"set his adaptation of Anna Karenina primarily in a rundown theater or have Blackbeard's pirates sing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in Pan. Wright's tendency as a director to point out the artifice of what he's doing, then use our awareness of said artifice to emphasize how all of us, all the time, are performing for an audience, is a perfect fit for a story about politics and the people who wield ideologies as lure and cudgel."
"Wright's adaptation covers the first book only, its eight episodes spanning 1914 to 1925, the years in which Mussolini struck out as a career socialist and pivoted to fascism. The latter was a failing movement at first, too, which the series emphasizes by speeding through a primer on Italian post-World War I history: Veterans of the war felt rejected by society,"
Joe Wright stages Mussolini: Son of the Century as a deliriously experimental chronicle of Benito Mussolini's rise from 1914 to 1925. The series adapts Antonio Scurati's first novel and compresses post–World War I Italian history to portray veterans' alienation, an ineffectual monarchy, and widening class gaps. Mussolini pivots from career socialism to fascism, exploiting social dislocation and manipulating performance and spectacle. The production uses camera tricks, theatrical artifice, and maximalist flourishes to emphasize performative politics. Luca Marinelli embodies Mussolini as a magnetic, physically altered figure whose charisma and spectacle propel a destructive political ascent.
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