BEFORE: Robert De Niro carries over again from "Great Expectations". As you might imagine, De Niro is rapidly rising through the ranks of actors with the most appearances this year, thanks to De Niro Con (the home version). I don't think he'll make it to the top spot, currently held by Kevin Hart, but he may get close, especially if he pops up in a couple of docs unexpectedly, that's been known to happen.
I had to take an extra day to watch this, since the version I have (which aired on Starz a few months ago) is over four hours long. The original released version was even longer, at five hours and 17 minutes, which is a combination of the original release in two parts, however at some point for American audiences the director was forced to make a stripped-down version that could be viewed all at once without taking up your whole evening. So since I was taking the whole day off Tuesday to recover from Tribeca FF, I watched two hours in the afternoon (Part One) and then the other two hours at night, post talk-shows.
THE PLOT: The epic tale of class struggle in twentieth-century Italy as seen through the eyes of two childhood friends on opposing sides.
AFTER: Well, I made it through all four hours of this movie, I can't possibly imagine what else could have been in the five hour version. Maybe they explained the politics a little better in the longer version, who knows? I was very confused by the politics thing, the socialism inherent in the countryside of Italy before the first World War, and then the rise of fascism leading up to World War II. But the movie kind of skipped over both wars, which maybe seems like an odd choice. Maybe that's what's missing from the four-hour version, all the war scenes?
The film is also somewhat misnamed, because only a very small part of it takes place in the year 1900, in the beginning, I assume. So it really should have been called "the 1900's" or "the first half of the 20th Century", giving it the name of one single year doesn't really work if the time span covered is really 45 years. Actually, the movie starts with the ending, we see Italy in 1945 just after its liberation from Fascism, and we've seen the fall of Berlin so many times in movies, but the fall of Mussolini's Rome, not so much. What we see is an angry mob of peasants chasing down Donald Sutherland and a woman who are trying to escape on bicycles that are loaded up with their possessions, so it's s metaphor for the upper class, I suppose, being burdened with all of their worldly goods while the peasants are able to chase them down because they are unburdened, umm, except for their pitchforks. Yeah, this scene is probably not going to end well for Sutherland's character. Meanwhile, De Niro's character, whoever he is, is being held at gunpoint by a young man and forced into a barn full of cows. He explains that this is also the barn where his grandfather died, and then he starts to narrate the tale of how things got to this point, so we're rocketed back in time....
To the birth, in 1900, of two male babies, one is Alfredo Berlinghieri, born to the land-owning family, and we see his grandfather, also Alfredo, (maybe he's the one they name the creamy pasta sauce after) outside encouraging his daughter-in-law (?) who's inside, giving birth to his grand-child. On the same day, a grandchild is born to Leo Dalco, who's the foreman on Alfredo's land. The two grandfathers approach the day very differently, Alfredo passes out bottles of wine and celebrates the day, because he's a rich man and this is his first grand-child, while Leo Dalco has probably like 40 grand kids, and he keeps on working because, like, what's one more? Another metaphor, no doubt, about the differences between the classes. The poor people really do seem to have more children, don't they? Well, really, what else do they have to do?
Olmo is raised by his grandfather as a Socialist, and Olmo watches as the peasants attempt to go on strike, and eventually many of them get replaced by threshing machines that can clear hay from a field in ten minutes, where before that would have taken 10 laborers half a day. But the strikes bring Olmo and young Alfredo together, and they become close friends, like brothers. Alfredo wants to be a Socialist, too, but as the child in the landowners' family, really, it's just not going to take. By the time of World War I, and this is where the movie skips ahead a few years, Alfredo stays behind to run his family's plantation, while Olmo is forced to enlist in the Italian army. When Olmo returns from the war, he finds that Alfredo's father, Giovanni, has hired a new foreman, Attila, who treats everyone cruelly. (That he has the name of a famous Hun is probably another symbol, he represents the approach of fascism.)
But hey, at least Alfredo and Olmo are back together as friends, though now played by adult actors, and they get into all kinds of wacky situations like visiting a prostitute together. Which gets very awkward because she doesn't want them to take turns, she wants to get things over with quickly, so sure, have a threesome with your best friend, what could possibly go wrong? Olmo has, well, not a wife, but a partner, Anita, because Socialists didn't believe in marriage, it was too close to "owning" another person's love, so I guess they had open relationships? Olmo and Anita lead protests together, but in the early 1930's she dies during childbirth, so Olmo has to raise his daughter (also named Anita). Alfredo, meanwhile, has a couple of girlfriends but marries Ada, an alcoholic whose favorite pastime appears to be pulling pranks, like pretending to be blind, and also then over-apologizing to everyone for pretending to be blind.
