With ‘Parthenope,’ Paolo Sorrentino Tells the Story of a Woman Named Parthenope

February 6, 2025

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Parthenope being Parthenope (CREDIT: Gianni Fiorito/A24)

Starring: Celeste Della Porta, Stefania Sandrelli, Silvio Orlando, Gary Oldman, Luisa Ranieri, Peppe Lanzetta, Isabella Ferrari, Lorenzo Gleijeses, Daniele Rienzo, Dario Aita, Marlon Joubert, Alfonso Santagata, Biagio Izzo, Paola Calliari, Nello Mascia, Silvia Degrandi, Cristiano Scotto di Galletta

Director: Paolo Sorrentino

Running Time: 136 Minutes

Rating: R for Some Awkward But Intense Sex and a Little Bit of Saucy Language

Release Date: February 7, 2025 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: A baby girl is born in the waters outside a huge villa in 1950s Naples,. An old friend of the family declares that she shall be named Parthenope. You almost get the sense that a new religion is about to form with all the fanfare her arrival attracts. It doesn’t quite work out that way, though her life story does prove to be a bit of a spiritual odyssey. In her young adulthood, everyone is knocked out by her sun-dappled beauty, as she hangs out a bit with a famous drunken American novelist and kind of stumbles into an academic career track in anthropology. That leads her to a beguiling bishop as she investigates the nature of miracles, among other grand adventures in 20th century Italy. As the decades roll along, will the people ever be able to stop talking about Parthenope?

What Made an Impression?: A Life Lived Lavishly: If you’re in the world of Paolo Sorrentino, you can at least expect everything to be beautiful. I was spellbound by his Silvio Berlusconi-inspired film Loro, as well as his transgressive TV work on The Young Pope and The New Pope. He reunites with his Hand of God cinematographer Daria D’Antonio for Parthenope, which is just as much of a visual feast as the rest of the Sorrentino-verse. And I kind of think that this latest release should have been a silent film. The dialogue isn’t terrible or anything like that. On the contrary, it’s occasionally quite witty. But the primary appeal is all those looks that Celeste Della Porta serves (in every sense of that phrase) as the title character. What I’m trying to say is: I wish this movie had been a little more abstract, and a little less literal.
What is Anthropology?: If this movie inspires scores of viewers to become anthropologists themselves, I’ll be a little more than surprised, honestly. Now, I’m no anthropologist, so maybe an expert in the field will have a different take. I did, however, take an introductory anthropology course my freshman year of college, and it didn’t seem anything like what’s on display in Parthenope. Perhaps the field changed significantly in the decades in between, or maybe Europeans (or just Italians) have their own unique methods. Anyway, this is just a preamble to my conclusion that I’m pretty sure that this is supposed to be Paolo Sorrentino’s Anthropology Film. Whatever that means. Because after watching Parthenope, I don’t know what that means.

Parthenope is Recommended If You Like: Italian Anthropology?

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Anthropology Grades

I Am Become Viewer of ‘Oppenheimer,’ Did It Destroy My World?

July 19, 2023

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Has he become Death yet? (CREDIT: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, David Krumholtz, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Danny Deferrari, Alden Ehrenreich, Jefferson Hall, Jason Clarke, James D’Arcy, Tony Goldwyn, Devon Bostwick, Alex Wolff, Scott Grimes, Josh Zuckerman, Matthias Schweighöfer, Christopher Denham, David Rysdahl, Guy Burnet, Louis Lombard, Harrison Gilbertson, Emma Dumont, Trond Fausa Aurvåg, Olli Haaskivi, Gary Oldman, John Gowans, Kurt Koehler, Macon Blair, Harry Groener, Jack Cutmore-Scott, James Remar, Gregory Jbara, Tim DeKay, James Urbaniak

Director: Christopher Nolan

Running Time: 180 Minutes

Rating: R for Some Disturbing Images and Deviously Edited Sex Scenes

Release Date: July 21, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: J. Robert Oppenheimer didn’t build the atomic bomb all by himself, but he’s borne the weight of its legacy much more than anybody else. In adapting the biography American Prometheus, Christopher Nolan makes it clear just how sprawling the efforts of the Manhattan Project were in the halls of science, government, and the military, while also underlining how it all revolved around Oppenheimer. This is a three-hour epic with one of the most sprawling casts in recent cinematic history. Despite that deep bench, Cillian Murphy is in nearly every single scene as the father of the atomic bomb. It’s an intimate approach that paradoxically illuminates the massiveness of the moment. As Oppenheimer traces the title character’s journey from homesick PhD student to Los Alamos to Princeton, it makes the case about how much the world irreversibly changed through his efforts.

