Six months from the end of a successful presidency, the Italian statesman Mariano De Santis sits opposite his daughter, a talented attorney in her own right, and tears a proposed law to shreds. Slashing through its pages with a marker like a hunter hatcheting his way through the jungle, the aging politician demands another round of edits and clarifications on a controversial bill legalizing euthanasia in his country.
Cut, revise, delete. “Clarify agony,” he demands. Exhausted by her father’s indecision, Dorotea has repeatedly urged him to approve the law, but De Santis, a devout Catholic and friend of the pope, has procrastinated for months while wrestling with his morality (or mortality) and dreaming of home.
“If I don’t sign the bill, then I’m a torturer. If I do sign it, then I’m a murderer,” explains the conflicted president. Dorotea proposes the fundamental question: “Who owns our days?”
Among the most distinctive talents in modern Italian cinema, the Oscar-winning director Paolo Sorrentino returns with “La Grazia,” the stylized portrait of a “gray, boring man of the law” haunted by the death of his wife and pensive about his legacy in a changing nation. Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo won the Volpi Cup at the Venice Film Festival for his sensitive portrayal of a grief-stricken politician who cannot make up his mind.
A sturdy and unflappable presence on the world stage, his years in office have fashioned him a great Italian monument. He bristles at the moniker “Reinforced Concrete,” a testament to his steely resolve, yes, but also suggestive of a certain iciness, an unemotional and distant quality. “Your father is indestructible,” says the president’s eccentric friend Coco to his daughter. But a moody De Santis feels “useless” and “worn out,” by his own admission. Music (Italian rap, to be exact) helps him relax, but prayer puts him to sleep, he complains. He is consumed by thoughts of his late wife and obsessed by the memory of an affair she had with someone else—he’s not sure who—40 years ago. It is no wonder he often appears shadowed or half-obscured by darkness.
De Santis has tasked his daughter with reviewing the legal merits of two clemency petitions before the conclusion of his term. One potential pardon concerns Isa Rocca, imprisoned for stabbing her allegedly abusive husband more than a dozen times. When Dorotea meets with her in prison, the woman defends her actions and says she liberated her spouse from his chronic sickness. “It was euthanasia,” she claims, tauntingly. Cristiano Arpa, despondent in jail after strangling his wife, asserts that Alzheimer’s made her prone to violent outbursts—and that he killed her out of love.
Sorrentino is only the most recent director to wade into the thorny topic of euthanasia, explored in his film through the unsettled conscience and competing allegiances of an elder statesman. Other notable examples include Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” and Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Sea Inside,” which chronicled the decades-long effort by Spanish writer Ramón Sampedro to end his life after becoming paralyzed from a diving accident at age 25.
A U.K.-based campaign that supports euthanasia laws notes that some “300 million people around the world have legal access to assisted dying.” Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Columbia, Cuba, Ecuador and nine European countries have legalized some form of assisted dying. Twelve U.S. states, plus Washington, D.C., have passed M.A.I.D. (medical aid in dying) laws as of late December.
On Dec. 16, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Catholic, announced that she would sign an assisted dying bill allowing some terminally ill patients to end their lives after obtaining permission from at least three physicians. (The bill also requires a five-day “waiting period” during which a patient may change course.) Citing her mother’s difficult death from A.L.S., the governor said she understood the objections of some faithful to the bill, but she believes the decision to die is a matter of personal liberty.
“I was taught that God is merciful and compassionate, and so we must be,” wrote the governor in an essay published Dec. 17 in the Albany Times Union. “This includes permitting a merciful option to those facing the unimaginable and searching for comfort in their final months.” In a joint statement, Catholic bishops in New York wrote that Governor Hochul’s decision was “extremely troubling” and that it represents “our government’s abandonment of its most vulnerable citizens.”
The Catholic Church has used the strongest possible terms to describe euthanasia and assisted dying as affronts against the dignity of human life. In Sorrentino’s film, a fictional pontiff asserts that De Santis will never sign “that law of death.” The Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith released a lengthy letter in 2020 reaffirming the Catholic obligation “to protect the life of patients in the most critical stages of sickness” and expressly prohibiting euthanasia as a crime against “the sacred and inviolable gift” of human life.
“Euthanasia is an act of homicide that no end can justify and that does not tolerate any form of complicity or active or passive collaboration,” reads the letter, published during the pontificate of Pope Francis. “Those who approve laws of euthanasia and assisted suicide, therefore, become accomplices of a grave sin that others will execute.” As the World Medical Association convened to discuss end-of-life topics in late 2017, Pope Francis told the president of the Pontifical Academy of Life that Catholics need not adopt “overzealous treatment” to sustain the life of a dying person, but that euthanasia is always impermissible.
Such stark pronouncements, however, have not cooled disagreements. A bill legalizing assisted dying for some terminally ill patients in England and Wales remains under consideration by British lawmakers. In September, it was the subject of debate in the House of Lords, where former British prime minister Theresa May dubbed it a “license to kill” and past Health Minister Glenys Thornton argued that respecting the dignity of human life should not force “terminally ill people to undergo a distressing and painful death against their will.” When the bill cleared the House of Commons in June, Archbishop John Sherrington of Liverpool condemned the legislation and urged improvements in palliative care as providing “the best pathway to reducing suffering at the end of life.”
And in the United States, the Illinois state legislature approved an assisted dying bill just last month; Gov. JB Pritzker signed it on Dec. 12. Pope Leo, who was born in Illinois, expressed his disappointment with the governor and said he had spoken directly with Pritzker about not signing the bill.
Considering opposing viewpoints from his daughter and the (fictional) Holy Father, President De Santis makes his choice in the end, but maintains doubt about his decision. This is grace, he claims—the ability to sit with uncertainty.
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