Rich Wright
Those Europeans sure know how to make irresistible movies out of the most unlikely topics, no? This one concerns the choice made by the widower of a young woman who's just died to sit outside his daughter's school every day to wait for her, rather than go to work. What starts off as an odd way to come to terms with his grief, quickly transforms into an emotional journey for him, and his family.He starts appreciating the simple things in life more, and makes a lot of new friends that he otherwise may not have met. It also turns him into a bit of a minor celebrity... as folks flock to see 'The Man Who Can't Be Moved'. Who'd have known that Script song may be based on a real character?!It's brilliantly acted, with truly heartfelt moments studded throughout. You become wrapped up in the lead's quest to find some kind of personal closure, and the lives of the other participants are almost equally as fascinating. Could us Brits build such a towering edifice with such small bricks? Alas, I don't think so. But... what's to stop us trying? 8/10
nevadaluke
This is a movie that only Euro-cinephiles could possibly enjoy. Think of Bergman reading this script. Think of what he would have done with the Marta-Lara arc ... or the Claudia-Carlo arc ... Or the horror with which Pietro says he regards the Holocaust ... Or revealing what Pietro and Steiner discuss in the car with the windows rolled up. The mind boggles.All in all, Pietro is a thoroughly unsympathetic character. The amazing dramatic turn here is that he is completely sympathetic in Act I. But he proves to be so indulgently inert that, by the end of Act II, you don't care much whether he takes the job, screws the girl who walks the dog, lets his brother marry his daughter or jumps back in the ocean and ends it all.The inescapable conclusion is that he only "changes" when Claudia finally fires him as a weirdly obsessed Daddy. Obsessed with what and on what level? Obsessed with protecting his daughter figuratively? Obsessed with achieving personal redemption metaphorically? While we're thinking this over, let's call time out for a long, gratuitously graphic sex scene.And this scene advances the story exactly how? Maybe one good reason for that scene is that, hopefully, it will protect Miss Paladini (or Yoshimi -- whatever) from experiencing the totality of this mess for a few precious years.
gradyharp
Two middle-aged brothers - Pietro (Nanni Moretti) and Carlo (Alessandro Gassman) - play ball on the beach when suddenly two women yell for help while in the ocean. The brothers risk their lives to save the two women, only to find that the women don't even thank them. When the Paladini brothers drive back to Pietro's home, they discover that in their absence Pietro's wife has fallen and died. Pietro's 10-year-old daughter Claudia (Blu Yoshimi) is distraught and asks her father why he was not at home to save his wife. After a quiet funeral Pietro enters an existence of 'quiet chaos', neglecting his duties as a successful executive, choosing instead to sit on the bench across from Claudia's school, waiting each day in numbed silence for his daughter's completion of classes in order to drive her home. His only goal, despite various interruptions from passers-by and family members in incidents both humorous and distractingly serious, is to be there for Claudia, visible through her school window, to reassure her of his constant presence. How Pietro gradually figures out his grief, the world, and his place in it, discovering a new relationship with Claudia, forms the story line of this tender film. Director Antonello Grimaldi, working with a screenplay adaptation of Sandro Veronesi's book by Veronesi and Nanni Moretti, draws extraordinary performances from his cast of premiere Italian actors. In an classroom scene Claudia's teacher is explaining the word 'palindrome' (a sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction) and shares with her pupils how some things are reversible while other things are irreversible. Grimaldi and his writers and actors demonstrate this term as it applies to human events in this thoughtful story. The film, in Italian with subtitles, appeals both to the intellect and to the emotions. It is a little treasure. Grady Harp
hand-eti
Nanni Moretti is not playing his neurotic self this time but he is quite convincing as a man who can't deal with his emotions at all. The good thing about the movie is that all little story lines keep on spinning around him and seem to go nowhere in the end.Just a few things put me off. I don't know if it was necessary to make the person a top manager. He doesn't seem the type to hold that sort of position. And the symbolism of the reversibility of palindromes is a bit cheesy and over the top.But the thing that really put me down is that one sex scene. There is nothing wrong with it in itself but it does not fit in this movie at all. The whole atmosphere changes, it is as if the movie stops, the sex scene starts, and when it's over the movie starts again. Not convincing at all.
AD