At some point Giovanni dies, making Alfredo the new "padrone" of the plantation, and this neatly puts him and Olmo on opposite sides of the political spectrum - it's impossible to be both a Socialist AND a landowner, apparently. Meanwhile, Attila, the cruel foreman, rallies the Fascist black-shirt troops by strapping a cat to a wall and killing it. I'm not sure exactly how this was supposed to inspire soldiers or promote Fascism, maybe he just didn't like cats?
In Act Two, things come to a head as Alfredo and Ada mess around with cocaine, and Attila takes up with Regina, who's Alfredo's cousin, and she doesn't really like Alfredo's wife. She says "It should have been me..." but I'm not sure if she was referring to how it should have been her running the plantation or it should have been her marrying Alfredo. Maybe both. But anyway Attila and Regina make a cruel pair, at one point they track down a missing child and they spin him around in fun until they knock his head off. Whoopsie. No worries, they try to hide the body in a crypt, but when it's found they just keep blaming Olmo or another random guy until everybody agrees that's who probably killed the kid.
Then Alfredo's wife, Ada, leaves him, and it's a bit unclear whether she goes to live with Olmo or just wants to be alone and drink all day. The peasants start to revolt against Attila and the fascists, and Alfredo fires Attila so he can spend more time killing families. But the peasants throw horse manure at him, and Olmo rubs his face in a big pile of fresh, hot manure. Then Olmo disappears on his bicycle for fear of retaliation, and his daughter Anita rides off in the opposite direction, just in case.
Eventually we're back to where we started, with the peasants chasing down Attila and Regina with pitchforks, and a young man holding Alfredo at gunpoint. The workers want to put Alfredo on trial for the crime of being a cruel landowner, not realizing that he always wanted to be a Socialist at heart. Olmo comes back, just in time to represent Alfredo at his trial, and Olmo declares that Alfredo is "dead", so that they won't kill him. An interesting legal strategy, because if he and his landowning ways are dead, symbolizing the overthrow of the old social system, then maybe he can save his life.
Finally, representatives of the new Italian government arrive, and they want the peasants to give up their weapons, the war is over. Alfredo probably was wishing they could have arrived a few hours earlier, but cooler heads prevail and the peasants give up their guns because now that Fascism is dead, all of their problems are solved and there will never be any class struggles ever again in the future. Yeah, sure.
OK, so I'm not really sure if this was accurate, if what I learned about Italian history is genuine, or if this is just one person's perspective on history, and how things might have gone down back in the early 20th century. Really, a lot of this movie just felt like a collection of odd moments, like what do you do when you and your friend have a threesome with a hooker and she has an epileptic fit shortly after? Or what happens when you go to your best friend's house and accuse him of maybe sleeping with your wife, but you find out that she's not there, as you expected, but she just left you and went somewhere else? Very awkward. And what do you do with a woman who's driving you in a fancy new car but insists on pulling that prank where she pretends to be suddenly blind, and she might crash the car? Well, I guess you marry her, that's what. Whatever. It was a different time, that's for sure.
Also starring Gerard Depardieu (last seen in "Green Card"), Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti, Donald Sutherland (last seen in "Moonfall"), Stefania Sandrelli, Werner Bruhns, Stefania Casini, Sterling Hayden (last seen in "The Long Goodbye"), Anna Henkel, Ellen Schwiers, Alida Valli (last seen in "The Paradine Case"), Burt Lancaster (last seen in "De Palma"), Romolo Valli, Giacomo Rizzo, Pippo Campanini, Antonio Piovanelli, Paulo Branco, Liu Bosisio, Maria Monti, Anna Maria Gherardi, Demesio Lusardi, Pietro Longari Ponzoni, Jose Quaglio, Clara Colosimo, Vittorio Fanfoni, Edda Ferronao, Paolo Pavesi, Roberto Maccanti, Odoardo Dail'aglio, Piero Vida, Patrizia De Clara,
RATING: 4 out of 10 orders of frog's legs
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