Based on Sorrentino’s memories of growing up in Naples during the 1980s, The Hand of God is full of scenes and images that seem to tear off from everyday life: a nighttime traffic jam in the Piazza del Plebiscito, reminiscent in its eerie silence of the dream sequence that opens Federico Fellini’s 8½; a woman in a leotard twirling a hula hoop up from her ankles to her neck while playing castanets and chewing bubble gum; an apocryphal sighting of Diego Maradona, the world’s most celebrated footballer, behind the wheel of a BMW. Such shards of spectacle for spectacle’s sake are the linchpins of the film.
Fabietto (Filippo Scotti), a teenager with an eye for the miraculous, leads a carefree life among his family of eccentrics. His father, Saverio (Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo), despite professing to be a communist, works for the Bank of Naples, and his mother, Maria (Teresa Saponangelo), shows both affection and displeasure for others through practical jokes. Fabietto’s brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), an aspiring actor, auditions for a part in the latest Fellini film but is deemed insufficiently carnivalesque, and as the butt of an amusing running gag, their sister, Daniela (Rossella Di Lucca), is always in the bathroom.
Such as it is, the film’s plot is languid and meandering, unfolding linearly but structured more as an assemblage of memories than a chain reaction of events. Thanks to Sorrentino’s willingness to linger on moments that, while extraneous to plot development, stand out from the routine, The Hand of God transcends its coming-of-age and period-piece scaffolding, never becoming too treacly or navel-gazing. These moments are often announced by tracking shots that follow the roving eye of young Fabietto or detach and float away at the filmmaker’s whim.
Unlike The Great Beauty, which was notable for its eclectic soundtrack, The Hand of God features almost no music, even though Fabietto is often seen wearing a headset and listening to music that we don’t hear. As such, The Hand of God dispenses with the near-ubiquitous trope in period dramas of stuffing the soundtrack with era-specific pop hits. The viewer hardly notices the absence, as the film’s sumptuous images, bathed in the chatter and noise of Neapolitan life, stand up without need of music to signal the mood of a given scene.
The Hand of God, though, is hampered by its over-sexualization of women’s bodies, above all that of Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), the focus of Fabietto’s burgeoning sexuality. If this weren’t already an established pattern in Sorrentino’s films, it might, from a pedantic point of view, be possible to overlook here. It could be part and parcel of Daria D’Antonio’s sensual camerawork, or an honest, even self-critical recreation of Sorrentino’s own attitudes at the time. The film’s treatment of those attitudes isn’t entirely lacking in nuance, for instance, when Saverio’s womanizing nearly splits the family, or when Fabietto shows sympathy for Patrizia by visiting her after she’s institutionalized by her husband, Marco (Massimiliano Gallo), for being a “whore.” At the very least, Sorrentino appears to understand that the men who stare at her, just as the camera does, project this hypersexuality onto her.
But none of this offsets the strong impression that The Hand of God is tacitly addressing a masculine, heterosexual audience with so many gratuitous shots, which can start to feel like unwanted winks and nudges. Sorrentino chose to make an autobiographical film, rehashing a perspective that’s dominated filmmaking from the outset, instead of taking advantage of fiction to imagine life from a point of view not essentially his own. It’s hard to shake the feeling that Sorrentino’s attitudes in this regard haven’t really shifted since the ’80s.
Catholicism plays a muted role in The Hand of God, despite its title. Still, a central theme is that of the miracle, whether dispensed by God or coincidence. In a pivotal scene, Fabietto’s secular family, which worships Maradona more than God, gathers on a balcony to watch a broadcast of the 1986 World Cup match between England and Argentina. Maradona scores the first goal, causing the family to erupt into ecstatic cheers along with their neighbors. Moments later, the announcer reveals that Maradona touched the ball with his hand (though the referee failed to see it, allowing the goal to stand) and the family’s enthusiasm deflates.
Maradona later attributed the goal to the hand of God. Here and throughout the film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable. It’s precisely this duality of the miraculous, shaded by its opposite, that imbues the film’s most arresting images. For instance, Maria juggles oranges to impress at a family gathering, but after Saverio’s affair comes to light, she juggles in the kitchen, alone, with a terrible desperation.
Similarly, Fabietto’s parents manage to overcome Saverio’s transgression after Maria scares him half to death with a prank involving a man in a bear suit, but after traveling to their newly finished home in Roccaraso, they die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Robbed of his parents by the hand of God, the young man decides to leave Naples for Rome to pursue his filmmaking ambitions at the end of the film. His departure underlines that The Hand of God, from its opening helicopter shot, which sweeps in from the sea to caress the Lungomare coastal promenade before turning back to the water, is nothing if not a love letter from Sorrentino to the city of his youth, where miracle and tragedy converge.
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