When Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, La Grazia, opened the 2025 Venice Film Festival in competition, it did more than just mark a return to form for the Oscar-winning Italian director. It also reignited a cinematic partnership with Toni Servillo, whose performance as a fictional Italian president grappling with personal and political dilemmas has critics and audiences alike abuzz. The film, set in Rome, is a meditation on power, morality, and the bittersweet solitude of old age—an elegant, wintry work that blends Sorrentino’s signature surreal flourishes with a deeply human story.
For those familiar with Sorrentino and Servillo’s past collaborations, La Grazia is a kind of homecoming. According to Deadline, the duo first achieved international acclaim with Il Divo in 2008, where Servillo’s portrayal of Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s iron-fisted Prime Minister, earned widespread praise. They reunited for The Great Beauty, which won the Foreign Language Film Oscar, and again for Loro, where Servillo tackled the role of Silvio Berlusconi. After a nostalgic detour with films like The Hand of God and Parthenope, Sorrentino now returns to the halls of political power—this time through the lens of fiction, perhaps reflecting on the current climate in both Italy and abroad.
In La Grazia, Servillo plays Mariano DeSantis, the elderly President of Italy, who finds himself in the last six months of his final term. DeSantis is a figure admired for his rectitude and stately bearing, nicknamed "reinforced concrete" for his unyielding commitment to the constitutional letter of the law. Yet, as The Guardian notes, there’s a certain agony beneath his dignified exterior—a man haunted by grief for his late wife Aurora and by gnawing suspicions of her infidelity some forty years earlier, possibly with his contemporary Ugo (Massimo Venturiello), who now harbors political ambitions of his own.
The president’s personal struggles are mirrored by the weighty decisions that mark his final days in office. Two potential pardons land on his desk, each fraught with moral complexity. One concerns Isa Rocca (Linda Messerkliger), imprisoned for stabbing her abusive husband 18 times—a crime she frames as an act of mercy, or even euthanasia, given his mental deterioration. The other involves Cristiana Arpa (Vasco Mirondola), a schoolteacher who strangled his Alzheimer’s-stricken wife after years of suffering, claiming the act was motivated by love. DeSantis, a former judge, is keenly aware of the gravity of both cases, taking his responsibilities with a seriousness that speaks to his lifelong devotion to justice.
As if these dilemmas weren’t enough, DeSantis also faces the contentious issue of whether to sign a bill legalizing euthanasia—a decision that pits his strict Catholic upbringing, and the disapproval of the Pope, against the impassioned lobbying of his daughter Dorotea (Anna Ferzetti). Dorotea, a lawyer, is both exasperated by her father’s reluctance and determined to see the bill passed. Her presence in his life is both a comfort and a challenge, as she pushes him to confront his own beliefs and the evolving values of Italian society.
Sorrentino’s screenplay doesn’t shy away from the burdens of leadership or the loneliness that can come with it. According to Deadline, the film opens with a dry, almost schoolbook recitation of the president’s duties—a reminder that even the most powerful figures are bound by the machinery of government, their actions subject to the checks and balances of Parliament. Yet, Sorrentino is quick to peel away the layers of formality, revealing a man whose only pleasures are listening to rap music on his earphones and sharing forbidden cigarettes with his personal protection officer, Labaro (Orlando Cinque). His only real confidant, however, is Coco Vulori (Milvia Marigliano), his late wife’s best friend and a sharp-tongued critic who holds the secret to Aurora’s past.
Throughout La Grazia, Sorrentino stages a series of visually arresting set pieces that serve as metaphors for the absurdity and fragility of officialdom. One standout moment, as described by The Guardian, sees DeSantis hosting a rain-soaked reception for the Portuguese president, watching impassively as his guest struggles along a red carpet swept by the wind—a dreamlike image of the vulnerability beneath the pomp of statecraft. In another, DeSantis joins Italy’s Alpini mountain infantry in song at a veterans’ dinner, a rare moment of communal joy amid the film’s pervasive melancholy.
But it’s in the quieter moments that Servillo’s performance truly shines. A wordless scene in which DeSantis waits among ordinary visitors in a prison waiting room, or another where he sifts through his late wife’s clothes, describing what made her beautiful, are testaments to the actor’s ability to convey "fathomless depths of sadness or lenient humour with a single smile," as The Guardian puts it. The supporting cast also impresses: Ferzetti is "terrific as a devoted daughter," while Marigliano’s Coco Vulori provides both comic relief and emotional depth.
La Grazia runs two hours and thirteen minutes, and according to both Deadline and The Guardian, it is a stylish, enigmatic film—one that broods on the Romanità of the capital, the way history is inscribed in its buildings for those who know how to read it. Sorrentino’s use of electro-pop and surreal imagery adds a contemporary edge to the story’s age-old questions about love, loyalty, and the meaning of a life in service to others.
As the film draws to a close, DeSantis must decide not only the fate of those seeking his pardon, but also what kind of legacy he will leave behind. The movie, Sorrentino has said, is really about love—love for family, for country, and for the ideals that once made leaders worthy of admiration. In a time when political division and cynicism seem to rule the day, La Grazia offers a wistful, contemplative vision of dignity and hope. Servillo’s performance, understated yet deeply moving, has already sparked talk of a long-overdue Oscar nomination.
It’s rare for a film about politics to feel so personal, or for a story of grief and regret to leave viewers with a sense of possibility. Yet Sorrentino, with his trademark blend of melancholy and wit, manages to do just that. La Grazia stands as a reminder that even in the twilight of a life—or a career—there is still room for grace, wisdom, and the quiet, stubborn hope that things can be better.
