Il Divo is a tremendous piece of style. The camera soars through complex settings in which countless people are being highly expressive in some way or another. Every other shot is in slow motion. Cuts never hide but outright snap as quickly as possible from shot to shot to shot. The soundtrack is rich with dynamic modern pop music. Captions are everywhere; some of them move, some of them inflexibly wait till the camera reaches a certain point in order to be legible, some are upside down, et. al. Sometimes, the camera calms down to focus on an actor doing something very interesting and moving, but those are comparatively less conspicuous.
The film is a true story, and a widely known one in its home land, Italy, one about the corruption of power, the assault of religious guilt on an unrepentant conscience, the rise to excess and the beginning of an uncertain fall to the prospect of a soul's relieving punishment. It is a story that has been told for centuries, one that offers us no real surprises here, so instead it is awash in stylistic flourishes. That seems very vain and shallow, but such gesticulative hyperkinesis affords the film some very moving moments. Some are expository throwaways, which is just as well, but others are treated in that same manner, as mere fine points, when they betray epic stories all their own. There is also an effective amount of time devoted to the central character's fear of God's judgment, and whether or not he inflects it to take the place of life's chance occurrences or the existence of one's responsibility for his own choices.
Il Divo is so pumped with testosterone, never slows down, always has something eye-popping, indeed often just distracting, to throw at us, and like a lot of masculine flaunting, it seems to compensate for a lack of something else. But that's not quite the case here. Yes, the film is all style. But the story is not lathered on top of it. It is the cloth with which all that showing off is done. The dialogue in itself is both plentiful and fancy. The way the characters talk to each other has an aphoristic form and a philosophical undertone. For instance, "I know I am an average man but I look around and see no giant." There is a lot of info-dumping with book-ending title cards and myriad captions among other avenues of squeezing out all facts and fine points, but as complicated as the plot is, and as quickly as it is developed in scenes like the almost whirlwind-speed Mafia meeting, the actors are particularly strong and all have the power to wrestle their scenes away from the clockwork narrative and have them stand out as their own beasts, sometimes through blazing emotional deliveries of exchanges, monologues and even soliloquys, and sometimes through simple emoting that winds up pushing all the stylized clutter to the edges of frame to function at just the right pitch to complement such facial expressions and halfway teardrops. I struggle to recall any other film in recent memory in which such seemingly insignificant characters have unraveled so briefly and brought me to tears with such feeling command.
So obviously, the film is highly expressionistic, almost baroque. Toni Servillo's make-up job as Giulio Andreotti, the title figure, is very elaborate and the details of his ears, hair, glasses, facial lines and tightly wound upscale dress sense are screamingly defined and allow him to underplay the role to the point where he is almost an oil painting save for his sporadic jolts of tremendous emotional build-up. The food critic Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille comes to mind. Not every actor here is endowed with this advantage, but they do all have emboldened distinguishing characteristics. Despite those few very touching moments and certain powerful images, often spectacle-driven but sometimes not, the brandishing nature of director Paolo Sorrentino's stylisic proficiency keeps us too distant from his real subjects and the heart of the matter. Regardless however, the actors and the prose they perform rebel against such oppression and do some intense brandishing of their own.
The film is a true story, and a widely known one in its home land, Italy, one about the corruption of power, the assault of religious guilt on an unrepentant conscience, the rise to excess and the beginning of an uncertain fall to the prospect of a soul's relieving punishment. It is a story that has been told for centuries, one that offers us no real surprises here, so instead it is awash in stylistic flourishes. That seems very vain and shallow, but such gesticulative hyperkinesis affords the film some very moving moments. Some are expository throwaways, which is just as well, but others are treated in that same manner, as mere fine points, when they betray epic stories all their own. There is also an effective amount of time devoted to the central character's fear of God's judgment, and whether or not he inflects it to take the place of life's chance occurrences or the existence of one's responsibility for his own choices.
Il Divo is so pumped with testosterone, never slows down, always has something eye-popping, indeed often just distracting, to throw at us, and like a lot of masculine flaunting, it seems to compensate for a lack of something else. But that's not quite the case here. Yes, the film is all style. But the story is not lathered on top of it. It is the cloth with which all that showing off is done. The dialogue in itself is both plentiful and fancy. The way the characters talk to each other has an aphoristic form and a philosophical undertone. For instance, "I know I am an average man but I look around and see no giant." There is a lot of info-dumping with book-ending title cards and myriad captions among other avenues of squeezing out all facts and fine points, but as complicated as the plot is, and as quickly as it is developed in scenes like the almost whirlwind-speed Mafia meeting, the actors are particularly strong and all have the power to wrestle their scenes away from the clockwork narrative and have them stand out as their own beasts, sometimes through blazing emotional deliveries of exchanges, monologues and even soliloquys, and sometimes through simple emoting that winds up pushing all the stylized clutter to the edges of frame to function at just the right pitch to complement such facial expressions and halfway teardrops. I struggle to recall any other film in recent memory in which such seemingly insignificant characters have unraveled so briefly and brought me to tears with such feeling command.
So obviously, the film is highly expressionistic, almost baroque. Toni Servillo's make-up job as Giulio Andreotti, the title figure, is very elaborate and the details of his ears, hair, glasses, facial lines and tightly wound upscale dress sense are screamingly defined and allow him to underplay the role to the point where he is almost an oil painting save for his sporadic jolts of tremendous emotional build-up. The food critic Anton Ego in Pixar's Ratatouille comes to mind. Not every actor here is endowed with this advantage, but they do all have emboldened distinguishing characteristics. Despite those few very touching moments and certain powerful images, often spectacle-driven but sometimes not, the brandishing nature of director Paolo Sorrentino's stylisic proficiency keeps us too distant from his real subjects and the heart of the matter. Regardless however, the actors and the prose they perform rebel against such oppression and do some intense brandishing of their own.