The tepid cartoonishness of Oliver Stone's W. suggests that, as the director of JFK and Natural Born Killers approaches his seventieth birthday, he's having trouble deciding whether he wants to be praised for having "matured" or instead wants to hear that he can still lay out whoopee cushions with the best of them. In his dotage, Stone can at least take pride in knowing that his work has not been without influence. The Italian writer-director Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, a gonzo biopic about Giulio Andreotti, who dominated the Christian Democratic party for decades between his arrival in Parliament in 1946 and the last of his three terms as Prime Minister, which ended in 1992. (Named a Senator for life in 1991, Andreotti is still hanging in there at ninety, and ran unsuccessfully for President of the Senate in 2006.) Andreotti's last term as PM coincided with a massive corruption scandal that consumed and destroyed his own party, and which may, just be clearing the ground, may have helped lead to the Berlusconi era in Italian politics, which would be a hard thing for any serious man to have to live with. Andreotti may have much worse things to live with: after his term ended, he was indicted on charges of complicity with the Mafia, in trials that dragged on for years and which resulted in some convictions that would ultimately be overturned. Il Divo begins with Andreotti (Toni Servillo) sitting at his desk, alone and wreathed in darkness, musing about how all his life, he has managed to somehow outlast those who predicted his imminent defeat or demise. He sounds like a bemused naturalist describing an interesting trait in a strange species of insect life that he's just discovered, which happens to be himself.
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