Few filmmakers embrace beauty as wholly as Paolo Sorrentino, a voluptuary with a keen sensitivity to the material world and its affects. In his movies — he’s best known for “The Great Beauty,” from 2013 — he immerses you in lush, classic yet modern worlds filled with interesting faces (comic, soulful), long-legged sylphs (some wiser than others), luxurious estates (some more vulgar than others), ravishing landscapes and much art. His is an exacting, refined visual sensibility that’s been marinated in millenniums of history, so it’s no surprise that he likes compositional balance, harmonious lines and anarchy.
In “La Grazia,” Sorrentino has placed his frequent star, the great Italian actor Toni Servillo, at the summit of governmental power. He plays a fictional president, Mariano De Santis, a lawyer turned politician who’s set to retire in six months after a storied, successful career as the head of state. It is an unsurprisingly fraught moment for him and for his closest advisers, as well as a fateful turning point. Despite his professional success, the admiration of his allies and advisers, as well as his public equanimity, Mariano is gravely troubled by unfinished business and by stubbornly lingering ghosts. These complications haunt him, binding Mariano to a life that he must soon abandon.
It’s enjoyable to be back in Sorrentino’s richly detailed and stylized universe, with all its enchantments and individualized, warm-blooded characters. These are foregrounded in a story that builds incrementally and finds Mariano wandering — literally, emotionally, psychologically — through his remaining time in office. Even as he winds down, he tends to his duties, grants interviews, welcomes dignitaries and consults his advisers, including his closest one, his daughter, Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti, appealingly brisk). The most pressing matters that he needs to address before vacating his position are a bill that will legalize euthanasia and the fate of two prisoners who are candidates for a presidential pardon. There’s also a sick horse named Elvis to tend to.
The problem for Mariano — and for everyone else, the viewer finally included — is that he can’t make his mind up about the bill or the prisoners, twinned challenges with stark ethical and legal considerations. Much of the movie involves his reticence to move forward on these issues, a period that finds him deliberating and stewing alone in his quarters in Rome’s Quirinal Palace. Here, in this sprawling space, the onetime home of popes and kings, he frets and reflects in gloomy and bright rooms as well as on a walkway where he sneaks an occasional smoke accompanied by his indulgent aide (Orlando Cinque). As Mariano waffles, he also stokes his anger at his dead wife, Aurora, whose long-ago affair still maddens him.
For all of Sorrentino’s focus on earthly pleasures, on the visceral intensity of the here and the now, “La Grazia” (grace in English, but also benediction) is also somewhat of a ghost story. At times, as Mariano roams the curiously underpopulated palace — a space laden with deep history, ornamented with antiquities and watched over by guards in old-fashioned uniforms — he can seem more like a specter than a man. Out of sorts and out of time, he is preoccupied by the past, conflicted in the present and unreconciled with the future, a destabilizing state of being that’s mirrored by the larger world. It may be that Sorrentino is equally conflicted and unreconciled, given that he has largely sidestepped Italy’s contemporary politics with such a benign fiction.
Mariano’s obsession with his wife’s affair plagues him, at times sending him into periodic fits that underscore that he is still very much alive. Servillo, a performer with an almost shockingly wide expressive range, has long been the most reliably interesting face in Sorrentino’s filmography. His ability to inhabit a variety of characters was much in evidence at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, where he appeared in two movies, including Matteo Garrone’s “Gomorrah,” in which he played a corrupt businessman with a dangerous smile, an openly animated face and an outward-turning physicality. By contrast, Servillo was so gray and tightly, spookily tamped down as the scandal-plagued Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti in Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” that it was hard to believe it was the same actor.
Servillo’s performance in “La Grazia” — calm, human, empathetically melancholic — anchors you even as Mariano dithers and drifts. If only he’d make up his mind! Sorrentino fleshes out Mariano as a man, a father, a jurist and a leader with strong scenes: The character dines at the palace with a delightfully eccentric longtime friend, discusses morality with the groovy Pope, joins a group of World War II partisans in stirring song. Many of these interludes are engaging, handsome and narratively rounded, but they also never cohere into a persuasive, satisfying whole. Other people’s indecision can be frustrating. The same is true here, even if “La Grazia” again reminds you that of all the beauties gracing Sorrentino’s movies, few are as indelible as this filmmaker and performer, joined together in mutually supportive sync.
La Grazia Rated R for language. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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