Summary
The Big Fake is a derivative crime movie that is hamstrung with a two-dimensional, unlikeable lead and a distracting sense of familiarity.
It’s often easy to see how someone could be lured by a life of crime. The upsides are pretty considerable, after all, at least in the short term. But if the movies have taught us anything, it’s that those upsides are temporary. Nobody ever comes out clean. So, the lure has to be strong enough; whoever falls into the trap has to have a good enough reason. The big issue with Netflix’s so-so Italian forgery thriller The Big Fake is that its protagonist, Pietro Castellitto’s Toni, simply can’t wait to get in over his head.
Stefano Lodovichi directs a screenplay by Lorenzo Bagnotori and Sandro Petraglia that is ostensibly based on a true story, but gets this key aspect dead wrong. When we meet Toni, he and his best friends, priest Vittorio (Andrea Arcangeli) and worker Fabione (Pierluigi Gigante), are simple enough dudes planning to leave their provincial background to make their fortunes in Rome. But the next time we see Toni in the big city, he’s already a charismatic conman churning out indistinguishably accurate duplicates of famous (and very expensive) paintings. There’s no arc. His “dreams” of being an artist instead of a mere copycat are thinly sketched, only cursorily acknowledged, and as soon as he realizes that forgery is a more lucrative market, he abandons them completely.
Toni ends up in over his head pretty much immediately, and you can’t feel sorry for him because it’s clearly what he wanted. His complete lack of self-preservation and motorised blabbermouth aren’t conducive to a long life in the underworld. His curious talent for replication, which quickly extends beyond artwork to forged signatures on very large checks, is so unexamined that it becomes uninteresting. It just is, as much an innate part of him as the tendency to leap headlong into one dangerously stupid situation after another.
The Big Fake is backdropped by real-world political events, notably the kidnapping of Italian politician Aldo Moro by the far-left Marxist-Leninist militant group the Red Brigades. Toni is retained to forge propaganda, pushing the extremist political cause, but his personal rejection of partisan politics – “I’m for whoever helps me live well,” he says at one point – bleeds into the entire movie. It’s a determinedly apolitical stance in what should be a politically charged movie. Toni’s belief that he can continuously act exclusively in his own self-interest, regardless of whom he upsets by doing so, smacks of a naivete that makes him off-putting and two-dimensional.
But by this point, thanks largely to a pacing issue, Toni’s already in too deep either way. An ostensibly regular guy hanging out with a criminal element for fun, and realising too late that it isn’t what he signed up for, is nothing new, but is typically more gradual than this. One of Toni’s very first encounters with crime takes a murderous turn that he’s complicit in, which should have been evidence enough that he and the woman who becomes his girlfriend, Donata (Aurora Giovinazzo), were in pretty considerable danger. But this is where Toni’s association with criminality starts. My heart doesn’t bleed for him, and his willingness to get more and more involved undermines a very loose thematic idea that he’s stuck between a rock and a hard place with no clear-cut options.
The third act of The Big Fake finds the movie at its best, with clearer personal stakes and a fun heist to pull off, which even returns, finally, to Toni’s supposed aims of becoming a real artist. But it’s too little too late and doesn’t last especially long, not to mention being derivative of so many other movies that it’s difficult to keep count. Final turns hinging on Toni’s lapsed morality don’t land, since he never seemed especially moral in the first place, and ultimately, you’re unlikely to care enough about him to be concerned about whether he makes it out alive.
Still, at least it looks really nice.
RELATED:
