La misa ha terminado

I came to Nanni Moretti from his wise and witty later movies _Caro Diario_ and _The Son's Room_. So in _La Messa_ I was surprised to see a bitter, angry, and quite selfish Moretti in the role of a suburban priest who seems--much like the psychoanalyst of _The Son's Room_--utterly incapable of helping those who put themselves in his care.

There's lots to like in this movie: the somewhat decrepit but nonetheless lovely settings around Rome, the nods to other great Italian movies (Moretti, in his cassock, playing soccer with the school kids, calls to mind Rossellini's _Rome, Open City_), the intense and largely convincing story. I found particularly compelling a courtroom confrontation involving a judge, a defendant, and Moretti's priest as a witness. I was, on the whole, moved by Moretti's take on the priest's dealings with his brothers-in-arms from what were presumably their days as leftist activists.

On a final note, people are always comparing Moretti to Woody Allen. I don't see why. Their movies have almost nothing in common. I have never seen Allen as anything more than a second-rate standup comic, or as a caricature. Moretti, on the other hand, is a human being.