And so lacking a true subject or thematic direction, he turns inward, focusing on his emptiness (which out of vanity he mistakes for depth) and his suffering, most of which is self-inflicted. Guido is dried up as an artist, and spent as a man. Loaded with self-referential detail, '8 1/2' is the director's self-mocking chronicle of his inability to come up with a worthy subject for his next film. Never again was Fellini as successful as he was here in his use of film as a theater for soul-searching. Yet, still, what beautiful mannerisms, what lyricism and romance.

What we just barely tolerate in this chronologically numbered, blatantly autobiographical opus is the shamelessly overluscious 'Italian-ness' of it - the priests and the nuns, all that symbolism and emotionalism and chicly weary self-absorption - a trait that through the lead character of Guido, his alter ego and filmmaker without a clue, Fellini parodies with one brush stroke and indulges with the next.Īlso on this list of negatives is his sentimentality, and his tendency to substitute his trademark mannerisms - his auteur's stamp - for true substance, and cover his deficiencies with his astounding sense of visual lyricism and romance. He'd hit on something fundamental, not just about '8½' but about all of Fellini - that he is that rare sort of artist who can be loved, revered and just barely tolerated, all at the same time. Recognize, as if he had to squint and put on his glasses.Īnd yet MacDonald's grudging faint praise isn't merely a case of critical distemper. 'Fellini has made a movie,' he wrote, 'that I can't see any way not to recognize as a masterpiece.' And he used the term 'masterpiece' as if it set his ornery teeth on edge. Of course, MacDonald intended for 'obvious' to serve a double meaning.

In 1964, when Dwight MacDonald reviewed Federico Fellini's '8½' for Esquire, he called it the Italian maestro's 'obvious masterpiece.' Today, as the film approaches its 30th anniversary with a spanky new 35mm print, that evaluation still sounds about right - perhaps even more so than when '8½' was first released.

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