Till Love and Fame to Nothingness: Sorrentino's new great film, Youth

Paolo Sorrentino's newest film, Youth, is a challenge to get into at first, as for a while it's very hard to get our bearings - what is this story about, where is it heading, who's important and who's peripheral, why are these people together? - but patience and attention will pay off as the film begins to cohere and take shape and becomes a powerful, beautiful, troubling examination of love and fame - much like Sorrentino's previous film, The Great Beauty. Youth is darker, older than Great Beauty but they both center on a male protagonist of late years. In GB it's a writer who never lived up to expectations and hopes, mostly his own, as he edges toward retirement and later life (while living among celebrities in Rome - he's a journalist, and an obvious echo of La Dolce Vita). In Youth, the central character, the always excellent Michael Caine, is a little different - older, a retired conductor and composer, obviously very famous and successful, and now living w/ his aging body and thoughts of death. The movie is set at an extremely posh Swiss resort/spa, and yes it will remind you of the Magic Mountain (though w/out the philosophy), where Caine's closest, lifelong friend, Harvey Keitel in some interesting casting as an American director working w/ a team of young actors and writers on his final film, which is obviously going nowhere. Sorrentino thoughtfully and with great wit explores their friendship, as well as Caine's difficult relationship w/ daughter (Rachel Weisz) and various other family trauma. Of course the film is visually beautiful - can't really miss in this setting - but it's also visually imaginative with some striking and surprising scenes throughout (Miss Universe in the hot tub!, an aged former soccer star showing his technique, various nightclub scenes - again, as in Great Beauty - which the characters find boring (but we don't, necessarily), and final very moving concert performance. Throughout, David Lang's music is fantastic - a rare movie score with range and variety and that actually enhances the film, in fact, plays a role in the film - most scores these days emphasize the obvious and smother the subtle. Yes, Sorrentino oversteps the mark several times - not every scene works, some of the effects are surreal and magical and in that sense out of keeping w/ the rest of the film, there's some pretentious dialog (Keitel's mostly), some over-acting (Jane Fonda, mostly), a few moments of melodrama and sentimentality that seem out of key - but all that's because he's constantly exploring the edges, pushing his film as far as it can go, surprising us all the time and making us think. Imagine that.