La Grazia

La Grazia follows Mariano De Santis (Toni Servillo), a fictional but entirely plausible President of the Italian Republic, through the last six months of his mandate. A lifelong scholar of criminal law, a Catholic, a widower, he is a man credited with steadying the country after a period of crisis — and a man who has organised his existence around rules precise enough to keep feeling at a distance.

Two files land on his desk as the term winds down: petitions for presidential clemency from a woman who killed her abusive husband, and from a man who ended the life of his wife in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's. At the same time, a bill legalising euthanasia awaits his signature — legislation prepared and championed by his own daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti), a jurist who works at his side. Law, politics and family collapse into a single knot.

Sorrentino, in one of his most restrained registers, treats all of this less as a procedural than as a study of love in its "intricate offshoots" — doubt, jealousy, tenderness, responsibility. Between religious conviction, institutional pressure and the persistent memory of his late wife, the President is forced to ask what a life is worth, who gets to decide when it ends, and whether forgiveness is something a state grants or something a person must finally give himself.

The film's title carries a deliberate double sense: grazia is both the legal pardon a head of state signs and the theological grace that arrives unearned. Sorrentino builds the whole picture on that pun. His president is a man who has spent a lifetime believing that justice can be codified — and who discovers that the cases which matter most are precisely the ones the code cannot resolve.

Against a public culture that rewards certainty, La Grazia argues for doubt as a moral virtue. Sorrentino himself framed the film as an embrace of doubt rather than a verdict on euthanasia; De Santis is not asked to be right, he is asked to be present, to actually look at the human beings behind the dossiers. The recurring question the film poses — who owns our days? — is answered only obliquely: they are ours, and a whole life is barely enough to understand what that means.

Underneath the institutional trappings the film is an intimate one about grief. The President cannot legislate his way out of mourning, cannot pardon himself by decree, and cannot love his living daughter properly until he stops administering his dead wife's memory. Grace, in the end, is what happens when a man consents to be changed by another person's pain.

As a pro-choice argument in disguise. One reading holds that the film's structure — a believer worn down by the sheer humanity of the cases before him — is a quiet advocacy for the right to die, with the President's Catholicism functioning as the strongest possible objection that the film then answers.

La Grazia arrived at a pointed moment in Italian public life: end-of-life legislation has been contested in Italy for years, caught between constitutional court rulings, regional initiatives and the Catholic Church's opposition. By putting the question in the hands of a devout head of state, Sorrentino dramatised a national fault line that Italian politics has repeatedly declined to resolve. That the film opened the Venice Film Festival gave the debate an unusually large stage.

Its reception confirmed the shift in Sorrentino's standing. After the divisive Parthenope, the critical consensus treated La Grazia as a return to form — Metacritic logged 69/100 from 22 critics, and reviewers described it as a sober, sincere character study, with some arguing it ranks among his best work. Toni Servillo's Volpi Cup and Anna Ferzetti's Pasinetti Award anchored it in the festival's prize record, and roughly $10.7 million in box office made it a commercial success on the arthouse circuit.

Culturally, the film belongs to a European tradition of chamber political dramas — closer to the moral interrogations of Catholic cinema than to the thriller mechanics of contemporary political film. Within Sorrentino's own body of work it functions as the third panel of a triptych on Italian power alongside Il Divo and Loro, but with the satire replaced by something like tenderness.

Praised: Toni Servillo's performance dominates the response, and the Volpi Cup formalised it — critics described a study in interiority, a man acting mostly with stillness. The film's restraint was widely welcomed as a corrective after Parthenope, with Time Out awarding four stars and calling it a rapturous character study of a grieving politician, Sorrentino at his most sober and sincere. Anna Ferzetti's Dorotea and Daria D'Antonio's carefully colour-coordinated images also drew consistent admiration.

Criticised: The same restraint divided viewers. Detractors found the film slow and static, its dilemmas arranged too neatly, and missed the visual exuberance that defines Sorrentino's signature; some outlets were sharply negative, faulting it as anything but graceful. The muted brown-and-grey palette struck part of the audience as mournful, others as drab.

Controversial: The euthanasia subject itself, and the choice to dramatise it through a devout protagonist — some wanted a firmer position than the film's cultivated ambivalence offers.

Verdict: Generally favourable — Metacritic 69/100 from 22 critics, a long Venice standing ovation, around $10.7 million at the box office, and a widespread sense that this is a mature, minor-key Sorrentino that rewards patience more than it dazzles.