Il Divo
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
At Lincoln Plaza Cinemas & Landmark Sunshine Cinemas
Runtime: 110 min

It's disappointing that the film that has gotten writer-director Paolo Sorrentino the most attention in America is Il Divo, the Neapolitan enfant terrible’s most self-indulgent film to date. Sorrentino’s visual style is always stupefying in its self-assuredness, but the breadth and scope of his subject—the trials and delusions of former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti—is just too much, even for his considerable talents. Indulging his worst aesthetic whims, Sorrentino makes a brash biopic that relies on its attitude far more than the gifted (and arrogant) up-and-comer can justify.

Il Divo is full of slick visuals and a Pitchfork-approved soundtrack as it re-imagines Andreotti (Toni Servillo, who in make-up looks like Kissinger as a Keebler elf) as a man trapped in a fishbowl of his own construction. But this is the same mold created for Sorrentino’s previous protagonists: They’re all lonely, self-absorbed and self-sequestered loners that romantically re-imagine themselves as messiahs but are really just closeted egomaniacs. Accordingly, Sorrentino’s Andreotti modestly but persistently compares himself to Christ.

That kind of tacky martyrdom is fitting considering that Andreotti has, as he jokes in the film, been connected with most every crime in Italy from the late 1960s to the mid- ’80s, including the kidnapping and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro. His ghoulish paranoia is driven home wonderfully by Servillo’s performance, which is every bit on par with Frank Langella’s recent Richard Nixon and every bit as human as a Universal monster. “I may be short, but I don’t see any giants around,” he says with a faux-contemplative air upon hearing from his cronies that they’d like to support his campaign to become president of the republic.

Sorrentino is not so interested in that detail or any other single thing about Andreotti; rather, he looks at him as an unfathomable “extraterrestrial,” as one reporter put it. He’s a mythic figure whose notoriety cannot be contained in a singular or tonally sustained narrative, so Sorrentino tells Andreotti’s story as a series of disjointed quasi-vignettes instead of whole, self-contained stories.This makes sense, in principle, since this is Italy, a republic of rulers whose promiscuous politics make the Wild West look like a teetotaler’s paradise. Conspiracies, murder and bribery are great fodder for a filmmaker fascinated by the contradictions of such bloody operatic power plays.

Sorrentino turns Andreotti’s later career into an imagistic jumble, bending time and space to create a new and unsettling hyperhistory that demands to be taken as an artificial re-imagining instead of a series of dramatic facts. Events are divorced from a readily digestible chronology and thrown into a blender to create a supernatural series of images that, for example, turn the death of a government prosecutor into a “cut” scene from Zabriskie Point.Visually, it’s dazzling; but emotionally, it’s not only barren but insulting in its experimental excesses. Sorrentino’s version of Andreotti’s story is thus only really fascinating as a bloated vanity project, one that is unlikely to win him many new American defenders.