Il Divo: Ill Communication

Winner of the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Il
Divo, the story of the legendarily shady Italian prime minister
Giulio Andreotti, is a frenetic, sardonic M-80 of a movie that assumes
a near-encyclopedic knowledge of its subject by its audience. Even
accounting for a lengthy pre-title text info-dump, it quickly becomes
baffling for anyone without a firm grip on recent Italian history. But,
man alive, does it ever move.

Beginning in the late 1970s with a gaggle of corpses,
writer-director Paolo Sorrentino’s film delves at warp speed into the
rise and fall of Andreotti, the little-loved (sample nicknames:
Beelzebub, the Black Pope) yet seemingly Teflon public figure who,
despite rumored ties to the Mafia and a history of political enemies
dead before their time, is currently still serving as a senator for
life at age 90. (The film at one point links him to some 236 deaths, a
figure that, judging from what we see on the screen, may actually be a
little light.)

Sorrentino’s rock-’em sock-’em style, which cribs freely from
Scorsese and De Palma, is certainly engaging, which makes it easy to
coast for minutes at a time on pure bombastic sensation before
realizing that you haven’t the foggiest idea about who is having a
meeting with whom or if the guy with the mustache lurking in the
background is important somehow. (SPOILER: He is, I think.) Baffling
and maddening as the film frequently is, however, it does boast a
whopper of a central performance by Toni Servillo, who suggests
limitless depths while scarcely moving a facial muscle. Combining
clammy skin, busy hands, and a posture reminiscent of Snoopy in his
vulture phase, he (re-)creates a fascinating monster: a morose, near
joyless void of a man who draws his lifeblood from the auras of those
in his proximity. Given some CliffsNotes, the surrounding film might
even be worthy of him.