Paolo Sorrentino’s "THE HAND OF GOD"
Movie review by Dennis D. McDonald
Coming of age films are a dime a dozen. This 2021 Italian film is better than most. It’s episodic, gritty, heartfelt, sad, funny, tender, and occasionally weird.
We follow young Fabio as he struggles to become an adult in 1980s Naples. The city by the water is just a much of a character as the myriad of family members and friends who pop in and out of the film. Via gorgeous photography we get a distinctly non-touristy view of Italy and Italians that refreshingly blows away the homogenization that has overtaken so many Western films. This is due to the influence of the director/writer who bases the film’s incidents on his own youth in Naples.
Is it all believable? Not completely. We can usually tell when the director is playing with the audience and daring us to believe that a particular incident really happened the way it’s portrayed in the film. But that’s OK. Memory is like that. We sometimes embroider past experiences when retelling them for entertainment’s sake.
One of the most impressive feats of this movie is the number of characters. Sometimes what happens with large ensemble casts is that we find ourselves losing track of who’s who and who did what. Not in Sorrentino’s film. Everyone makes an impression and early events have a way of being referenced — sometimes quite amusingly — later on.
Highly recommended.
Review copyright (c) 2022 by Dennis D. McDonald
