OVP: Pinocchio (2020)

Film: Pinocchio (2020)

Stars: Federico Ielapi, Roberto Benigni, Gigi Proietti, Rocco Papaleo, Massimo Ceccherini, Marine Vacth

Director: Matteo Garrone

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

This has been a weird awards season in general.  Virtually every one of the nominated films (save one, for me) I saw at my house.  All of the awards shows are being done via Skype or Zoom, with us seeing the meticulous (occasionally monotonous) design of the houses of the nominated stars.  And of course, it was a longer awards season than usual, with us stretching across a calendar year for the first time since 1933.  But if we want to talk about the weirdest moment for me in cinema in the past 365 days, it would be the fact that we got another Pinocchio starring Roberto Benigni.  For those of you too young to know this, Roberto Benigni made a major splash at the 1998 Oscars, winning Best Actor & Best Foreign Language Film for Life is Beautiful (a movie I love, and others don't, and that's okay-we don't all have to agree on movies).  Benigni had a huge backlash to his win (as people thought it was "too much") and got his comeuppance with Pinocchio, his followup film that was roasted by critics (it had a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes), and essentially ended his career.  Benigni has in the 20 years since only directed one film (The Tiger and the Snow, which didn't get so much as a peep from the American press despite his fame), and other than a key part in Woody Allen's To Rome with Love, has basically been absent from the press.  So when it was announced that there was not only a new iteration of Pinocchio out, but that Benigni was one of its stars, I honestly thought that 2020 had melted my brain or I was having a Mandela Effect...because we'd already done this before.  But this is real, and in perhaps the greatest vindication for Benigni, it is a movie that won him a trip back to the Oscars, as the film's costumes & makeup are both cited for tonight's ceremony.

(Spoilers Ahead...though seriously, you don't know the story of Pinocchio?) You know the story of Pinocchio, if not from the classic novel by Carlo Collodi than certainly from the Disney-animated feature from 1940, for my money the best film Disney has ever made. It's a beautiful story about a young puppet named Pinocchio (Ielapi) who is brought to life through the love of a lonely carpenter named Geppetto (Benigni), and who then runs away, going on a series of adventures as he attempts to become a real boy.  The film brings many of the figures we know by heart, including the Blue Fairy, the Fox-and-Cat, and the Talking Cricket (in the Disney tale, he's of course Jiminy Cricket, which is a much different take on the character than how he's portrayed in the film & book, where their relationship is adversarial).  In the end, Pinocchio & Geppetto are reunited, with him now a real boy.

I will admit that while I lived through the Benigni controversy, I did so more through the pages of Entertainment Weekly (if you're an old enough cinephile, you'll remember basically running to your library or mailbox on Tuesday morning's to grab that week's EW, your bible of information for the coming week...or maybe this was just my brother & I).  I have never in the years since seen the film, and while I think it'd be interesting to try (I might watch it just for comparison/context when we get to the 2002 OVP), all I know about that film in relation to this movie is that Benigni plays the puppet in the 2002 film, rather than the carpenter here.

Benigni adds a fun flare to this movie (again, I generally liked him even if he's outlandish), but the movie itself doesn't quite work.  The picture is visually compelling, with the characters meant to be both elaborate and grotesque, hyper realistic makeup that creates feats not just like a young boy made of wood, but also real-life figures playing the Cricket or the gigantic Snail maid.  But it doesn't have enough running through the story, there's not enough there for the young Pinocchio to really keep your attention, and it does feel like it's leaning too heavily into the prosthetics as a plot point.  The Makeup is extraordinary, and would make a worthy winner if that's the direction Oscar wants to go tonight as it courts the line between most-and-best with tact, but it's not a good movie.  The costumes are appropriately impressive, though here I'm not quite as intrigued, as the design work is more reliant on past iterations of Pinocchio (with a solid amount of detailing, particularly in the Blue Fairy), but not as much originality as you'd hope for from a surprise Oscar nominee.  Kudos, though, to Roberto Benigni, who through this film's success finally got to have absolution from his 2002 debacle.