MOVIE REVIEW : ‘The Great Pumpkin’: Fresh Walk on Familiar Turf

Francesca Archibugi’s “The Great Pumpkin” (at the AMC Century 14 daily at 10 a.m. only for one week), Italy’s official entry in the Oscars, is a lovely, low-key study of a dedicated doctor (Sergio Castellitto) and his troubled 12-year-old patient (Alessia Fugardi). We’ve seen such stories countless times before, but Archibugi brings to its telling a consistent freshness.

As in her earlier “By Nightfall,” in which Marcello Mastroianni’s staid, solitary professor is shaken up by his hippie-like daughter-in-law (Sandrine Bonnaire), Archibugi is particularly acute at illuminating relationships between two solitary individuals of different generations.

Castellitto’s Arturo is a thirty-something workaholic, recently appointed chief of the children’s neuropsychiatric ward in Rome’s rundown general hospital. Like doctors everywhere, he sees so much need and so little in resources. His dedication to his work, his fascination with the mysteries of mental illness, has so absorbed him that his wife has left him. His job has so completely consumed him that if he could get away with it he’d simply live at the hospital.

(Arturo is based on an actual doctor, Marco Lombardo Radice, who in the ‘70s and ‘80s pioneered in Italy a non-drug approach to treating disturbed children. The film’s title refers both to the “Peanuts” comic strip in which Linus is searching for “The Great Pumpkin” and, rather oddly, to a progressive movement in psychology in Italy.)

One day a beautiful woman, Cinthya (Anna Galiena, the prostitute in “Jamon, Jamon”) comes to his clinic in despair over her equally beautiful daughter Pippi (Fugardi), who from age 3 months has experienced frequent and intense seizures, which have long ago been diagnosed as epilepsy. Never one to work on assumptions, Arturo early on suspects that they may not be epileptic in origin, and tests eventually confirm this suspicion. But what has caused them, and what can he do about them?

An intellectual who realizes that the more he learns the more he doesn’t know, Arturo embarks on a kind of adventure in attempting to treat the sometimes difficult and petulant Pippi. He realizes that he may even be able to effect a cure without completely knowing how he’s done it.

A couple things are certain, however: Pippi is better, happier, when she’s with others--as when she starts learning to care for a little girl, seemingly paralyzed and vacant, far worse off than she is. And she and the doctors’ other patients also respond when they are the focus of constant, loving attention--something that Arturo has none of in his own life.

There is no doubt, indeed, that love does flower between doctor and patient--but it is the responsible, positive father-daughter kind as in the father-son relationship between a man and a boy in Mel Gibson’s “The Man Without a Face.”

Archibugi has been able to draw from her stars the same kind of probing, far-ranging portrayals she elicited from Mastroianni and Bonnaire in “By Nightfall.” Castellitto, who alternately reminds one somewhat of Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman, is an especially engaging presence, and Fugardi possesses an innate poise. Another strong presence in this tender, warm and beautiful film is veteran actress Laura Betti, as a gruff, seriously overworked nurse, well-meaning but dangerously short-tempered.

‘The Great Pumpkin’

Sergio Castellitto Arturo

Alessia Fugardi Pippi

Anna Galiena Cinthya

Laura Betti Aida

A RAI Corp. presentation of an Italian-French co-production: Ellepi Film (Rome)/Italian International Film (Rome)/Chrysalide Films (Paris) with the participation of Moonlight Films (Amsterdam) in collaboration with RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana/RAI UNO. Writer-director Francesca Archibugi. Producer Leo Pescarolo, Fulvio Lucisano. Cinematographer Paolo Carnera. Editor Roberto Missiroli. Costumes Paola Marchesin. Music Battista Lena, Roberto Gatto. Production designer Livia Borgognoni. In Italian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hr., 43 mins..

Times-rated Mature (adult themes). Scenes involving mentally disturbed children too intense for youngsters.