Il Divo (2008)
Giulio Andreotti: Thinking ill of your fellow man is a sin,
but you have guessed right
Giulio Andreotti is a respected seven-time Prime Minister,
an international statesman, a survivor of countess Machiavellian battles. He seems
unstoppable, until his downfall comes quickly as one after the other, a
sequence of Mafia turncoats name him as being the Mafia’s man in Rome.
Andreotti as a character is likeable and charmingly self-deprecating,
but there is a reason why he has survived when so many others have died or
fallen in disgrace. He is a strange character with many sides to him. We see
him confessing to his priest regularly, helping his poor constituents with
paying their bills and buying presents for their children. He knows his
constituents intimately, he knows their troubles and the hardships they face
and he does try and help them. On the other hand it seems pretty certain (they weren’t
able to say definitely because of legal reasons) that he had links to the top
leadership of the Mafia and that he was aware of, if not actively ordered, the
murder of several of his political enemies.
The message of the film, the strapline on the English version
of the DVD box, is that to do good, sometimes you have to do evil. The people
he has surrounded himself with are obviously corrupt and out for themselves,
but with regards to Andreotti the actions and decisions he took were done to
keep Italy safe against the threat (real or imagined) of a Communist rebellion.
That is what makes the character so
difficult to fathom out, we believe him to have done evil things but we find it
hard to see him as evil.
All references come from IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1023490/
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