Not a lot to say about this movie. It's a fictionalized biopic about Pirandello, a famous writer and playwright, coming back to Sicily to meet with another famous writer and meanwhile having to deal with a creative block. He's helped by two strange but endearing funeral home workers/aspiring artists. The story on the surface contains a lot of Pirandello's core themes, like the idea of madness hiding under the surface of normalcy, of masks and lack of identity, of "strangeness". Pirandello went on to write (in this movie and in real life) Six Characters in Search of an Author, a meta-play about actors rehearsing a play and being interrupted by six characters without a writer that enter the theater and ask the guy in charge of rehearsal to write their stories, and then the story continues into this one arc structure for the entire play. The movie successfully depicts a story that, in itself, could have been written by Pirandello, if he ever did movies. The cinematography is pretty good although a bit standard, the editing is fast paced and makes for an entertaining watch. Toni Servillo basically plays the same character he plays always: the classy, reserved and troubled yet sentimental intellectual. But he does so pretty well so what's there to say? Ficarra & Picone work decently, but I personally don't really like how repetitive and predictable their screen presence and dynamics and deliveries are: they also play the same characters in every movie, Ficarra is the more crass, materialistic, sarcastic, "patriarchal" italian guy, Picone is the (too) sensitive and compliant one (and for some reason always ends up having an affair with Ficarra's sister in every movie). They work way less than Servillo because their characters only serve the purpose to be "fascinating" to Pirandello, that sees their weirdness and stupidity and finds it cute and charming. There's not a lot of depth, not a lot of meaning to their existence. Moreover, this movie suffers from the same affliction of every biopic about creative people, which is: "I don't know how I show the main character having an idea". In this case they work around it by playing on the idea that some of the stuff we see is not strictly real but imagined. It sort of works, but it just ends up being one of those movies where you can fill in the gap only knowing the real story of the real character. You don't get a lot of enjoyment if you don't know who Pirandello
is, you don't really feel for his character all that much. The "weirdness" in the title that connects the strange slice of humanity in the film is never really explained, it's just left at the level of "people are weird and funny to look at sometimes". And again, you can understand by knowing Italian literature beforehand, but I personally think a movie should not take the audience's cultural knowledge as a basis. It's definitely a more clever example of biopic, because it integrates a core theme of the author's work into the story with intelligence, making the entire plot basically revolve around it, but it still leaves you a bit unsatisfied. I guess that nobody really cares, and the people that go and watch the movie know exactly what to expect and what ideas are celebrated (because they know the author). So if you just want a movie that reminds you of why this author is great, then this movie is for you: it's well made, competently directed and comfortably unchallenging.
Review of Strangeness
