Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

Reality Blu-ray Movie Review

Reality Italian Style

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 23, 2013

Alongside Il Divo director Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone is perhaps the most compelling voice in contemporary Italian cinema. His previous feature, 2008's widely acclaimed Gomorrah—a gritty drama about his country's modern crime problems—is often cited by critics as evidence of a Neo-Realism revival. But Garrone refuses to be pigeonholed. Despite its title, his new feature, Reality, is far more Fellini than Rossellini, with darkly baroque comedy, an uneasy dreaminess, and a poison-dipped satirical spear point that pokes holes in both the highs and lows of Italian culture. At its core, it's a great character study, following a man so determined to be cast on the Italian version of the reality show Big Brother that the reality of his own life recedes inside a mist of paranoia and obsession.

Reality TV may be an easy target for satire, but Garrone avoids taking the cheap and obvious shots, preferring to examine what it is that makes these types of television shows so addicting—the potential for 15-minute fame they offer their contestants, and the escapism they provide their audiences. Adding a layer of thematic texture to the film is that fact its star, Aniello Arena, is a former mobster currently serving a life sentence in prison for his involvement in the murder of three rival mafioso. To give himself something to do, he began performing in the prison theatre troupe, which is how he met Garrone. Casting an imprisoned man as a free man who wants desperately to be imprisoned inside a house where he's constantly being monitored is a deft postmodern touch, but it wouldn't work were Arena not such a charismatic and genuinely talented performer. The young DeNiro/Pacino vibe is strong with this one. (Though he bears more of a resemblance to Sylvester Stallone.)

The film opens with a dazzling aerial shot over southern Italy that slowly zooms in on a gilded, storybook carriage anachronistically pulled by high- stepping horses down the street and through the opulent gates of what can only be described as a wedding theme park, where couples release doves, take photos in front of an artificial waterfall, and celebrate in faux Renaissance-era great halls. In this plasticky, Disney-fied fantasy space, Garrone is already calling attention to our collective, largely unfulfillable desire to have lives grander and more consequential than our own. It's here that we meet the working class Luciano (Arena), a Naples fishmonger and the avuncular family clown, always playing a joke or acting out.

He clearly enjoys being the life of the party. At the wedding he's attending, he dresses up in drag for the reception to do a comedy routine, and he manages to attract the attention of the former Big Brother contestant Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante), a minor celebrity who's been hired to make an appearance and give a toast to the bride and groom. Later, when Big Brother auditions are being held at the local shopping mall—which is just as soulless and inauthentic as the wedding park—Luciano's wife (Loredana Simioli) and kids convince him to try out, if only for kicks. Unexpectedly, he gets called back for a second audition in Rome. While the other hopefuls only get fifteen minutes in front of the panelists, Luciano's interview takes a full hour, leading him to believe he's a serious contender. It's only a matter of time until he gets the call, he thinks, and when he returns home, Naples prematurely celebrates its soon-to-be-famous son.

And so the waiting game begins. Luciano holds on to this hope, and more so, lets it completely override his heretofore blue collar life. Where once he was a lowly fish salesman—who also ran a sketchy black-market racket selling and stealing robotic kitchen appliances—he now acts like he's already famous, basking in the compliments thrown to him by clients and the kid behind the coffee counter. His wife is wary that he's getting ahead of himself, and his deeply religious best friend and business partner (Nando Paone) sees him as making an idol of fame, but Luciano is convinced that at any second his phone could ring with good news.

But then the new season of the show starts without him. And this is when Reality goes from being a simple comedy about a fool to being a psychological portrait of desperation and obsession. Rather than give up the dream, Luciano allows himself to think that the show's producers are merely testing him, watching him from afar to evaluate whether he should be one of "two new contestants with incredible stories" who will be added in the coming weeks. His behavior becomes erratic and bizarrely saint-like—but with less-than-saintly motivation—as he takes to giving away his worldly possessions, believing this might impress the show's producers.

Garrone is less interested in satirizing reality television itself than he is in pointing it out as a sign of a culture newly unmoored from tradition and adrift in a sea of meaninglessness. Throughout the film he pits old against new. The cobblestone piazza in Naples versus the glossy shopping mall. The solemnity of a Catholic service versus the sham communion of watching TV together as a family. He seems to be saying that our modern cultural rituals point to nothing, say nothing, mean nothing, predicated on spectacle and brain-dulling comfort instead of a need to make order in the world and find purpose within it. "Reality," then, becomes an increasingly slippery term as Luciano spirals further into his imagined inner world of delusion and desire.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Reality arrives on Blu-ray—courtesy of Oscilloscope Laboratories—with a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that gets everything right. This might not be the sharpest or most vibrant image you'll see this summer, but it's very clearly true to both source and intent. Shot on 35mm, the film's somewhat chunky grain structure is fully intact and unmodified, untouched by digital noise reduction, edge enhancement, or other types of filtering. The encode is solid too, with no major compression issues—no banding, splotchiness, macroblocking—or glitches. (I did notice some moire/aliasing on the fine parallel lines of the rooftops during the opening aerial shot, but that's about it.) The heaviness of the grain does cut into overall clarity a little—compared to finer grained films shot equivalently—but the organic-looking picture still displays lots of fine detail in faces, clothing, and other in-focus areas of the frame. The slightly pushed color grading works well too—everything is slightly warmer and richer than reality—while contrast and skin tones are kept balanced. There are no real distractions here; Reality is a pleasure to watch.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Oscilloscope gives us two audio options here, the default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track and an uncompressed Linear PCM 2.0 stereo mix-down, both in the film's native Italian. The highlight here is the wonderful score by acclaimed composer Alexandre Desplat (The Tree of Life, Zero Dark Thirty, The King's Speech), which sounds great—full, dynamic, and clear—and complements rather than overpowers the film's emotional tone. In front of this you'll hear a good amount of rear-channel ambience—falling rain, fish market clamor, pounding nightclub music—along with occasional cross-speaker effects, like Enzo's helicopter taking off. Dialogue is central, though, and it's always clear and at the front of the mix. The disc includes English and French subtitles, which appear in bright yellow lettering.

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (HD, 1:32, 1:17, 00:39, 3:21): Four short deleted scenes, including an extended Big Brother sequence that serves as a kind of epilogue.
• New Interview with Matteo Garrone (HD, 23:49): A fantastic interview with the film's director, who explains how he wanted to make a different sort of film after Gomorrah, how the story came together, working with Alexander Desplat, and the film's thematic undercurrents.
• Dreams Are My Reality (HD, 19:49): A collection of behind-the-scenes B-roll footage.
• Inside Reality (HD, 9:01): A featurette about the production of the score, the location scouting, and the special effects.
• Profile of Aniello Arena (HD, 13:17): A look into the life and career of actor and felon Aniello Arena.
• Trailer (HD, 2:30)

Reality Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Reality may lack the scope and hard-edged realism of Matteo Garrone's last film—Gomorrah—but it's no less observant about the changes and contradictions of modern, culturally adrift Italian life. It's at once a social satire, a perceptive character study, and an existential inquiry into what it means to live well, and it solidly maintains Garrone's reputation as one of the most interesting filmmakers working in Italy today. Oscilloscope's Blu-ray release is the ideal way to way the film; the audio/video quality is excellent, the disc includes some fantastic extras—including a 20-minute interview with the director—and it all comes in one of Oscilloscope's characteristically gorgeous fold-out cardboard packages. Highly recommended!