrama but by mutual respect. Even when tension builds—as De Santis procrastinates, as time runs out—their disagreements remain measured, credible, and deeply human. It is, quite simply, the most convincing on-screen relationship Sorrentino has ever crafted.
The film’s pacing will test some viewers. Accustomed to Sorrentino’s hyper-charged rhythms, one may initially read La Grazia’s slowness as an overcorrection. Certain narrative beats repeat, and there are stretches where the film seems content to hover rather than advance. But this, too, feels intentional. De Santis’s inability to decide is not a narrative flaw but the subject itself. The repetition becomes expressive, a formal embodiment of a man trapped between law and empathy, faith and doubt, action and abdication.
What distinguishes La Grazia from Sorrentino’s earlier work is not merely its restraint but its seriousness of purpose. The moral, ethical, and legal complexities it raises are treated with care rather than irony. Sorrentino, a filmmaker often accused of cruelty or detachment, here demonstrates an unexpected tenderness. Even the film’s humor—often rooted in Italian political specificity—serves to humanize rather than caricature. Servillo sneaking a cigarette on the palace ramparts, or murmuring obscene rap lyrics to himself, becomes a way into De Santis’s inner life rather than a punchline.
Perhaps Sorrentino has gone soft. Or perhaps he has finally learned how to modulate his obsessions, how to transform his fetishes into tools rather than ends. La Grazia may not deliver the kind of ostentatious elegance that made his reputation, but it offers something more durable: gravitas earned through attention, through listening, through the humility to let questions remain unanswered. It is a film about endings—of terms, of lives, of certainties—but also about the dignity of hesitation.
For those who have long admired Sorrentino, La Grazia may feel like a surprising pivot. For those, like myself, who have often resisted him, it feels like an olive branch extended with genuine sincerity. In choosing contemplation over bombast, elegance over excess, Sorrentino has made a film that lingers not because it dazzles, but because it understands that sometimes the most radical gesture is simply to pause, look, and allow complexity to breathe.
On MUBI now
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