Netflix’s adaptation lacks what made Lampedusa’s novel a classic: nostalgia for traditional society

The Leopard

Directed by Tom Shankland, Giuseppe Capotondi, and Laura Luchetti ◆ Written by Benji Walters and Richard Warlow ◆ Produced by Indiana Production and Moonage Pictures ◆ Distributed by Netflix

“If we want everything to stay as it is, everything needs to change,” is the best-known line in Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel, The Leopard (1958), now adapted by Netflix for a six-episode limited streaming series directed by the British filmmaker Tom Shankland. A joint British-Italian production, the series stars an Italian cast headed by Kim Rossi Stuart. An achingly nostalgic tale of aristocratic decline in Sicily at the time of Italy’s national unification in the 1860s, the story captures the life, times, and mores of a Lampedusa ancestor and his family and offers disguised autobiographical reflections of the novel’s author, his 20th-century descendant.

The author and his great-grandfather, on whom the novel’s central character, Don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina, is based, lived in turbulent worlds. The 20th-century Lampedusa lived through both world wars, the second and more horrible of which witnessed the destruction of his family’s Palermo town palace in an Allied air raid. The calamity sent the younger Lampedusa into a deep depression. The palatial edifice, his home from childhood, was only reconstructed long after his death, in 2015, with stylized arches inscribed with images of his epistolary description of life there for the edification of 21st-century guests, one of whom I was privileged to be for several weeks last summer.

The novel’s narration makes a bitter, if restrained, reference to a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh in 1943 that would destroy the palace’s beautifully painted ballroom ceiling in a way Lampedusa’s characters could never have imagined. Shankland’s better directorial instincts include long takes of the ceiling, even without mentioning its ultimate fate. Property loss aside, Lampedusa also had to reckon with being the last of his family’s biological line, whose fading legacy he handed to an adopted distant cousin, Gioacchino Lanza di Tomasi (1934-2023), a noted arts administrator who led several Italian opera houses and the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.

For his part, the author’s 19th-century forebear lived through the end of his particular ancien régime, the Bourbon-ruled Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The state and society he knew were overthrown from without by the forces of Italian nationalism, led by the radical democrat Giuseppe Garibaldi under the banner of the foreign, northern Italian monarchy of Piedmont-Sardinia, and from within by forces of political and economic change heralded by a low-born bourgeoisie that only seemed to rise at the nobility’s expense. 

The same forces, which Shankland draws out far more explicitly than the novel does, also whipsaw through Brideshead Revisited, The Age of Innocence, and The Remains of the Day, as well as TV series such as Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age. These period meditations all dwell on the passage of time, the inevitability of change, the dynamics of family, and the decline of the great and the good—themes that appeal to the enduring Romantic sensibilities that continue in our age.

The novel’s title, Il Gattopardo in Italian, offers a soubriquet apposite for both the author and his ancestor. The type of cat in question is not the familiar African leopard but the smaller serval, an animal that once lived prominently enough in Sicily to be featured at the center of the Tomasi family’s coat-of-arms. Fatefully, it had become extinct there at the time of the novel.

Publishers initially rejected The Leopard as too old-fashioned just two weeks before Lampedusa’s death and it was only posthumously published. The crushing irony is that it turned out to be the greatest Italian novel of all time and one of the greatest novels ever written. Amid a searing controversy in which most of Italy’s postwar leftist intelligentsia denounced the book as nostalgia for feudalism, it became a runaway bestseller, going through 52 printings within six months. It won Italy’s highest award for fiction and, in 1963, was adapted for an ambitious film by Luchino Visconti, Italy’s greatest filmmaker, in a lavish Italian-American production starring Burt Lancaster, a gruffer but ultimately more dignified and philosophical patriarch than Rossi Stuart’s defensively cynical potentate.

Lampedusa’s novel stands at the beginning of Sicily’s rise in the international popular imagination, a tradition followed by The Godfather universe, which Visconti’s film influenced, and carried into contemporary times, for better or worse, by the second season of HBO’s otherwise execrable dark comedy murder-mystery series The White Lotus. Given international copyright restrictions on such a relatively recent work, adaptations of The Leopard have been almost entirely limited to Visconti’s film. The only exception is the American composer Michael Dellaira’s opera, with a libretto by J. D. McClatchy, which premiered in 2022 to highly favorable reviews.

