Just have to throw in a note of dissent here, since the universal critical praise for this mediocrity is frankly mystifying. "The Best of Youth," at the end of the day is little more than a creaky melodrama that tries to cover its coincidences and rigged reversals with feigned subtlety and perfunctory attention to small drama. It's a soap opera too concerned with tastefulness to indulge in suds, and yet its view of character and history adds up to the same sort of reductive sentimentality that gives melodrama a bad name. Its evocation of "the sixties" through music--trotting out the usual Motown suspects--is strictly by-the-numbers nostalgia bait, and I find it telling that the soundtrack scarcely acknowledges any of the other decades the movie takes in once we're out of "Big Chill" territory and the comforts of well-trod cliché. If this is meant to represent the characters' sense of time through a relationship to the music of their youth and ignorance of pop culture after that, it doesn't work because there's no sense of people relating to the music (or even literally hearing it), no sense that they love it and need it to the point that it crowds out the songs of their future; pop hits are just laid on to tell us in the audience what year it's supposed to be...until they aren't. So characterization and sense of history--the very things the movie is supposedly about--suffer for such negligence. The acting is fine, and the writing has moments, but there's little electricity between the people on screen, and ultimately what we see is little more than skilled actors performing a screenplay for a camera. Meanwhile, the stodgy visual sense only intermittently delivers cinematic effects that either heighten the drama or draw attention to the potential epiphanies in nuance, doing little to enhance the stiff dramaturgy. The cinematography can perhaps be defended on the basis that this was originally filmed for Italian TV, but that's really no excuse if you compare with the photography in an average episode of "6 Feet Under," or "The West Wing," never mind a gorgeous piece of work like Jane Campion's "An Angel at My Table" which was also made for television. The film just doesn't go very deep, and comparison with an undeniably problematic work of the same genre like Bertolucci's propagandistic "1900" or even Copolla's third "Godfather" movie just reveals how flimsy this is. Well-paced and never boring, its 6 hours are still too much to ask, given the movie's thin and surfacy takes on family and history. Why bother with pretentiously "novelistic" movies like this when you could get so much more from spending that time reading an actual novel or watching 3 movies that don't care to be anything but cinema?
Review of The Best of Youth
