La Grazia: Toni Servillo, once again masterful (review)

Sorrentino follows a president who hands out presidential pardons when he has nothing left to lose. Less glitz, more silence: a twilight film about love that survives and death that approaches.

After Parthenope which was close to leaving the road, La Grazia. Paolo Sorrentino signs one of his seemingly wisest works, but wrought with his lifelong obsessions. Less show off, less baroque. Instead, a threshold film, almost an exit film, where we watch a president at the end of his term decide who can die, who deserves to live, and what a pardon is worth when there is nothing left to gain. Sorrentino films love and death as two inseparable forces.

This tired man is Tony Servillo with a worn, slow, silent body. He is the sum of all the figures of power that he embodied in the filmmaker, condensed here in a character who arrived too late. A gaze that wavers, an authority that disintegrates: power is no longer a theater, but an endless corridor, a muffled asphyxiation made up of files and impossible decisions. However, power here is just a decoration. Very quickly, La Grazia slides from the political to the intimate. First of all, love, that of a missing, unfaithful wife, whose memory returns like a poorly healed wound. A love that saves nothing, but reminds us of the possibility of another life beyond reach. Then the relationship with his daughter, a severe lawyer, the moral mirror of the film. Public grace thus finds itself contaminated by private affects, by the fear of dying alone, by the belated desire to have loved again.

At this point of balance, the film hits very close. But also too fair, sometimes. By wanting to hold everything together, Sorrentino gives in to his temptation: to explain what he knew was leaving it floating. The scene of the dying horse or that of the astronaut become symptoms, symbols supported where the disorder was enough. The essential remains: a film about love in the face of death, and about death which gives its definitive weight to love. And an actor who reminds us that grace, for Sorrentino, is never a concept. It’s an accident.

By Paolo Sorrentino. With Toni Servillo, Anna Ferzetti, Orlando Cinque… Duration: 2h13. Released January 28, 2026