The Best of Youth: A

I feel now that I just must travel to Italy; and not just for the beautiful vistas, the earthy populace (in whose deeply sincere smiles I would probably melt), and roiling rrrrrr's of the native land. No, I would go searching for the Carati family - and I would leave dissapointed. Because no family in all of Italy (of even I wager, the world) could magic the enchantment cast by the central clan in Marco Tullio Giordana's spellbinding, epic, nearly flawless The Best of Youth. Weaving elements of character interaction via smartly written dialogue over hotly debated areas of sociopolitics has been done before (Crash) but nowhere have I seen it done more exquisitely than here. Characters don't just interact - they grow, blossom, stumble, fail, succeed, die, and above else, live. Dialogue isn't just tossed back in forth - it is spoken with all of the broiling emotions of reality (as well of all of its brains). And here the sociopolitics don't take a passive-agressive stance as eerily, persistently, "present" - they are are there, subtly, as an element of behavior and geography and not as a glaring excalamtion point of a screenwriter's "vision". Quite frankly, The Best of Youth views life through a lens all too often discarded by Hollywood - real life.

And yet to say that the main characters of the film, Matteo (Alessio Boni) and his younger brother Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio), are grudgingly "realistic" people - "people" like ourselves who gripe and complain all day - is too tell a grotesquely sadistic lie. Instead, the two brothers at the core of the film are articulate, wondrous human beings...and yet not without their flaws.
These flaws - Matteo is a hot-headed, righteous crusader while Nicola is an eternally benevolent humanitarian - are at times key to major plot points. The first of such points occurs as the essential start of the film. When Matteo rescues a patient, Giorgia (Jasmine Trinca), from a mental institution he unknowingly begins a short-lived quest that will forever instrinically weave itself into the moral character of he and his brother. To be blunt their quest to save Giorgia fails and its consequences are subtle, tragic things. Matteo, the sensitive academic searching for problems to fix, incurs a blow heavy enough to leave permanent, volatile, scars in his emotional armor, while Nicola sets himself up to become a figure of (occasionally tragic yet always endless) empathy. To say more of the plot would spoil it; suffice to say that on one summer's trip-turned-failed-adventure two Italians almost imperceptibly set themselves on the road of the rest of their lives.

But oh what lives! The remainder of Youth details their next 40 years - together and apart - as they experience personal epiphanies and national tragedy. Alone however they are not. Lovers, wives, children, parents, grand-children, friends, students, patients, and a few others all flit through or settle into the Carati family - a group of luminous individuals who together become a sublimely radiant whole. As such a cohesive family they, like all good families, talk...alot. The script, by Sandro Petraglia & Stefano Rulli, understands this with more intimacy, humor, compassion, bravado, heartache, understanding, and forgiveness than roughly 20 American films put together. The effect is such that each scene, be it short or effusively long, is not only directed by Giordana with mesmerizing skill but also constantly anchored in the divine words of its characters - who as such, being mediums of such believable speech, become characters no longer; they become real. Or such was my feeling as I neared the end of this massive, massively effecting saga.

And by massive, I do mean massive. As all reviews of The Best of Youth must invariably begin, the film is almost six hours long (yes, six). I have chosen however to reveal this at the end. To me it didn't matter how long the film was, quite the opposite; as the final stories of Nicola and Matteo played out on screen - against an ever changing tapestry of national, personal, and emotional elements - I wanted desparately almost to have it go on longer, the characters to continue talking and laughing, crying and reminiscing. Shocking isn't it? that a story spanning four decades, dozens of family members (and just as many great performances), a few key world events, maybe one or two choice devastations, and acres and acres of great dialogue could be this ravishing and amazing. But I don't lie - The Best of Youth is a film like no other. Find it and watch it, then call me in the morning.