Il Divo
Italy/France, 2008
Starring: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Watchmen
US 2009
Starring: Billy Crudup, Malin Akerman,
Patrick Wilson, Jackie Earle Haley
Director: Zack Snyder
The Burning Plain
US 2008
Starring: Charlize Theron, Kim Basinger
Director: Guillermo Arriaga
AS SOMEONE who wears glasses I was disturbed by what a pair of spectacles did to the tops of the ears of actor Toni Servillo, cast as Italian Prime Minster Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo. Servillo’s ears are bent over in what must be a painful fashion. Clearly, in the early 1990s when the film is set, Italian design did not include comfort. In another scene, Andreotti is seen riding a primitive exercise bike. It looks like the U-bend of a toilet and you wonder what he is actually doing on it.
These are early impressions of an impressionistic film – I hesitate to call it a drama – written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino, who worked with Servillo previously on the drama, The Consequences of Love. Il Divo suggests an orchestration of scenes for aesthetic effect rather than a cumulative cathartic experience. By the end, I knew little more about Andreotti – seven times Italian Prime Minster – than I did at the beginning. Each term only lasted a year, so it was not exactly a towering achievement.
But what technique. Early on, we have a montage of murders committed over a 15-year period, all of which were somehow associated with Andreotti. In particular, Sorrentino draws attention to the death of Aldo Mori, Andreotti’s colleague murdered by the Red Brigade colleague, whom he could have saved. When we hear Mori, direct speech is replaced by ghostly, lisped words from a tape recording. The film exhibits a high level of sound as well as visual design. The members of Andreotti’s seventh government are introduced in the manner of the bank robbers in Reservoir Dogs – presumably an intentional association.
There are many striking moments. In one scene, the camera snakes through a series of rooms where a mad party is taking place. There are Latin drums, flailing limbs and, in the middle, Andreotti sitting on a sofa being greeted by a queue of guests. There is an amusing moment when Andreotti
phones his wife (Anna Bonaiuto) from the Kremlin, dwarfed by the bed in the guest room where he sleeps alone. They discuss Gorbachev’s birthmark.
In so far as the film has a dramatic arc, it follows Andreotti’s faith in a financial index, his miserable attempt to be elected president and the attempt to prosecute him for his Mafia dealings. Servillo portrays Andreotti as a librarian rather than a wily politician. It is Philip Larkin as a mob boss.
Il Divo displays great film-making without being a great film. I was bored and exhausted long before it ended – with accounts of the verdicts of various hearings. Crucially, I learned nothing about how Andreotti’s politics affected his people. But I did enjoy the premier’s wit. Asked why, at church, other politicians talk to God but he speaks to the priest, Andreotti replies: “God doesn’t vote”.
To understand movie superheroes is to understand their condition. They may be genetically modified people who struggle to cope with their enhanced or extra-human abilities in a human context. Alternatively, they are psychologically traumatised individuals who create an alternate identity, channelling their rage towards righting wrong. The problem with Watchmen, the long-awaited screen adaptation of writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel set in an alternate America of 1985, is that, with only one exception, you do not understand either the hero or their condition. Moreover, in the case of the only comprehensible one, Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), he’s a total bore. He has godly thoughts and abilities, but God is by far my least favourite Bible character.
Nominally, Watchmen the movie belongs in the noir tradition of superhero flicks, Moore being a pioneer of the comic book strand that inspired Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman. Moore’s other best-known work is The Killing Joke, exploring Batman’s relationship with the twisted Joker. In Watchmen, Moore has created his own damaged hero, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a promiscuous vigilante with a Groucho Marx moustache and cigar, who is thrown out of a window to his death by a shadowy male assailant at the start of the film. Another vigilante, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), whose mask consists of a shifting black blob, investigates his murder. Rorschach’s name implies a man who can be interpreted in many different ways but screenwriters Alex Tse and David Hayter and director Zack Snyder do not engage us in his mystery.
Instead, context takes precedence over character. There is the imminent threat of nuclear war, as Russia squares up against America over Afghanistan. America’s trump card is the human atomic bomb, Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the victim of an industrial accident. He helped Richard Nixon end the war in Vietnam; Nixon remained President to serve five consecutive terms.
The film deals with an attempt to remove Dr Manhattan from his position of influence when he is accused of giving his colleagues and ex-lover cancer.
Watchmen the movie posits the idea that a “moderate” nuclear catastrophe might be good thing for world peace, yet given human history since the first atom bomb was dropped in 1945, such an notion should only be presented ironically. Unfortunately, director Snyder takes it seriously with a capital “S” (also for “stupid” and “seriously misconceived”). The whole alternate history of America is underdeveloped and there is no debate about changes to the American constitution. Unlike the comic book, the film explains the political context at the outset rather than let the viewer discover it through the narrative.
Snyder is in thrall to a debate about the relativity of time and the futility of human endeavour, with Dr Manhattan, able to see his own past and future, becoming disengaged from the struggles of civilisation. Crucially, the audience shares his disengagement. This is a film with a doomsday clock, yet you think to yourself: “When will things get properly started?” I waited for a shift in gear for a full 150-odd minutes. It only happened when the final credits rolled.
Guillermo Arriaga has been responsible for some of the most distinctive screenplays in the past decade – from his three collaborations with director Alejandro Gonzalez Inárritu, Amores Perros, 21 Grams and Babel, to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, filmed by Tommy Lee Jones. Sadly, The Burning Plain, the screenplay with which he makes his directorial debut, is less impressive than the works that preceded it.
The opening image is of a burning caravan, sitting isolated in the middle of a plain. This is a drama in which one love affair ends tragically with an act that scars the person who commits it – a theme from 21 Grams. Arriaga’s complex narrative structure, cutting between locations and time periods, while withholding information about one character’s relationship to another, is initially arresting and again familiar from his earlier films. However, it leads us to moments that beggar belief. His protagonist is Sylvia (Charlize Theron), a smartly turned-out restaurant hostess who, judging by her current relationship, has had a long series of meaningless affairs. She moves from sleeping with a married chef to having torrid, submissive sex with a customer. When the two men fight over her, a stranger, Carlos (José Maria Yazpik), who first appears to be a stalker, intervenes. Sylvia gets into his car without any regard to his intentions. It is hard to accept that she would be so wilfully cavalier about her own safety.
Arriaga cuts between this drama, filmed in an overcast Portland, Oregon, with scenes set in New Mexico involving Gina (Kim Basinger), a married housewife engaged in a torrid affair of her own with Nick (Joaquim de Almeida). At the start of the film, there are two funerals. The Mexican family blames Gina for robbing them of their father in a scene reminiscent of last year’s Shotgun Stories. Here, though, a relationship develops between Gina’s daughter, Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), and Nick’s son, Santiago (DJ Pardo), which turns out to be far from redemptive. It is possible to overlook one improbable act in a film – Sylvia accepting Carlos’ offer of help at face value, as if serial killers did not exist; she even offers herself sexually to him. It is less possible to accept two, as we discover the cause of Gina and Nick’s death.
Arriaga has a less than sophisticated attitude to character and there is little sense of family life in its truest sense, with relationships intersecting. And Arriaga really over-eggs the melodrama by showing Gina to be at Nick’s beck and call, disappearing with the excuse that she is “off to buy fabric” when she is actually meeting for sex. Their relationship seems drawn from Last Tango in Paris – two strangers meeting each other’s needs. Gina goes to Nick because he can overlook the scars of her mastectomy when making love. The film’s sexual politics are depressing as it portrays women as the agents of their own destruction.
Patrick Mulcahy
