Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (Toni Servillo) faces trial for his alleged Mafia ties in the award-winning film Il Divo. (BetaFilm)

Frank Langella's portrayal of Tricky Dick in Frost/Nixon was impressive, but it's nothing compared to Toni Servillo's magnetic performance as Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo. It's hard to resist the comparison. The late U.S. president and Andreotti — who served three times as Italy's prime minister — were not only contemporaries but also political birds of a feather. Both saw their careers end in scandal, but managed to escape punishment. Both were also cold, cunning, secretive men who excelled at the kind of machinations that keep politicians in power.

Giulio Andreotti, a three-time Italian prime minister and a fixture in parliament since the end of the Second World War, was finally undone by his alleged ties to the Mafia.

Andreotti, however, didn't share Nixon's fatal fondness for tape-recording private conversations. As played by Servillo in Paolo Sorrentino's bravura biopic, Andreotti seldom bares his soul except in his diary and to his priest. Even then, he uses his time in the confessional to justify his actions rather than repent for them.

A doleful-looking Servillo doesn't impersonate Andreotti so much as embody his inscrutable character. With hunched shoulders, massive glasses and Dumbo ears, Servillo not only looks like the man, he simultaneously suggests both the gnomish and gnomic. His Andreotti is like Churchill's famous description of Russia: a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. He walks silently through the corridors of power like a monk in a monastery, his narrow little body clenched, as if guarding dark secrets that no state prosecutor will ever prise from him.

Servillo's Andreotti is the hump-backed question mark at the heart of this maelstrom of a movie. Writer-director Sorrentino, tipping his fedora to classic gangster flicks, tracks his subject's downfall with the breathless gusto of a crime thriller. It's all too appropriate, since the durable Andreotti, a fixture in the Italian parliament since the end of the Second World War, was finally undone by his alleged ties to the Mafia.

The film focuses on Andreotti's final term in the early 1990s, which ended in corruption charges that destroyed the Christian Democrat party and led to an investigation of his mob connections. Sorrentino opens the picture with a surreal image that signals his unconventional approach: Andreotti, who suffers from migraines, is introduced to us sitting alone at a table, his head bristling with acupuncture needles. Before we can consider the allusion – ideological martyr or political porcupine? – we're suddenly engulfed in a GoodFellas-style montage of mob hits, murders of high-ranking officials and a muckraking journalist that Andreotti may (or may not) have had a hand in.

Prime Minister Andreotti's inner circle gather for a meeting in a scene from Il Divo. (BetaFilm)

From there, Sorrentino dares us to keep up, plunging us into the labyrinthine intrigues of postwar Italian politics, from the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978 through the "Bribesville" scandal two decades later. Avoiding any outright accusations (Andreotti is still alive and was legally acquitted in 2003), