Reading Time: 3 minutesPut your imagination into it: planet Earth savior Leonardo DiCaprio yachting around the Med in middle-aged Gatsby-esque fashion after replacing his green light with a carbon-spewing party boat. Planet savior, 50, has been head over heels again—who would’ve thought?—despite it all—for Italian model Vittoria Ceretti, 27. There is nothing that screams “save the planet” like carbon burning on while going out with someone whose birthday had yet to be attained when Titanic first hit the big screen.
The August photos on Formentera, Spain, are a soft-focus picture of love in the modern era: Leo, papa body that would be the envy of fathers everywhere, basking in the sun beside the pool while his significantly-younger GF glows in an animal-print bikini. The 23-year gap trails on the gentle Mediterranean breeze like yacht motor, offending, and yet unable to be gazed away from in the fantasy math of Tinseltown where women do not seem to be aging beyond 25.
The highlight is seeing DiCaprio go from pretty boy to the guy at the marina who clearly has very loud opinions on wine choices and most likely has a crypto insider on speed dial. Social media observers compared his bizarre metamorphosis into Jack Nicholson from the sneaky smirk to the smile at the ladies who are likely sitting parent-teacher conferences with his imaginary kids.
Just put one minute aside and see pure poetry of green doubletalk in operation right in front of your eyes. It is he who has turned sermonizing on masses and carbon footprint into an art, collects climate awards pretty much like ordinary people play with phones, and now cools his increasingly-Nicholson-esque heels aboard a luxurious yacht. The cognitive dissonance is so high it can be packaged up and sold under the brand name of green insulation.
At the same time, poor Vittoria learns to navigate being the girlfriend of a man whose Wikipedia entry is bigger than small countries. In her candid interview with Vogue France, she talked about the unavoidable: “The minute that you’re going out with somebody who’s got more followers than you, then you’re ‘girlfriend of.’” That’s the kind of disposition one learns by watching one’s working self being swallowed up quicker than sea trash by Leo’s fame.
“‘It is rude to believe that, regardless of what, you cannot be with the person that you desire, because people want to categorize things,” she went on, seemingly blissfully unaware that the label is not merely “girlfriend” but “the newest contestant on Hollywood’s longest-running game show: Will She Make It to 25?” Her hypothesis concerning love—”If what you feel is true, if you simply know that you are in love with each other, then panic is unnecessary”—is beautiful, though one can’t help but question whether she has any clue about the reality of the fact that Leo’s definition of “true love” has a more limited shelf life than salad greens purchased from the farmer’s market.” Their Mediterranean jaunt had it all: gentle pecks in the shade (shielding that sunny glow from sun spots), gallant splashes into vitreous lakes (warmed, one suspects, by the buzzing thrum of motors just below the waterline), and tender PDA that would reduce their carbon calculator blubber to tears of diesel.
Social media had its usual field day. Others ran the gamut from self-conscious nostalgia—”I’m embarrassed how much I was obsessed with Leo in the ’90s”—to begrudging admission of the law of natural selection: “Dad bod without being a dad.” The redemption would be complete: from Titanic golden boy to yacht-living embodiment of “do as I say, not as I do.”
What’s delectably rotten about the entire debacle is the unmitigated nerve. He’s the man who spent decades pointing his finger at us puny humans about conserving and planning ahead while himself working through girlfriends young enough to learn about global warming from texts, not videos, on the YouTube of Al Gore.
Shrewdiest of all is Ceretti’s confession that being with a mega-star may be “something you learn.” Just scan the course requirements: Advanced Tabloid Navigations, Public Scrutiny 101, and the inevitable graduate seminar in Graceful Exit Strategies. Because when it comes to Leo’s love life, romance maybe is forever, but girlfriends, like the polar ice caps he activistly campaigns on their behalf, do, one has noted, have an alarmingly predictable melting point. As our planet warrior moves on with his Mediterranean vacation trip, downning fossil fuels and the tolerance of climate activists across the planet, one wonders: Is this one gonna break the trend? Can Vittoria pinch down our free-spirited Gatsby? Or be the newest member on the A-list roster of former beaus of the great Leo, exchanging wounds of wars and therapy sessions of the collective kind over courting America’s greenie-hypocritical man? Time—and, one suspects, a highly lost carbon emission counter—alone will be able to say!