What Made an Impression?: Again with the Time Manipulation: Christopher Nolan is famous for manipulating temporal perception in his films, and Oppenheimer serves as an ideal subject for that approach. As inheritors of the legacy of relativity from Albert Einstein (memorably played by Tom Conti), paradoxes about the nature of the universe were pretty much a given for Oppenheimer and his colleagues. Nolan is basically the filmmaking equivalent of a relative physicist, with a storytelling approach that is technically out of order but makes perfect sense when you look at it from the right angle. The story of Oppenheimer plays out in a linear fashion in the broad strokes, but there are some key scenes that are teased and revisited with varying degrees of essential information. The past, present, and the future converged at the Manhattan Project, and Oppenheimer apparently saw that more clearly than anybody. This is all to say, if your mind works like both Nolan’s and Oppenheimer’s, then this movie will make perfect sense to you.
Messy Mythmaking: Oppenheimer didn’t just seek to understand the world through particles and waves, but also through storytelling. He famously uttered a quote from the Bhagavad Gita (“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”), and his accomplishments have often been compared to that of Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from Olympus and then gave it to humans, thereby granting them the power to destroy themselves. Mythmaking of individuals is often used to mean valorization that elides more complicated truths. But the myths of ancient cultures that have survived to this day are filled with the foibles of mortals and deities. Oppenheimer makes it clear that this modern Prometheus had plenty of shortcomings as well, particularly unfaithfulness and stubbornness. (Although, I must say that his reputation for an disagreeable personality is a little overblown; sure, he always speaks his mind, but he’s generally pleasant to be around.) With its mix of historical accuracy and cinematic embellishment, Oppenheimer earns its place in the mythical tradition.
We Needed Some Bonhomie: Despite the doomsday cloud hanging over the whole proceedings, Oppenheimer also works quite well as a hangout movie. J. Robert was friends or acquaintances with seemingly every other prominent scientist of the mid-20th century, and it’s a delight just seeing them interacting and mentally stimulating each other. That levity is especially welcome with a three-hour running time, which is always a tall order, even for especially receptive moviegoers. We all have bladders, after all! So while I quite enjoyed Oppenheimer, I’m not eager to immediately watch the entire thing all over again, though I would happily check out a supercut of every scene with Albert Einstein as a jolly old wizardly mentor.

Oppenheimer is Recommended If You Like: The History Channel, Scientific American, Interstellar

Grade: 4 out of 5 Destroyers of Worlds

This Is a Movie Review: Gary Oldman Disappears Into Winston Churchill’s ‘Darkest Hour,’ and the Result is Fascinating But a Little Too Stiff

November 21, 2017

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CREDIT: Jack English/Focus Features

This review was originally posted on News Cult in November 2017.

Starring: Gary Oldman, Lily James, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ben Mendelsohn, Ronald Pickup, Stephen Dillane

Director: Joe Wright

Running Time: 125 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for War Talk and a Dash of Naughty British Humor

Release Date: November 22, 2017 (Limited)

How do you solve a problem like a mumbling lead character? You could make him not mumble, but of course that’s not really an option when he is a real person whose mushmouth is historically accepted fact. So then you could make the difficulty to understand him part of the point, but could that really work when he is known for inspiring his country to plow ahead in a time of crisis? Darkest Hour certainly does not take it easy on Winston Churchill (an exceptionally unrecognizable Gary Oldman). Nobody in Parliament thinks he is up to the task, but somehow he manages to fire up the British citizenry for the war effort without having to tamp down his prodigious appetites. Maybe the men and women on the street appreciate all the bluster thickly surrounding all of his words.

Darkest Hour is the third in 2017’s (accidental) trilogy about Britain’s early days in World War II. First came Their Finest, depicting the production of a propaganda film about the evacuation of Dunkirk. Then of course there was Dunkirk, about the evacuation itself. And now Darkest Hour presents the political maneuverings surrounding these same events.

