Rocco and His Brothers (2018)

As Good As It Gets

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I am delighted to find that decades later this has lost NONE of its sweeping power and operatic splendor. Renato Salvatori should have received a shelf of acting prizes for this role - it is one of the most intense and beautiful acting jobs since Marlon Brando filmed 'Streetcar'. Close behind is the legendary role of Annie Girardot's doomed 'Nadia'. Alain Delon is heartbreaking and overwhelmed by love, life, all that is demanded of him by family, everything.A great movie carries all before it. Claudia Cardinale is given a 'neo-realist' simplicity that actually accents her beauty far better than the over made up and stylized version of herself we came to know. Katina Paxinou is a force of nature and though Magnani would have been magnificent in the role she would have been 'too Magnani'. Paxinou vanishes into the role of the mother with perfect understanding of every gesture, word and shade of feeling asked of her. Even small roles - take for instance the owner of the laundry - are fabulous! SO much good acting it is almost TOO much good acting. I could describe a dozen more small roles played to perfection. Don't watch any great film for awhile till your mind and heart are good and hungry and rediscover this masterpiece.

Perhaps the greatest (or just only) neo-realistic soap opera? Neopra! Actually, it's operatic quality is what is great for it, and you can either dig into it or you can't. I did, but it takes some adjusting from those earlier neo-realistic scenes in the movie. It's like a fusion of Visconti's more grounded, Earthy material in his 1947 film La Terra Trema and the intense passion of his other more "actual" operatic movies like The Leopard and Senso, and the tragic dimensions (if not the restraint) of The White Nights.It has it all, though it's not a perfect film. It's messy and is so into its Italian-dramatic states that you can almost feel the theater shake with the vibrations of the Brothers' Mother crying and screaming. But it's got intense passion and is true to its high-stakes emotional nature. Only a few scenes really stand out as dated. Its violence is also quite vivid for a movie 50 years old; it got censored pretty much everywhere on original release, and the print I saw by chance at a revival house was "Presented" by Martin Scorsese. So it goes. Oh, and Alain Delon is wonderful, in case you were wondering.

As a growing fan of foreign cinema, I wanted to see this one too, even though its long runtime of nearly 3 hours caused me to hesitate a bit. But the urge to see it was stronger than the hesitation.The two best things about this movie were cinematography (showing us good old Italy, how it was more than half-century ago) and acting.This is a strange film. It tells the tale of a big rural family from Italy and their adaptation to city life; it has boxing scenes (not properly something I wished to see); it has the story of a prostitute with whom the brothers Rocco and Simone share a passion; there are certain scenes of brutal violence (physical aggression, rape and even a cold-blooded homicide).In my opinion, this film doesn't have that much to justify such a long runtime. Its plot could be told in nearly half of that time. It's slow and overlong. I don't mind about the slow pace, I can handle that. But this one is so long that even if it moved at a faster pace, I don't think that would make much difference.Concerning the cast, Alain Delon is great as Rocco. Same about Renato Salvatori as Simone, Annie Girardot as Nadia (the prostitute), Katina Paxinou as Rosaria, Spiros Focás as Vincenzo, Max Cartier as Ciro and Rocco Vidolazzi as Luca.

In 1960's new wave was spinning around Europe giving birth to new movements such as the French New Wave and Novi-film. At the same time Hollywood was in ruins; the studios had lost their money and the filmmakers of the new generation started taking influence from Europe. But perhaps a more interesting perspective on Rocco e i suoi fratelli is Italian neo-realism; a movement which started after the WWII with Rosselini's Rome Open City (1945). There has been some quarrel about whether Italian neo-realism actually started in 1943 with Visconti's Ossessione but the movement is often considered to be postwar. Rocco e i suoi fratelli meant a return to neo-realism by Luchino Visconti - one of the men who started it in the beginning.Rocco e i suoi fratelli marked a turning point in Italian neo-realism and grew out to be one of the finest films of it. All the common themes for Visconti combine in it: betrayal, family and the disintegration of it which makes Rocco even more fascinating and it is often considered to be Visconti's 'magnum opus'. Rocco e i suoi fratelli is a melodramatic family chronicle which tells the story of a family moving from a small town in Southern Italia to a bigger city Milano. Eventually the problems of the new life start to culminate and tear the family apart.Rocco e i suoi fratelli is a complex film - very complex indeed. It basically has two sides; the epic tale and the psychological drama about the disintegration of a family. The beautiful cinematography with the brilliant use of music (or no music at all) and the strong family portrayal put this in the same caliber with some of the finest epic family melodramas by Douglas Sirk. But the film most certainly not is just an epic melodrama and the other side brings it above the finest melodramas in the history of cinema.When the family moves from the small town to the big city they at the same time are forced to leave behind fraternity and old core values. There is a strong contrast here; the old city represents safety, security and fraternity. In the new city they come across with the problems of bourgeois life; unemployment, the cruel business of boxing and prostitution. The critique for capitalism culminates in the Dostoyevskian battle between good (Rocco) and evil (Simone). Prostitution is seen as a norm of bourgeois life, as a rule of the game, but also as a disruptive force; both Rocco and Simone fall in love with the same street girl who eventually breaks up their brotherhood. Luchino Visconti's quintessential critique for bourgeois life was that the only hope for the people who had been beaten down was to attack to the others who had been beaten down. Rocco e i suoi fratelli added some meaningful points to the analysis of capitalism and the cruelty of it. It's a grand epic tale of the society, the family, and a beautiful psychological drama about the disintegration of a family.