In the style of his great hero, Fellini, Sorrentino plays up the surrealism and the grotesquerie, whether he’s depicting the neighbors in Fabietto’s apartment building or his own family. Maradona came to Napoli in 1984 he scored the “hand of God” goal in 1986 Napoli won its first championship with him in 1987 - all moments glimpsed in the film, even though Fabietto the teen (or anyone else, for that matter) never really seems to age. The family has rented a VHS of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America from the video store, but they never manage to watch it. There is in fact a general sense of stasis throughout the house - through the whole extended family - as if we’re watching a moment captured in time and then stretched across the years. “And I’ll never have it.”) Their sister, in a surreal running gag throughout the movie, never leaves the bathroom. (“It’s called persistence,” he tells Fabietto one day, as they watch Maradona patiently knock shot after shot at practice.
We meet Fabietto’s older brother Marchino (Marlon Joubert), an aspiring actor who auditions for bit parts in Fellini films but can never get a gig because he’s uninterestingly handsome and has no real drive. Mom, on the other hand, is alternately sensible and ruthless she’ll help a family member in need at the drop of a hat, but she’ll also play the cruelest of pranks on those around her. We meet Fabietto’s oddball parents: Dad (played by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo, possibly the greatest actor of his generation) is a devout communist who also happens to work at a bank he’s deeply in love with Fabietto’s mother (Teresa Saponangelo) but has evidently also been cheating on her for years. The early scenes of The Hand of God are disjointed in the way family chronicles tend to be. When the whole clan gets together for a summer gathering and she takes her clothes off to tan, all the menfolk sit transfixed. To be fair, everybody in the family seems to lust for Patrizia. And he’s also enchanted by his voluptuous aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri), who is grappling with both mental illness and an abusive shithead husband. He’s excited by the rumors that Maradona might be on the verge of signing with the local team, SSC Napoli. Sorrentino’s stand-in is Neapolitan teen Fabietto Schisa (Filippo Scotti), who is growing up in the 1980s with little but girls and soccer on his mind.
Through unspeakable sorrow, the director seems to suggest, he wound up becoming a man and an artist. (I won’t give either the tragedy or its soccer connection away, even though plenty of articles about the picture have mentioned the rather ghastly thing that the film is about.) In other words, in Sorrentino’s vision, too, the “hand of God” is not a random act of divine Providence or damnation, but an offsetting, a counterbalance. The event in question actually has its own rather surprising Maradona connection. The title of Paolo Sorrentino’s achingly autobiographical coming-of-age film The Hand of God refers not just to Maradona’s goal but also to a shattering tragedy that the director endured as a teen, and which occurs almost exactly halfway through this perplexing, lovely movie. Maybe it was revenge, or maybe it was just a necessary balancing of the books. To some Argentines, the victory over England, coming not so long after their country’s defeat in the Falklands War of 1982, had some deeper resonance. The English were understandably salty about it for years, even though Maradona was the undisputed greatest player in the world at the time and Argentina clearly the better team. The illegal hand ball went unseen by the refs in a game Argentina took 2-1, on its way to winning the world championship one week later. In soccer lore, the “hand of God” refers to Diego Maradona’s legendary first goal against England in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinals, a shot he practically punched into the net.