Youth is a challenging if seriously flawed new film from Italian wunderkind Paolo Sorrentino, winner of the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for 2013's The Great Beauty. Your impression of it will depend on your tolerance for high-flown speeches, even when emanating from unusually talented lips.
The film is set in a luxurious Alpine Swiss resort, which appears to cater to a mix of hyper-ambitious young revelers and a sadder if wiser collection of older souls searching for a literal fountain of you-know-what. Sorrentino is an actor's director, allowing his players to shine in circumstances that, in less sure hands, might appear downright risible. He gives arguably the best young American actor of his generation, Paul Dano, a speech that in a different context might seem embarrassingly pretentious. Dano plays Jimmy Tree, a conceptual actor-artist whose claim to fame is impersonating a robot on screen. Like other guests at the resort, Dano's Jimmy Tree is at an awkward career/life crossroads: "I have to choose what is really worth telling, horror or desire? And I choose desire. You, each one of you, you opened my eyes, you made me see that I should not be wasting my time on senseless fear."
Tree's remarks are inspired by and directed at a pair of the resort's older guests: a great composer, Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine); and a talented film writer, Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel). While Fred has thrown in the towel, refusing to tap his muse despite pleas from adult daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz), Mick is desperately anxious to pop one more out for his love, Brenda (Jane Fonda). Youth, if it's about anything, represents the late stirrings of the male ego �" in this case, a guy accustomed to success who wants to go out on a hit.
In 1998, Woody Allen rounded up 27 pretty faces/terrific actors for a B&W outing he called Celebrity. The film stank of all the bad choices I sense from Youth, except for one incendiary sequence where a then-24-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio seductively bullied the film's Woody stand-in, British Shakespearean star Kenneth Branagh. Leo was dazzling in his emasculation of the older actor, and for exactly 10 minutes the movie sparkled. As soon as Leo left the screen the conceit evaporated and turned back into one of the worst Allen films in the post-Mia Farrow era.
In Youth, whenever Caine, Dano and Keitel hold forth I'm engaged, even if it's not really my kind of movie. The three both articulate and represent a dialogue about life and art that dates back to the Greeks. When they're gone it's as if someone flipped off a switch: the juice is missing.
Art, the great secular religion of today's chattering classes, is a most fickle entity. It's easy for those of us on the sidelines to urge life's "one-trick-ponies" to quit before they embarrass themselves. But even certified genius-level practitioners can stumble badly. As hard as certain patches of Youth were, I'm grateful I saw it, and I urge my readers to take a plunge into this charged if shallow pool. You may come away muttering, but I bet the conversations generated in your head, or better yet with friends, bloggers and water-cooler mates, will be worth it.
Also, in a year when the Oscar buzz is likely to include Jane Fonda (for Youth) and Paul Dano (for his astonishing turn as the young Brian Wilson in Love and Mercy ), Youth is a great opportunity to catch an amazing young film actor at the height of his powers.