The Brooklyn Rail

Heavy is the subject matter of Paolo Sorrentino’s latest feature La Grazia (2025), which screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival and will be in theaters December 5. One of the dominant topics of the film is the right to euthanasia, certainly a highly contested and sensitive subject that I myself struggle to grapple with. Sorrentino challenges us to face this topic, and, by doing so, his film offers an unusually rewarding, uplifting, and humane view of the world. Given the times we are living in, La Grazia’s heaviness, the huge responsibility of tackling its subject matter, makes it possible to experience a genuine renewal of faith rather than the feeling of a trite pat-on-the-back at odds with our pessimistic era. Often engaged in themes of faith and Italian politics, Sorrentino is the kind of writer–director in whom you can have faith to handle the most difficult topics deftly and with nuance.

In La Grazia, the fictional president of Italy, the serious and sophisticated Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo), has rescued his country from buffoonish past rulers, and now, eight years after his wife’s death and seven years into his presidency, he is facing the end of his term, old age, and the time to return to the apartment he last lived in with his deceased beloved. De Santis’s character echoes themes Sorrentino has played with before, as with Servillo’s earlier role in La Grande Bellezza [The Great Beauty] (2013). Three fateful decisions remain on De Santis’s desk: two pardons for murderous crimes of passion and a bill supporting the legalization of euthanasia, championed by his daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti). The theme of merciful death pervades tensions with his grieving daughter in more ways than one. But De Santis is also preoccupied; he cannot let go of the fact that his wife once cheated on him and he still does not know the identity of her fellow adulterer. His obsession with identifying, truth, and faithfulness reverberates in his political career in the form of a crisis of faith and identity and a quest for truth.

De Santis is a true jurist. He values the law and how the law can be used in support of truth. As he and Dorotea mull over and investigate the pardons and fight over her bill, emotional, legal, and factual truth become blurred in a way that builds an intense level of suspense while leaving room for exquisite, quieter moments. If De Santis seems slow to act and like an overthinker, the idea of a president committed to law and truth is as refreshing as his professional and refined demeanor. When he bids his staff farewell near the end of the film, he points out to one colleague that they never got along but at least they were “elegant” about it.

Sorrentino generously finds moments of beauty and humor throughout the movie. One of the funniest bits came during a dinner scene. Dorotea has De Santis on a strict and limited diet for his health. He invites his friend Coco (Milvia Marigliano) for dinner, but she leaves just as the meal commences. When De Santis points out, hurt, that she had said she would stay for dinner, she quips that this was not dinner, “it was a suggestion.”

Like in La Grande Bellezza, Sorrentino relishes in luscious Roman settings. But this time, the city mainly stays at a distance, the shots focus on somber dramas playing out in the historic, Baroque interiors of the government buildings. The maze of this cloistered setting, these closed and disjointed interiors, effectively mirror De Santis’s character and psychological battle. Lingering indoors also serves Sorrentino well; when he does choose to show us a grand vista, the contrast makes the view all the more sublime. De Santis often sneaks onto the rooftop for a clandestine cigarette. Here, a view of sunlight cascading over the hills and architecture of the eternal city takes my breath away as if I am looking through a mystical veil at another untouchable realm rather than a real locale on planet Earth.

Like the interior/exterior split, the elderly president also confronts youth and old age, future and past, rap and opera, a progressive Italy and a traditional Italy with a past even more ancient than La Grazia’s Roman setting. The title, La Grazia, points to both spiritual grace and legal pardons. But I don’t think the film aims to reduce every theme to mere doubles. Sorrentino is too brilliant for that. At the end, his camera luxuriates in a long walk through Rome, led by some sort of robotic security dog, and, here, what seemed like pairings become linked in a more complex web. The plot circumvents chronology with this scene. Sorrentino strategically builds suspense by muddling the timeline; we’ll return to De Santis’s last three decisions as president, now in the past. Old, truth, love, death, secular, hate, future, grace, lies, religion, outside, new, past, youth, life, inside, all collide into the mess of what it means to be human, to grapple with faith, and to redeem or heal a past self in order to move forward.

I could fill this review with reasons why I would not have expected to be a fan of La Grazia. But I won’t because the film thoroughly engrossed me and was emotionally powerful enough to haunt me long after. I felt I could trust this movie with my own pain, and that, like its characters, I would find some peace if I made it to the end. We talk a lot about movie magic and the power of storytelling. They’re nice phrases, nice things to say, but they’re shorthand and generic. What do they really mean? It’s a rare brew indeed when a movie can change how we see our lives, can open the mind to topics we may not have felt brave enough to handle, and to offer a little peace of mind for our own griefs.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, and La Grazia is just a really classy defense for smoking. (Kidding! Sort of.)