RUTHFULLY YOURS

The new movie Youth is a feast for the eyes, but it’s far more than that. It’s about two old men, a famous composer (played by Michael Caine) and a famous film director (Harvey Keitel) on summer vacation at a gorgeous resort in the Swiss Alps — during which they confront truths about their lives and about people and things they have lost. Yes, I am well aware that with that last sentence I have made the movie sound unspeakably boring to most readers — but stick with me for a minute: It is, in fact, the exact opposite of boring, because, for the film’s two hours, the screen is always full of life, incident, emotion, and color. One scene was notable for me because it was a solitary exception to this rule: Rachel Weisz, as Caine’s daughter, gives a speech about how Caine was an absentee father and didn’t show an interest in his family even when he was home. I can’t fault Weisz’s performance — she delivers the monologue quite convincingly – but it’s a scene that really belongs in another movie, a much talkier melodrama.

The film’s director, Paolo Sorrentino, made a movie a couple of years ago, The Great Beauty, that was almost as visually impressive as this one, but that I didn’t like — because it was simply overcome by its subject: The Great Beauty was a film about boredom, and it surrendered to boredom. Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), of which The Great Beauty was a self-conscious updating, had the same problem, albeit to a much lesser extent;  it had its moments, and gave the world the word “paparazzi,” but it didn’t have the greatness and sheer exuberance of Fellini’s best work (La Strada, Juliet of the Spirits, Cabiria, 8 1/2). The only spark of life in The Great Beauty was a scene, so excellently written and performed as to be squirm-inducing, in which the bored middle-aged male protagonist delivers a monologue exposing the lies a woman at a dinner party has been telling about her whole life. (“Come for the two and a half hours of boredom, and stay for the one scene of intense psychological cruelty!” The producers have my permission to put that on the cover of the DVD.)

In Youth, by contrast, Sorrentino has outdone himself in visual poetry – but has not surrendered to his subject the way he surrendered to the subject of the earlier film. This is a film, finally, about death, but there is no onscreen death. He has kept enough of a distance from his subject and his characters that the audience has some breathing space left, in which to relate to them.

The takeaway of this lovely film is: The fact that the things we see don’t last makes it all the more remarkable that they exist at all — and the proper response to this fact is gratitude and wonder.

I keep on going to the movies, after all these years, because I still hope to see movies like this one.