OVP: Il Divo (2009)

Film: Il Divo (2009)
Stars: Toni Servillo, Anna Bonaiuto, Piera Degli Esposti, Paolo Graziosi, Giulio Bosetti
Director: Paolo Sorrentino
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Makeup)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars

I know I complain about biopics a bit on this site (okay, a lot on this site), and for a variety of reason I don't gravitate toward them.  That being said, there's a comfort level with a biopic that you don't always get from other original films.  You know the players, you know the outcome-you may learn a thing or two but as a whole it's more about the execution than about the result.  However, occasionally you come across a film where you aren't aware of where it's going to go.  It features a figure you know little about, and suddenly this should be a history lesson.  For me, that's what Il Divo ended up being.

Now, for the most part I like learning new things; I regularly find myself in a Wikipedia blackhole of searches for hours on end.  That being said, when you're tackling a new or unfamiliar subject, the same rules of a regular film apply, and are perhaps magnified: you can't assume anything is commonplace to your audience.  This regularly is an issue with films like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter: they introduce characters assuming you're already familiar.  This is why, say, Chris Columbus's more instantly iconic Sorcerer's Stone is a lesser film than Alfonso Cuaron's less faithful Prisoner of Azkaban.

Il Divo fails to give enough background on our central character, former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (Servillo).  Admittedly, Andreotti is well-known to almost anyone who has paid attention to post-War politics in Italy.  Seven times the Prime Minister of Italy, he was the dominant force in Italian politics in the 1970's and early 1990's.  This man is clearly intriguing enough to have a biopic made about him, and American ignorance can be attributed to being lost for a bit of the film, but you never really get to know the man behind the prosthetics as the movie continues.  There's a lot to be said as we track Andreotti's final term as Prime Minister, his unsuccessful bid for the presidency of Italy, and his eventual involvement in a criminal trial of which he emerged not guilty (by the courts).

Yet none of it is said so much as shouted amidst random awkward musical segways and a plethora of character title cards (we are introduced to characters through a subtitle stating their name, rather than learning anything about them, which makes the scene where real-life people are brutally murdered all the more tacky).  And while it sort of paints a picture of what a film like Lincoln must be like for foreign audiences, you shouldn't need to have an extensive history of the Italian government wandering around your cranium in order to understand a movie.

Though I found the film clumsy, confusing, and dull, I will admit that the film was likely never meant for non-Italian audiences, and I quite frankly wouldn't have stumbled across it were it not for its inclusion in the OVP as a Best Makeup nominee.  So let's get to that out-of-nowhere nomination.  The Makeup branch has a famously eclectic list of films that it gives the title of Oscar-nominated (there's a 60% chance that Bad Grandpa will be amongst their selections this year).  The Makeup work here is nothing we haven't seen before, but it's very convincing.  Servillo in particular mimics the real-life Andreotti's jowls and heavy eyes quite exactly, and the side characters regularly look like they've come out of the Rick Baker school.  However, the makeup, while extensive, doesn't seem to equal anything "new" in the field and isn't of such a quality that it had to be rewarded even if it wasn't inventive.  It's hard to believe that this obscure film trumped the utter brilliance that was on display in the magnificent District 9 or that it beat an Academy favorite like David LeRoy Anderson's Cirque du Freak.  Chalk it up to a branch that also went for Norbit and Click, I guess.

I know I'm once again in the minority here (I'm really not trying to be contrarian)-who liked Il Divo?  Who was rooting for it with the Oscars?  The comments await!