With Germany holding the upper hand in 1940, the crux of Darkest Hour’s conflict is Churchill wrestling with the decision of whether to negotiate with Hitler or to rally the nation to keep fighting. This is a more complicated narrative than the simplistic version many of us have been told, in which the concessionist Neville Chamberlain (Ronald Pickup) gave way to the bulldog Churchill. In fact, Chamberlain’s decision to step down may have had more to deep with his creeping cancer. And I am no expert on British government, but Darkest Hour makes it clear that the executive forces on Chamberlain’s side were very much still present when Churchill ascended.

As a character study, this film is best regarded as a portrait of Churchill awkwardly slipping into the suit of the prime ministership. With his bulbous shape, and that physicality serving as a shield over his lack of self-confidence, so much of Churchill’s life is ill-fitting. Darkest Hour is similarly aesthetically unpleasant, in ways that I imagine were both intentional and unintentional. It cannot be helped that England is often a dreary country, and it is fair that that should be emphasized. Also reasonable but frustrating is the decision is to set many of the scenes in the deepest and most cramped bureaucratic interiors.

So it is quite a relief when Churchill and Darkest Hour trek out into the world, turning to the opinions of everyday Londoners riding the tube. The message here, at least as far I take it, is not so much that the commoners won the war, as much as it is that breaking out of your constrictions is always a good idea, whether you are a prime minister, an Oscar-angling motion picture, or anyone or anything else. So there is plenty of inspiration to draw from this film, though its shape may feel a little stitched-together.

Darkest Hour is Recommended If You Like: Winston Churchill mania (it’s hot right now), The King’s Speech, Chugging a Scotch and Puffing on a Cigar While You Watch Movies

Grade: 2.75 out 5 Litanies of Catastrophe

This Is a Movie Review: The Space Between Us

February 3, 2017

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the-space-between-us

This review was originally published on News Cult in 2017.

Starring: Asa Butterfield, Britt Robertson, Gary Oldman, Carla Gugino, B.D. Wong

Director: Peter Chesolm

Running Time: 120 Minutes

Rating: PG-13 for Intense Re-Entry

Release Date: February 3, 2017

If an astronaut on her way to Mars turned out to have gotten pregnant just before departure, would your first thought be how mortified she must be of her irresponsibility? If you said yes, you might just be Gary Oldman in The Space Between Us. In the moment, that sentiment is a little disturbing and quite backwards. Eventually it becomes clear why Oldman – the man behind this Martian colonization effort – reacts this way, and it is somewhat reasonable but also still a little patronizing.

That lack of progressiveness also plagues Space’s vision of the future. Beyond the fact that travel to Mars is reasonably accessible, there is not much to distinguish this vision of Earth from the 2017 version. The only new technology appears to be the latest generation of tablets. To paraphrase Tom Servo: so… 30 years from now it’ll be 3 years from now? I guess that’s what you get when you hire the director of Hannah Montana: The Movie to try his hand at sci-fi. The Space Between Us is decidedly NOT the best of both worlds.

The dearth of futuristic imagination can partially be justified by the fact that Space mostly chooses to be a road trip film through the southwestern U.S. The deal here is that Asa Butterfield (Ender in Ender’s Game) is the Martian-born son of that pregnant astronaut, and he is visiting Earth for the first time after growing up for his first 16 years on the red planet. He is supposed to be held at NASA for observation to determine if his bones can handle the new atmosphere, but he is too in love to be contained by The Man.

So Butterfield and Britt Robertson (Hollywood’s current go-to for all-American gals) go on the run from Oldman and his team to discover the truth behind Butterfield’s origins and just to be free. There is actually a great germ of a story here about how love knows no bounds (and Butterfield plays the slightly alien fish-out-of-water quite naturally) but the implementation is rather plainly prosaic. Also, everyone is genuinely looking out for the best of our Martian child, and a major revelation that resolves every misunderstanding is held off unnaturally for the sake of driving conflict. But at least we know now how passionately Gary Oldman feels about going to Mars.

The Space Between Us is Recommended If You Like: Gary Oldman getting all worked up, Britt Robertson playing the girl next door, the Asa Butterfield Space Genre

Grade: 2.5 out of 5 Space Colonies