Youth (2015)

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino; produced by Carlotta Calori, Francesca Cima and Nicola Giuliano

Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is a famous composer and conductor. Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel) is an equally famous cinema director and screenwriter. Fred, relaxing at his favourite Swiss hotel, has been asked by the Queen to conduct his most popular work for the Duke of Edinburgh’s birthday. Mick has come to the same hotel to work on one last film, his ‘testament’. Amid revelations and ruminations, each will resolve his current dilemma, not entirely in ways they expected.

Youth is very much an actors’ and director’s movie, so much so that one can almost see the acting and directing. After one gets over the fact that Caine and Keitel play two men who’ve been friends for sixty years – and these excellent players actually do persuade one of this – the two leads provide Youth with its best moments. That doesn’t mean there are many from which to choose.

Other actors do well here. Paul Dano portrays Jimmy Tree, a Johnny Depp-like actor who is cursed with ‘one moment of levity’: his part as ‘Mr Q’ in a light-hearted ‘robot-movie’. He feels an affinity and admiration for Fred, but his role is principally to allow Fred to voice some of his thoughts. Rachel Weisz plays Lena, Fred’s daughter, who is angry and bitter toward her father, and whose husband, Julian – Mick’s son – has just deserted her.

A number of characters are introduced, most of whom are anonymous and uninteresting. A prostitute, a masseuse, a soccer player, a silent couple, a little girl, a Miss Universe winner; some have a purpose of reacting to Fred and Mick, others seem to exist for no reason.

We see vignettes that consist largely of people eating, sitting, walking through corridors or across lovely Swiss landscapes. Often such sequences add to a film, even if they have nothing to add to the plot, the script or the outcome. In Youth, they appear as little more than an homage to the director’s great influence, Federico Fellini.

The big problem with Youth is the script, written by the director. Fred is retired, with no interest in working any more, yet Lena accompanies him to the hotel as his assistant. Why? And why would Mick come to a Swiss hotel to work on a screenplay? And with a group of minions who look like a 1940s comedy team, but without their talent (either to amuse or to write)? And would a Miss Universe contest send its winner to a hotel that is more a sanitarium for the old and tired than a centre of fun and excitement? The idea of a wide variety of people meeting at one place has worked well for dramas, comedies and mysteries since 1932’s Grand Hotel, but there should be some logic behind it.

Aside from these questions, there is trouble with the script even within its own context. Except in what happens to one major character (and even then, the event surprises more by its form than its occurrence), much is predictable. Fred’s decision can be seen coming; his reconciliation with his daughter follows on cue upon a revelation about his music. Jimmy, depressed by the popularity of ‘Mr Q’, is revived by a child – precocious, of course - who says one of his other movies gave her important insight. Lena, abandoned by her husband, is courted by a mountaineer. Fred and Mick both state, separately, that, as friends, they tell each other only ‘the good things’, yet at one point, it is obvious that they have discussed an impending disaster to Mick’s film. Predictable, nonsensical and, worst, uninvolving.

The title itself is misleading. It might be seen as irony, except that it is quoted earnestly by a very minor character as what Fred would find outside the hotel. It’s problematical that he does.

In fact, the point or message of the movie is hard to pin down. One gathers that it might be found in Fred’s claim that he likes music because one merely needs to feel, to understand it. And Mick states that emotions are all people have. A secondary character says all she feels is fear, to which a tertiary character responds that that is an amazing feeling. But the message is too diffused in its provision, and lost in what the writer/director probably believes are clever lines that must have sounded good in rehearsal.

Despite the fine performances, there is little warmth, except between Fred and Mick. Youth reminded me quite a bit of Wings of Fame, which I reviewed in January of last year. It too took place at an anonymous hotel, filled with disparate characters; it too tried to say things but was muddled about it; it too conveyed a chill that made caring about the people in the film, and the film itself, difficult.

Youth is a handsomely mounted work, with quality performances by several veteran actors. But it’s the sort of movie that makes one want to see something corny and sentimental, just to feel better.