Still, when this elderly, bedraggled woodworker joyfully crows to his neighbors, “I have a son,” it somehow feels beyond creepy.īut Pinocchio has a mind of his own - how he knows and speaks as much as he does after coming to life is just another curious conceit - and soon finds himself separated from Geppetto and bouncing from one garish misadventure to another. ![]() The result is a life-size, walking-talking boy Geppetto names Pinocchio (Federico Ielapi), and they become instant parent and child. Set in the hardscrabble 19th-century Italian countryside, the movie finds the lonely, impoverished Geppetto (what he’s been doing his entire life we never learn, but, y’know, just go with it) inspired to carve a puppet out of a log that, unbeknownst to him, has magical properties. If it adheres more closely to the original text than some other adaptations, particularly Disney’s 1940 animated classic (where’s “When You Wish Upon a Star” when you need it?), the film remains mostly a picaresque obstacle course stacked with get-out-of-jail-free cards for our intrepid wooden friend. But in that widely panned retelling, the Oscar winner (“Life is Beautiful”), then around 50, preposterously played the title character (as well as directing) and not famed cobbler Geppetto, as he quite deftly does here.ĭirector Garrone, no stranger to grotesque imagery - his award-winning 2015 horror-fantasy “Tale of Tales” popped with it - has leaned into the beloved fable’s dark and unsettling elements, sprinkling it with touches of Fellini, Gilliam and Lewis Carroll. ![]() But they made it anyway and you could do worse - and probably have if you saw the 2002 version which, like this new film, also stars Roberto Benigni. Did we really need yet another screen iteration of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s book about the miraculous wooden boy with the nose that grows? If this latest stab at “Pinocchio” from Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone is any indication, the answer is no, not really.
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