The new movie by Paolo Sorrentino, this year's Oscar and Golden Globe winner for best foreign film, is his fifth to star Servillo but the first to have a release here outside festivals.
Servillo, whose titanic performance anchored Il Divo, the director's dizzyingly operatic portrait of Giulio Andreotti, is a
recognised elder statesman of the Italian stage. And he is the central figure here in a rapturous, sumptuous, decadent and ultimately desperately sad fantasia about life in contemporary Rome.
In a performance at once superficial and soulful, he plays Jep Gambardella, a once-celebrated journalist now nearing retirement. Gambardella wrote a novel in his 20s that may have been a masterpiece or pretentious twaddle - we are never sure which.
He is the ultimate man about town: his rooftop terrace, which overlooks the Colosseum, is the site of all-night parties where people say things like "the Ethiopian jazz scene is the only interesting one nowadays". But behind the host's fixed smile is pain at the loss of a young love, which the film keeps flashing back to.
As he moves through his daily life - which is represented as a series of sybaritic set-pieces - Sorrentino allows past and present to overlap and commingle: reality, memory and fantasy become indistinguishable in the life of a man whose search for the title's grande bellezza has arrived at the conclusion - which he announces in a shocking, crucial scene - that "we are all on the brink of despair".
