Reality (Il Grande Fratello)

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Movie Details

• Genre: Comedy, Drama
• Release Date: 2013-03-15 NY, 2013-03-22 LA
• Running Time: 115 min.
• Director: Matteo Garrone
• Cast: Aniello Arena, Loredana Simioli, Nando Paone, Graziella Marina, Nello Iorio, Nunzia Schiano, Rosaria D'urso, Giuseppina Cervizzi, Claudia Gerini, Raffaele Ferrante
• Producers: Domenico Procacci, Matteo Garrone
• Writers: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti
• Distributor: Oscilloscope Laboratories
• Official Site: Reality (Il Grande Fratello) Official Site

Step by step, with a setup that evokes Honeymooners episodes, Matteo Garrone's Reality builds to as scalding a vision of televisual simulacra and its maddened victims as Scorsese's The King of Comedy. Garrone's follow-up to 2008's Gomorrah, Reality begins with a helicopter shot over Sant'Antonio Abate and a Renaissance horse carriage and a Felliniesque yet assiduously realistic wedding party so grotesque and overwrought you feel the teeth marks of Garrone's irony-loaded title in every faux-aristo explosion of zeal and cartoon opulence. Is this real? Not for a moment, but it gets only more hyper-unreal, when the nuptials, already crammed with frenzied disco gaiety and drag schtick, are guest-visited by a beloved former cast member of Big Brother, whose presence electrifies the crowd. The family patriarch, Luciano (Aniello Arena), is bedazzled, watching the quasi-celeb get choppered away like a dignitary from another planet. It's a world Luciano can't get out of his skull. Soon the hit Euro reality show is staging auditions in a Neapolitan mall, and to please his kids Luciano submits to an interview--despite being middle-aged and far from telegenic. With that his life selling fish and running pension scams begins to shred. Garrone's film explores nothing less than a mass delusion, personified by this one eager schmuck, a savvy Everyman who descends into paranoid magical thinking, finally obliterating his family and his sanity in order to, effectively, cross over into the broadcast afterlife. A prize-winner at Cannes, Garrone's film grows in your head afterward, making royal hash out of a cultural paradigm we'll be loathe to remember years from now--if, by then, everything hasn't become "reality."