paolo sorrentino's search for the divine
on LA GRAZIA (2025)
I was getting ready to write a post full of little capsule reviews when I decided to conduct a spot of research on Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director responsible for La grazia (2025). I’m embarrassed to say I’d never looked him up before despite how many of his films I’ve watched and enjoyed. Embarrassed, I say, because part of this whole gig is, essentially, if we’re honest about it, me googling things and then writing about my little google results. Dropping a couple of deranged footnotes in the process. But we live, we learn, etc.
I found myself so fascinated by Sorrentino, and so distracted by the many tangents I wanted to explore from the locus of the Italian director and his films—specifically La grazia and La grande bellezza (2013)—that I decided to dedicate a whole newsletter to him and to them.
Despite my vague awareness of Sorrentino and his, shall we call it, eccentricity?, I was somewhat dismayed to realize I was missing a significant amount of foundational lore.
I could’ve guessed he was born in Naples, given how many of his films feature the city and/or protagonists from the same. And honestly, I should have guessed he was orphaned as a teenager, given how many of his films feature a search for a home, for family, for belonging. Like, of course this man was faced with a deep, all-encompassing tragedy at sixteen years old.
And of course Maradona played a role.
This is why research matters. This is me learning my lesson. Never again will I neglect my beloved IMDb, a website that remains anxiously attached to the beautiful UX of whatever designer last updated it back in 2007. (This, to be clear, is a compliment.)
Now that we all have this information, then, a brief second prologue: the first Sorrentino film I watched was La grande bellezza, which my university was somehow showing at its cinema? Shoutout to whatever obnoxious film studies major made that happen, I owe them big. We left the small theater in a daze, the humidity of the Miami spring evening sticking to our skin, keeping us for hours still embroiled in Sorrentino’s flushed, decadent, and sumptuous Rome. There’s nothing like being stupid and young and walking to your local Thai restaurant with your fellow stupid and young friends, realizing you’ve just watched a film you’ll think about for years to come. A burst of energy hits you like okay this is what it means to be alive. A feeling to chase forever. It’s why I go to the cinema.
I rewatched La grande bellezza a few weeks ago in preparation for La grazia, in part because both films feature Sorrentino’s frequent collaborator (and fellow Neapolitan) Toni Servillo and in part because the last time I’d seen it I was twenty years old and sitting next to someone I was crushing on and would end up dating—and the thing is, you can’t fully appreciate a film if you’re too keenly aware of every expression your face is making. You just can’t.
Anyway, I watched the 2013 film in solitude this time, at home, over a decade older, and I can confirm it holds up beautifully. A story about the most social and charismatic 65-year-old man you’ve ever met coming to terms with his age. Life’s failures. The role he has played in crafting his own disappointments. Accepting them. It’s a film that, both at 20 and 33, made me feel wistful and sad and lonely and in a way forgiving, if not exactly compassionate.
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The Eternal City portrayed in La grazia is of a considerably less louche nature than that of La grande bellezza. Instead of a study in sustained depravity, the former displays for us a staid, almost prim capital city; the seat of government rather than the seat of debauchery. In La grazia, Servillo plays not a writer at the center of Rome’s cultural and social elite, but Italy’s head of state coming to the end of his seven-year term. Instead of the distant, magnetic, and self-assured Jep Gambardella hopping from lavish party to lavish party in a seemingly never-ending Trastevere night, we’re treated to the measured, quiet, and—still—distant Mariano de Santis, reluctant Presidente della Repubblica and father to Dorotea, his fellow lawyer, faithful adviser, and most frequent challenger.1
With just six months left in the President’s mandate, there are two pressing and lingering matters requiring his approval: a controversial law legalizing euthanasia and potential pardons for two convicted murderers. A man beset by the doubt he believes to be his greatest virtue despite the frustration it provokes in his staff, de Santis weighs these decisions heavily and cautiously. Too cautiously, his daughter tells him. At some point, the deliberation period must come to an end. At some point, a decision must be reached.2
A devout Catholic who considers the Pope his friend, de Santis is plagued by the choices set before him. It is through this affliction, this paralyzing doubt, that the film deals with the binary of faith and reason. Or faith and truth. Or faith and duty.
