David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: Loro
and Raise Hell)
Loro
No, Toni Servillo will not make his rep playing noble
old Tolstoyan peasants. He was the
corrupt master politician Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008), then jaded, autumnal playboy Jep in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty,
2013). Now he is gaudily corrupt politician Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (“them,” which stands for Italy’s
decadent elite and/or the voters hypnotized by Silvio’s
power circus). Each film is from director and writer
Paolo Sorrentino, who wears Fellini’s crown with spectacular gusto. The
Great Beauty, rightful heir to La
Dolce Vita, had Servillo’s Jep reincarnating Marcello Mastroianni as a
maturely suave hipster and quipster. The exquisite exploration of Rome wound me
up like a golden pasta fork.
Il Divo curled its baroque pasta for 110 minutes, Great Beauty for a sumptuous 141, and Loro offers 150, down from the 204 shown
(two parts) in Italy. The result is such a multi-faceted, mixed bag that we
can’t tell if the shorter version is a loss or gain. The “hero,” drenched in
lassitude between his third and fourth tours as prime minister, takes half an
hour to show up. At his ultra-modern Sardinian villa, one of 20 abodes, he
stages “bunga-bunga” parties where women are flesh décor and go-go bait for
later consumption (the word “prostitute” is frowned on). And yet, for all the
nubile display and festive nudity, Sorrentino really sees the faces, not just a
bod squad of erotic tassels as in Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street and De Palma’s Scarface. When Silvio, with his “dictator black” helmet of hair and
rubbery Botoxed face, makes his creepy bedroom move on a young lovely (Euridice
Axen), she ponders and then slips away, gently rejecting his “breath of an old
man” (quirky echo of Jep in Great Beauty
recalling that, as a boy, he loved “the smell of old people’s homes”). The
predator is gent enough not to make a Jeffrey Epstein grab as she exits.
The neo-Nero message is that Berlusconi, who rose to
power as a master of crass media, pimped the whole country. In a frail plot
string, the young super-pimp Sergio (Riccardo Scamarcio, a handsomely minor
Mastroianni) oozes into Silvio’s circle, only to be dazed, then dashed. His
story gets lost among the blowout parties and Sorrentino surprises (the most lurid involves a rat, a garbage truck and
the Roman Imperial Forum). Silvio, although sharp and wry, lacks Jep’s nuanced urbanity,
but as the wormy apple of all eyes he has the best scenes. Bored without
supreme power, he entertains himself by going on the phone and, using virtuosic
bullshit from his youth, seduces a middle-class housewife into buying an
unbuilt home she doesn’t want (it’s a nostalgia high, beyond bimbos).
With comical vanity Silvio, preening like Johnny
Fontaine in The Godfather, croons a
cornball song to his court of sycophants (imagine Charlie Kane belting
“Arrividerci Roma” to the old gang at Xanadu). A final confrontation of Silvio
with his disgusted wife (poignant Elena Sofia Ricci) rivals the heart-rippers
in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage.
But the scene of party babes bursting into a “Viva Italia!” dance cries out for
Busby Berkeley, and Silvio’s waxen visage often seems a mask hiding the story’s
inner secrets (in Il Divo, Servillo’s
Andreotti seems to carry the mummified look back through papal tombs to ancient
Egypt). In a surreal bit (dream?) Silvio consults with his look-alike, a past
partner acted by Servillo using his thinning hair, pleasantly aged face and
debonair impudence. This supple double is basically Jep revisited.
Il Divo was a pinballing maze of insider politics, though the
devious plotting became a little tiresome. Here there is not enough of Silvio’s
politics, just some bribing of other grizzled machers so that he can regain the premiership. Luca Bigazzi’s often terrific photography
lingers too long over the manicured estate with its carousel, pool and
butterfly aviary, without the entrancing Roman luster he brought to Great Beauty. Here is advice to
Sorrentino from a distant province: get away from crazy power games, and make
another great city film about Rome or your native Naples.
Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins
She named her dog Shit, and many of her words for
Texas politicians were much less affectionate. Big-boned Mary Ivins, six feet
tall by age 12, became Molly. That shocked her religious, conservative father,
whose macho dominance she flouted. He was rich from oil and gas, she became a populist journalist rich in compassion for
the poor, the weak, the dark and dismissed. Molly Ivins was an earthy daughter
of Texas like her friend Ann Richards, who became a liberal governor known for
her wit and effrontery. Ivins goaded, applauded and sometimes out-sparked her.
