124 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Roadside Attractions
Matteo Garrone strips the Disney varnish off Collodi and returns Pinocchio to its grim Italian roots. A wooden boy lies, wanders, and suffers for it at the hands of con men and worse. This is a fairy tale with the cruelty left in.
Geppetto, a poor woodcarver, carves a puppet from a talking log. The puppet comes to life as a boy who cannot stop lying or running off. Garrone adapts Carlo Collodi’s novel and refuses the sentimental version. The film is about a child who has to be repeatedly punished into becoming human. It treats childhood as a gauntlet of predators and bad decisions rather than a wonderland.
Federico Ielapi plays Pinocchio under layers of wood-grain prosthetic makeup and still finds a real child underneath. Roberto Benigni plays Geppetto with a restraint that surprises anyone who remembers his usual mugging. He plays the woodcarver as a tired, tender old man rather than a clown. Massimo Ceccherini and Rocco Papaleo play the Fox and the Cat as a pair of mangy con artists working every mark in sight. Gigi Proietti gives the puppet master Mangiafuoco a sudden flash of mercy that cuts against his menace. Marine Vacth plays the Blue Fairy as a calm, sad presence who keeps rescuing a boy who refuses to learn.
Garrone and co-writer Massimo Ceccherini build the world out of practical effects instead of digital gloss. The creature design leans on prosthetics, animatronics, and costuming, so the talking cricket and the half-animal con men carry physical weight in every frame. The camera shoots the Tuscan countryside in dusty, sun-bleached tones that keep the magic earthbound. The makeup turns actors into convincing hybrids of human and animal without burying their eyes. The production design looks like a storybook illustration that has been left out in the weather.
The film moves in episodes, and the stitching between them shows. Pinocchio escapes one danger and stumbles into the next with little connective tissue. The grimness is the point, but it flattens the back half into a string of trials. What lingers is the texture. Garrone delivers a Pinocchio that feels old, strange, and a little frightening, the way the story was before it got cleaned up for children.