Adapting any great novel for film will inevitably pose challenges. Visconti’s film, which is tinged by the director’s communist ideology and suffers from longueurs and a sometimes disjointed international cast, is far from perfect despite its iconic status. Addressing both the novel and the film, Shankland and his production team had to find a way to render the story differently for an audience two generations removed. “We wanted to interpret the novel in a way that will speak to a modern audience, with a visual and dramatic language that we’re more used to,” he said in an interview.

In the series’ most lasting impression, and in what may well be the greatest advertisement for Sicilian tourism yet, Shankland benefited from the massive investment that has poured into the island in recent years and unprecedented cooperation from the local authorities. Visually, the series is absolutely beautiful. Whereas Visconti’s film indulges a rundown, provincial milieu—purposely, given his intent to rub in a strong sense of aristocratic decline—Shankland’s Sicily is bathed in glamour and light.

Shankland’s production team laudably delved into Sicily’s rich material culture. The costumes are museum-quality, and delicacies of table, garden, and grove practically jump from the screen. In that sense, the director succeeded in creating what Netflix touts as “a dazzlingly sensuous epic.”

But his impulse to reinvent the work unfortunately spun out of control. For all the production’s sensuousness, the Prince’s world is not the traditional society Lampedusa loved and mourned, but a cruel, corrupt, transactional place—a hellscape of human failing where nobody is pure and everyone is vulnerable. Thievery, thuggery, blackmail, ruthless ambition, base sycophancy, mercenary sexuality, and a strange subplot around a sulfur mining land devaluation scheme, among other gratuitous vices absent from the book and film, leave us to wonder just what anyone will miss when this society passes. 

The Prince’s daughter Concetta, who is magnified far out of proportion to her role in the novel, spends most of her time trying to escape its miseries, including her disappointment in love. Her lost suitor, the Prince’s nephew, Tancredi, is cocksure in the novel but here succumbs to self-doubt over his marriage to Angelica, who, as her name suggests, is brought up by the ambitious peasant Calogero Sedàra to be innocent of the world’s horrors. In Shankland’s vision, however, she turns out to be as morally debased and psychologically damaged as anyone else. Played by Deva Cassel, the 20-year-old daughter of Monica Bellucci, she matches Visconti’s Claudia Cardinale in beauty but does not impart the character’s essential features. She is, however, well-paired with Tancredi’s Saul Nanni, with whom she became romantically involved during filming.

There is disappointingly little room for the original story’s deference, devotion, honor, sincerity, or any other virtue that would make life worth living or a community’s past worth idealizing. The script’s dialogue is coarse, lacks subtlety, and eschews nuance. Even the Prince’s servant, who in the novel knows his place as part of the natural order of things, degenerates here into a racketeer. 

“It’s absolutely the opposite of any idea of The Leopard,” Lanza di Tomasi’s widow, Nicolleta, said of the Netflix series in an interview. She maintains the family’s surviving palace, which offers a floor of lodging, hosts Sicilian cooking classes, and will feature an archive and museum. “I don’t want to think about it … This is not keeping alive the legacy of The Leopard and Gioacchino. This is just making money out of it.”

The essential plot holds through the first three episodes, but the story goes off the rails midway through. Called by the new government to serve in the united Italy’s new Senate, the Prince does not simply refuse and recommend the upstart Sedàra as in the novel, but oddly travels with his perpetually disappointed daughter Concetta to the new national capital in Turin, where much of the rest of the series inexplicably takes place. A significant part of the series’ content simply does not take place in Sicily, and one might well ask what The Leopard without Sicily is—or if it really is still The Leopard at all. The Prince returns home to die, not in the state of metaphysical reflection on the passing of his world that the novel imparts, but rather in the style Don Corleone in another Sicilian-themed epic, falling into his beloved rose bushes in the way Marlon Brando collapses into his tomato plants. And when he dies, the world goes on. There is no further reflection on the decline but merely a lurching forward on all fronts.

Shankland has achieved a sweeping work of obvious effort and great visual attractiveness. But it lacks the elegiac atmosphere that Lampedusa’s life culminated in producing and that Visconti rendered with much greater authenticity and humanity. Given the resources at the production’s disposal and the clear enthusiasm for the project at every level, they might have done better to stick to the original text and deliver the timeless messages viewers would appreciate rather than a reimagination that lost much but added little.