Hullabaloo: Saturday Night at the Movies by Dennis Hartley: Rome for the Holidays --- "The Great Beauty" and "Black Nativity"

It doesn't take long for the Fellini influences to burble to the surface in Paolo Sorrentino's La grande bellezza ("The Great Beauty"). The viewer is immediately thrown into the midst of a huge, frenetic birthday party in honor of 65 year-old writer Jep Gambardella (Tony Servillo), and we are definitely freakin' at the Freaker's Ball with some of the more oddly-featured and garishly-attired denizens of Rome's upper-crust literati. Although many decades have passed since the singular success of his sole novel, Jeb has ingratiated himself into Rome's high society over the ensuing years as a glib arts critic, serial womanizer and entertaining gadfly at parties (when accused of being a misogynist, Jep retorts that he is much more open-minded...he prefers to be addressed as a misanthrope).

However, Jeb's ebullient birthday mood is about to get quashed. When an old acquaintance he has long lost touch with (and who ended up marrying Jeb's teenage sweetheart) contacts him out of the blue to share the news that his wife has died, Jeb has an unexpected reaction, triggering a deep malaise. He begins to take stock of the self-indulgent pursuits that he and fellow members of Rome's idle class indulge in to distract themselves from the shallowness of their lives. The ensuing existential travelogue snaking through Italy's ever-cinematic capital begs comparisons with Fellini's La Dolce Vita, as well as Antonioni's La Notte , another drama about a Rome-based writer in crisis.

While beautifully photographed and cannily evocative of a certain surreal, free-associative style of filmmaking that flourished in the 1960s (even if the narrative is set in contemporary Bunga Bunga Rome), Sorrentino's film left me ambivalent. Interestingly, it was very similar to the way I felt in the wake of Eat Pray Love. In my review of that film, I relayed my inability to empathize with what I referred to as the "Pottery Barn angst" on display. It's that plaintive wail of the 1%: "I've got it all, and I've done it all and seen it all, but something's missing...oh, the humanity!" It's not that I don't understand our protagonist's belated pursuit of truth and beauty; it's just that Sorrentino fails to make me care enough to make me want to tag along on this noble quest for 2 hours, 22 minutes.

I make a concerted effort to avoid trite phrases like “warm-hearted musical that the whole family can enjoy” when dashing off a film review. But when it, erm, comes to warm-hearted musicals that the whole family can enjoy…I suppose you could do worse than Black Nativity, a Yule-themed musical inspired by Langston Hughes’ eponymous early 60s Off-Broadway play and helmed by writer-director Kasi Lemmons (Talk to Me). Glossy as a Hallmark card (and just about as deep), the film nonetheless ambles along agreeably enough, thanks to a spirited cast and a blues-gospel tinged soundtrack. Jennifer Hudson plays a struggling single mom who lives in Baltimore with her teenage son, Langston (Jacob Latimore). She decides (much to Langston’s chagrin) that this Christmas would be as good a time as any for her son to get acquainted with her parents (Forest Whitaker and Angela Bassett) from whom she has been estranged for a number of years.

After a long bus ride to NYC (which yields the film’s best musical number, a haunting, beautifully arranged rendition of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”), Langston no sooner sets foot on Big Apple pavement than he’s being accused of theft and getting hauled off in handcuffs after an earnest attempt to return a wallet to a man who has absent-mindedly left it on a store counter (I suspect I’m not the only person in the audience who flashed on the hapless newbie who gets racially profiled in the center section of Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City”). Luckily, his grandfather (a reverend graced with the punny name Cornell Cobb) clears up the misunderstanding and gets him out of stir. Sullen Langston and his pious (if well-meaning) grandparents are off to a shaky start for their “getting to know you” romp, which includes the rev’s annual “Black Nativity” church event, some family melodrama, and (wait for it) A Christmas Miracle.

Were the film not buoyed by the presence of the charismatic Whitaker and Bassett, and the fact that someone is inspired to break into song every 6 or 7 minutes, the entire cast may have been in grave danger of drowning in clichés. Still, Lemmons’ film earns extra points almost by default, due to the fact that the “family holiday musical” is on the endangered species list. So if you’re into that sort of thing, hey…don’t let me be Scrooge.