Moody Toons

The animation omnibus "Fear(s) of the Dark" and the cartoonish Italian satire "Il Divo" arrive on DVD.

Just as cartoony, Paolo Sorrentino’s “Il Divo” tackles the difficult task of plumbing the public and private career of Giulio Andreotti, three-time Italian prime minister and senator-for-life, around whom has swirled three decades of scandal, assassinations, disappearances, Mafia ligaments, Vatican skullduggery and blackmailing, climaxing more or less with a endless litany of murder and conspiracy trials cases, some of which Andreotti won, some of which he lost and then somehow overturned, ad infinitum.

It’s not an actionable narrative so much as a portrait of a character who doesn’t reveal himself, so Sorrentino plays the story as Soderbergh did in “The Informant!” — we never see Andreotti do anything expressly wrong, and so we’re not sure how truthful or venal he is — as he worries, scuttles around the chambers of government, nurses his migraines, and denies, denies, denies. It’s a galling story, much more familiar and presumably amusing to Italian audiences than to us, and Andreotti is an incredible figure, all by himself personifying the howling zoo that is Italian politics.

There’s no question that Toni Servillo, his back humped and his ears turned down like a troll from Middle Earth, cuts an unforgettable figure, a consummate political player so crafty and closed up he appears to be not paying attention to anything but what’s three feet in front of him. (In his 80s, Andreotti still functions in the Senate, and reportedly the raucous discussion about his villainy and/or triumph continues and resounds as public entertainment in Italy, as it does about Berlusconi, a longtime Andreotti cohort, as well as about Sorrentino’s film, which won a Jury Prize at Cannes in 2008.)

Contextualized as it is by the Red Brigades, the assassination of Aldo Moro and the membership of both Andreotti and Berlusconi in the infamously neo-fascist P2 Masonic Lodge, “Il Divo” tells a saga that’s head-shaking in synopsis, but I’m a little dubious of Sorrentino’s sensational movie, which throws plump, middle-aged Italian men at us by the several dozen to remember as characters, and often stalls in reverie, the crimes with which Andreotti is ostensibly involved mostly happening off-screen. To pick up the slack, the filmmaker ramps up the David Fincher-ish style — all ingenious process shots and vertiginous points-of-view — galloping around Servillo’s nearly inert Andreotti like spooked horses.

I’d never heard of Andreotti, so I appreciated coming to even a kind of pulpy understanding of the torque he’s inflicted on Italian government and popular culture. But critics, such as Roger Ebert and Stephen Holden at the Times, who liken “Il Divo” to Coppola’s best — because it’s Italian? Because Andreotti was used as a character model in “The Godfather Part III”? — are just daffy. It’s also been compared, tellingly, to Oliver Stone’s “W.,” but even though its intent on fathoming the inner clockwork of a malevolent leader seems a parallel, it is nowhere as naïve. It’s a film about a living, persisting public mystery, and so therefore it cannot hope to provide the answers or ethical bottom line we know are in there, somewhere.

“Fear(s) of the Dark” (MPI Home Video) is now available on DVD; “Il Divo” (MPI Home Video) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray.

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