‘La Grazia’ Review: Paolo Sorrentino’s Richly Drawn Political Drama of a Leader Who’s Lost his Purpose is One of His Best Films [A] Venice

If we think about politics in this day and age, our first reaction is probably disgust, disappointment, disillusionment, or outright fear. In a crucial age of our planet, the most important countries, not just in the Western world but worldwide, are dominated by populists, by politicians that sell certainties, easy recipes, identify easy targets just to win that handful of votes that may win them an election. We are so jaded and have been so easily burned in the past that we are resigned to politicians acting in their sole interest.

Paolo Sorrentino’s art has often been subtly political, and he has also often chosen to deal with the world of Italian politics, starting from Il Divo, the dramatized biopic of controversial and hugely influential Italian politician Giulio Andreotti, and continued his peculiar political biographies with the farcical, irreverent diptych Loro, centered around the marriage and political life of Silvio Berlusconi, media mogul and billionaire who started Italy’s so called Second Republic. In each of these movies, Sorrentino kept his usually detached look at politics, almost as if he was looking at animals in a zoo rather than actual people. With La Grazia, his latest film which opens the 2025 Venice Film Festival, Sorrentino decides to go much deeper.

This time, Sorrentino has chosen a made-up President of the Italian Republic as his central character. His name is Mariano De Santis, and he’s just entered his last semester as President, and he’s just tired of everything. He’s tired of meeting with foreign politicians, he’s tired of meeting with the Italian Prime Minister, he’s tired of having to deal with the press. Quite simply, he’s tired. Stuck in the past, and having never recovered from the loss of his wife, and a betrayal he’s still trying to figure out, he admittedly feels like a man from a generation too far removed from the one he’s living, and he’s confronted with this reality due to the presence of his daughter Dorotea, who’s also his counselor and, to a certain extent, his caregiver. They’re both specialized in the law, enamored with the limits and the boundaries that the law sets: this gives them comfort, especially in Mariano’s case, a Catholic man who grew up in the Christian Democratic Party. Even though it’s not revealed in the film that Mariano is a practicing Catholic, Sorrentino puts great emphasis on his religion, going as far as showing him having private conversations with the Pope. Why is Mariano’s religion so important? For some time now, he’s been asked to sign off a bill about euthanasia, still a taboo subject in Italy. In Mariano’s case, it’s both about his religion and his legacy as President. How is he going to be remembered by the people and by his friend the Pope if he signs that bill? To complicate things even further, he’s been presented with two pardon appeals – as shown during the opening sequence which illustrates the powers bestowed upon the President, this is something that only he can do. The cases are about two people jailed for murder: a woman who killed her abusive and torturing husband in his sleep, and a man who killed his violent Alzheimer’s disease-stricken wife. What seemed to be a boring, lifeless end to his presidential term suddenly becomes a time of moral and ethical dilemmas which force Mariano to deal with his own ghosts, doubts and regrets.

Paolo Sorrentino has often dealt with characters ruminating on the meaning of life, and he has done so in very personal terms. The Consequences of Love, The Great Beauty, Il Divo, Youth all bear the same marks: a meditation on the passage of time, a single person’s legacy in the heart of a turbulent world, the aching feeling of failure and emptiness. It’s a form of existential dread, or better existential ennui that pervades his best films. In this sense, La Grazia almost feels like quintessential Sorrentino: it has a man on the brink, on the brink of something (might it be a nervous breakdown?), it has his reflection on his past and his future, his relationship with his family and the people around him.

Mariano is a lonely man: he has been lonely for 40 years, since when he discovered that his beloved wife Aurora cheated on him, and he’s been even lonelier since the moment of her death. Even the presence of his daughter, the studious and extremely precise Dorotea, feels foreign to him: he knows nothing about her, he doesn’t know her friends, he’s not even sure of her sexuality, he just knows that she inherited her passion for the law from him. The only person he knows deeply is his wife, the source of all his pain. Why did she cheat on him? Why doesn’t he know who she cheated on him with? He’s been tormented by this thought for decades and this has kept him from fully evolving as a person. He’s completely stuck in the past, and he’s so devoid of any form of imagination that he can’t even dream. ‘Reinforced Concrete’ is his nickname, he learns to his immediate disgust. He has been so focused on the law all his life, to the extent that he wrote a 2,046-page-long manual of Criminal Law, that he became oblivious to everything else around him. The Presidential Residence, in the Quirinale palace in Rome, feels like a huge prison, darkly lit, isolated (credit must be given to the great director of photography, Daria D’Antonio), that eats the people who live in it. That is why the shocks provided by this end of term are what James Joyce would have called ‘epiphanies’, moments of sudden realization that completely change a person’s perception of themselves.

As President Mariano De Santis, long-time collaborator and favorite actor Toni Servillo gives one of his best performances: distraught, depressed, sarcastic, cynical, Servillo gives Mariano the prism of emotions one would expect from such an experienced actor. In Servillo’s hands, Mariano is both forcedly composed and in turmoil, keeping a façade where you can obviously see the cracks, made even more evident as the movie goes on. He takes advantage of his immense screen presence and never lets a scene slip out of his hand, joined in a great cast by Anna Ferzetti, the daughter-mother figure who’s never afraid to stand up to him, and Milvia Marigliano in a memorable comic role.

But, at the end of it all, this is Sorrentino’s film. It might be the moving of time, but he’s increasingly contemplative and angry at the same time. With The Hand of God he explored the nature of his childhood trauma that turned him into a storyteller, with La Grazia he’s made one of his best films and definitely his strongest political statement: one can almost feel his rage at the current almost pathologically narcissistic politicians. Even when the movie dangerously borders the verbose and repetitive, especially when it comes to Mariano’s obsession with his wife’s betrayal, it never stops being a celebration of doubt over certainty, of public service against personal gain, of harmony and grace (‘grazia’ means both grace and pardon in Italian) against corruption and it does so in his typical surrealistic style. After all, who doesn’t want a President who can rap?

Grade: A

This review is from the 2025 Venice Festival where La Grazia world premiered in competition. The film will be distributed in the U.S. by MUBI.