For Richards, adoptive Texan George H.W. Bush “was born with a silver foot in
his mouth.” Ivins eviscerated the son, George “Dubya,” in her book Shrub (the pro-Bush Houston Chronicle never ran her political columns).
Personal sidebar: I was raised in Houston when LBJ and
Sam Rayburn ruled the dominant Democrats, and Republicans were a “piss-ant”
party of Ike fans. I never hung around tony River Oaks, where the Ivinses lived
and where the Bushes roosted after passing as petro-cowboys in West Texas.
Mary, reborn as Molly, rebelled against the River Oaks crowd, and after some
Paris time attended Smith College (someone recalls her, with accent buried,
“sounding like Jacqueline Kennedy”). Her native twang revived after she
offended her New York Times bosses by
walking around barefoot and coining “gang-pluck” for a chicken fiesta story,
though her Elvis obit drew huge readership. Ivins returned to Texas as Odysseus
had to Greece. Mentored by John Henry Faulk at the upstart Texas Observer, she became the scourge of corrupt, sexist
backslappers in the legislature. Ann Richards crowed, “She can deck’em!” Molly was too large to patronize, too
savagely funny to ignore, and too fearless to play nice.
Raise Hell, from TV-formed documentarian Janice Engel, is a
riptide of juicy clips and talkers (Richards and daughter Cecille, Paul
Krugman, Dan Rather, Ronnie Dugger, Jim Hightower and – to resonate current
pertinence – Rachel Maddow). Key points
are delivered with spittoon accuracy, and the backstory includes shyness and loneliness
(her great college love had died young), Tex grit ramped up for full effect,
and recurrent alcoholism (like many a life-of-the-party, Molly could be merely
a loud, then sullen drinker). Cancer took Ivins in 2007, pre-Obama. Today she
would feel let-down by Beto and disgusted by Trump. Her afterglow, a
Texas bonfire, endures.
SALAD (A List)
12 Vivid Dramatic
Movies About Real Politicians
Darkest Hour (Gary Oldman as Winston Churchill, 2017), Secret
Honor (Philip Baker Hall as Richard Nixon, 1984), Milk (Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, 2008), Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, 2012), Il Divo (Toni Servillo as Giulio
Andreotti, 2008), Blaze (Paul Newman
as Earl K. Long, 1989), Vice
(Christian Bale as Dick Cheney, 2018), Vincere
(Filippo Timi as Benito Mussolini, 2010), The Iron Lady (Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, 2011), George Wallace (Gary Sinise as Wallace,
1997), LBJ (Woody Harrelson as Lyndon
B. Johnson, 2017) and Le Grand Charles
(Bernard Farcy as Charles de Gaulle, 2006).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire
de Chateau Welles)
A
valuable side-motor for Orson Welles in his Hollywood heyday was tall, can-do
secretary and “girl Friday” Shifra Haran. “Oh, she was great!,” said Orson.
“There was nothing too daring she wasn’t ready to do” (including keeping secret
some of his affairs). Haran said “Mr. Welles was just a demon for work. I’ve
worked for other people and no one worked as hard … just drove himself
relentlessly, and apparently reveled in it.”
Orson’s cronies sneaked a sign into the hospital scene in The Magnificent Ambersons: “Miss Haran,
Head Nurse.” (Quotes from Barbara Leaming’s Orson
Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Making
his debut feature, 1998’s The Cruise,
about motor-mouthed New York tour guide Timothy “Speed” Levitch, director
Bennett Miller could not know he was catching the World Trade Center three
years before its demise, with special lyricism: “On an overcast day, Speed
hurries to the towers. Above their plaza the white twins rise, and to Mark
Beller’s Sati-like piano music the giddy dervish spins in circles. Dizzy, he
lies prone and gazes up at the still-turning immensities. In a Tati touch, he
lifts one leg, as if to steady the world. The
Cruise, one of the WTC’s enduring monuments, was blessedly unaware of it.”
(From the Levitch/The Cruise chapter
of my book Starlight Rising,
available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (Image)
A fine movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
Near
his beloved Brooklyn Bridge Timothy “Speed” Levitch contemplates the East River
while the World Trade Center towers rise beyond, ghostly in The Cruise. (Artisan Entertainment,
1998; Bennett Miller, director and d.p.)
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