(If John Patrick Shanley hadn’t beat him to it in 2008, I’m pretty sure Sorrentino would’ve liked to call his film Il dubbio (Doubt) as opposed to La grazia. But alas. If you’re not first you’re last.)
A recurring theme in La grazia and his other films is an overpowering preoccupation with the impact of that which cannot be seen or proven.
In the Sorrentino universe, the craving for certainty—for truth—will never be fulfilled, because it presupposes our ability to perceive every variable. And that, the director repeatedly asserts, is an impossibility. Our understanding of ourselves and of our own environment is, whether by design or by circumstances, necessarily limited.
The sooner we accept that finite knowledge is the name of the game, Sorrentino seems to say, the sooner we can let go of any unrealistic expectations for certitude and give sentimentality a little more room to grow. Life is inhospitably heavy, and the only cure for that burden is intentional levity.
It’s an approach that makes sense from someone who at sixteen years old lost his parents in a senseless tragedy, who himself only escaped their same fate by virtue of teenage devotion to a football legend. Saved from a certain death by the twin forces of scheduling and passion. How indeed can someone with such a past believe in a world imbued in anything but chaos? And isn’t chaos what we by any other name would call faith—a belief that to attempt to understand the twists and turns of our lives is an exercise in futility?
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The journey toward this acceptance makes up much of the Sorrentino cinematic universe. In that vein, his characters tend to face two principal conflicts: dissatisfaction with the world and their lives within it and, not unrelatedly, the realization that they are running out of time.3
Jep, haunted by the memory of the girl he once loved and the career he thought he’d have; Mariano, haunted by his dead wife’s decades-old bout of infidelity and the timidity that has characterized his mandate; both men, the loneliest people in Rome, wondering what the point of it all was.
This unlucky partnering of malaise and proximity to death means that, in the last act of his films, we can nearly always find a desperate and necessary surrender. It’s hopeful. Not a ceding of control, really, and certainly not an embrace of nihilism, but an exhale.
What makes a life worth living? The answer is often: the mere fact of it being lived at all. To exist in such a way as to save us from alienation, by working toward the goal, asymptotic as it might be, of learning as much as possible about ourselves and each other. To steal and give love in the process. Because if it’s all chaos anyway, then why not?
No clearer answer will spring forth, and to look for one is to impose a rationality that will drive us insane: it does not exist. And if it does exist, it is certainly not for us to perceive. (Paolo Sorrentino would not have thrived in the Enlightenment, I can tell you that much.)
This surrender requires a degree of levity. It’s why the films are darkly funny, too. Less que será será, more madonna, well, I guess there for the grace of God go I. A lightness, as captured in Mariano de Santis’ newfound love of Italian rap, listened to with his eyes closed in the somber rooms of the President’s Palazzo del Quirinale—the sort of lightness, Sorrentino suggests, that makes the disorder of our existence bearable.
Underneath the striking and Catholic imagery in which Sorrentino dabbles is a latent search not for God, but for divinity. It is a quest for the pockets of the divine within the sordid and persistent mundanity of our daily lives. Secularism—by way of order and rationality—is anathema to his stories; it’s nothing but a fruitless attempt to convince ourselves of our ability to control our own destinies. In order to truly live, we must forsake this delusion. Even if it takes our whole lives to see it.
It’s a heady task, which explains why Jep and Mariano are constantly on the verge of losing their minds. And it is why faith takes on such a towering role in La grande bellezza and La grazia; it’s not about religion, but surrender. Existence might be mundane, but to live, Sorrentino seems to say, to live—is divine.
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I hate to engage in eldest daughter discourse, but my fellow eldest daughters … La grazia is made for us.
Anyone who’s been to law school will recognize the “on the one hand … but on the other!” of the President’s maddening prevarication. I personally was not ready for this particular journey to the past.
For more on this, you can watch this interview of Sorrentino conducted during the 2015 BFI London Film Festival.