‘The Hand of God’: Sorrentino’s Sultry Coming-of-Age Tale is Filled With Poignancy and Familiarity [Review]

At 16, director Paolo Sorrentino came home to find his parents dead, killed by a carbon monoxide leak. On the night of the tragedy, he had gone to a football stadium, watching his hero Diego Maradona play for the local team, Napoli.

Sorrentino’s “The Hand of God” is a sultry, highly personal, if at times dramatically familiar coming-of-age film that exposes the best and the worst traits of the Italian filmmaker. After the coldly detached statements of “The Great Beauty,” “Youth,” and “Il Divo,” Sorrentino has more or less substituted that voice for a youthfully conventional coming-of-age story.

Set in his native Napoli in the late ’80s, Sorrentino casts (Timothee Chalamet lookalike) Filippo Scotti as his alter ego, Fabietto. Toni Servillo plays his dad. Think “Cinema Paradiso” but sultrier with a dash of Fellini. All the Italian stereotypes are here — the large noisy family, the football watching, the oddball characters, the sexual awakenings. It’s all richly photographed by Daria D'Antonio’s evocative photography — many of the frames in this film have such a rich warmth to them.

When tragedy strikes, Fabietto, much like Sorrentino did, finds refuge in cinema. That’s when the film starts to drag. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that he will end up becoming this big shot director and winning an Oscar. Despite the familiarity, the end-result is raw and, on a moment by moment basis, compulsively watchable, but I at times wished Sorrentino refrained from the second half’s autobiographical trappings and relied more on the wonderful eccentricities of the side characters. [B]