Life and death dilemmas in La Grazia

LA Grazia

Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
2025.

Believing that all human life is sacred – all are made in God’s image and Christ died for all – I embrace “a consistent life ethic,” from womb-to-tomb. I question the death penalty, abortion, war and euthanasia while supporting adequate incomes, healthy food, good housing, accessible health care and protecting the vulnerable. The challenge is how to talk respectfully and listen with reverence to friends, loved ones and relatives, not to mention congregants, on all sides of these issues.

Pressure points

MAID controversies currently raise provocative uncertainties in Canada. I was helped in my thinking about this by La Grazia (“The Grace”), one of the most beautiful and moving films I have seen in years.

La Grazia is about a fictional Italian president, Mariano de Santis, in the final months of his term, just prior to retiring. Much loved because he helped the country avoid a crisis (unspecified in the film), he’s also an accomplished jurist, having written a 2046-page tome on Italian law. His reputation for being dispassionate earned him the nickname “Reinforced Concrete.” De Santis is a devout Catholic who prays regularly, even though that causes him to fall asleep. He regularly consults with his friend the Vespa-riding, ear-ringed and dreadlocked Pope.

The slow-moving account is lovely to watch, with scenic Italian landscape photography, and astonishingly ornate and regal settings that reflect the importance of the president’s office and reinforce the weightiness of tradition. There are sly moments of humour too, highlighted by subtle smiles and sideways glances.

De Santis is pressured, before retiring, to sign into law a bill that allows euthanasia. He is also asked to grant pardons to two people who killed their spouses: a woman who murdered her abuser and a senior who ended the life of his wife with dementia. People near him keep demanding a decision. But he finds it is impossible to know the truth. In the midst of it all, he feels deeply fatigued and isolated. He does not like drama or high-stakes emotions, preferring to stay safe. Viewers are given access to his internal thoughts, especially his deep love for his deceased wife and, at the same time, his lingering anger at her long-ago infidelity.

Through a series of encounters – including the prolonged death of his beloved horse – he overcomes his judge’s instinct to keep his distance and wants to try to see the truth up close. At one point, he makes a stunning decision to visit a convicted murderer in prison, first joining poor folk in the waiting room, all of them obviously anguished.

The ‘third way’

Without revealing how de Santis decides the issues or whether I agree with his final but reluctant verdicts, I simply note what spoke loudly to me as I think about hot-button issues. He laments that in euthanasia conundrums one can automatically be labelled either a “torturer” by one side or a “murderer” by the other. That sounds familiar when I consider the hazards of stepping into contemporary controversies trying to navigate “third way” perspectives, yet immediately being written off or dismissed.

An excellent question is posed by several characters in the film: “Who owns our days?” I would put that in conversation with our beloved Psalm 139’s sentiment: “In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.”

This film shows one person’s slow journey into deeper empathy and caring, a journey toward a deeper understanding and experience of mercy and grace, even freedom – a movement that edifies all.