The Great Beauty had success at festivals as and in cinemas around the world. It is more tasteful than a Paolo Coelho novel but just as empty and didactic. Most likely it will be forgotten as the insignificant movie that it is. Don't get me wrong: the directing, the camerawork, the composition of the scenes, and the acting are all outstanding. It is a very well made movie, a testimony of honed skills and serious artistic powers. But the story, message and mood of the movie are...disappointing.
The movie achieves only two things, neither of which it intends to. It draws attention nicely to two phenoma very common today. One is, that people who experience even slight unhappiness or sadness diagnose this as a serious problem. We see this in the more extreme quarters of the new sensitivity movement, in the work of quack psychologists pervading every aspect of life that can be sorted out perfectly well without their help, and the onslaught of mood altering legal 'medication'. The movie abounds in this approach, in fact, its basic idea rests on this misunderstanding. The film's main statement is something like that 'there is a lack of meaning and beauty in the world'. The truth is this: a very well off person who isn't working, has no family, has superficial friends, no serious hobbies and no responsible roles finds life mildly depressing as he is getting older. This is 1) not news, 2) not interesting. That the characters in the movie don't realize this and people enjoy this movie shows how many people subscribe to the view that personal happiness - meaning the experienced mood, emotion, as contrasted with living a well-lived life - is a cornerstone of a full life.
The second is the mistaken idea that somehow happiness is something that we should experience often and something that should 'come to us' as a result of focusing on our mental or spiritual well-being. Every sane person knows that taking something very seriously only leads one to care and worry about it much. It doesn't matter whether what one tends to is sports, politics, economy, money, family or one's own happiness, the more time and energy one invests in it the more important it becomes in one's eyes and the more likely it is that one finds fault with it somehow. Of course there is a huge difference between caring for one's own happiness and caring for, say, one's local community. If one cares about one's community, poverty, inequality, politics, peace, economy, family, or one's work, then one can actually improve something and gain happiness while at the same time being a useful member of the human species and the local community. In the long run this can put one's life in a perspective in which it can be understood as having had meaning. Success is not even necessary. A good, honest attempt is enough to provide coherence to a life. That's how caring for something is basic and can be very rewarding, how it is a constitutive part of our personality that is not static but dynamic. Having goals and taking things seriously enables us to care for things and to experience happiness.
But for people like the company who this movie is about, and people like them in the real world, who don't depend on others financially and hence don't experience community or caring, who only care about their own 'happiness', for them it comes as a surprise that they end up feeling empty. There are no secret inner planes, no spiritual dimensions, no art which could redeem one and prolong feeling happy if one's choice is to be shallow.
Of course one should not even strive for constant happiness and cheerfulness in the first place. If one has no place for duties, responsibilities, a feeling of community, and respect for work in one's life, then this emptiness will eventually enter and creep over everything. But we shouldn't be sorry for those who go this way. Either, they should start working or taking care of others. It would make for a more interesting story than watching them obsess about how sorry they are for themselves while living their comfortable and shallow lives.
That many people found this movie to be sad or moving, that they could identify with the people who it is about is a sad reminder that many of the most well off and gifted people in their fifties, sixties and seventies believe that they should live like teenagers instead of getting themselves together and contributing to the small steps of building communities, making themselves useful at companies or charities, helping out people who have to work a lot and don't have time for their kids or do any of the other thousand possible meaningful things that are open to them.
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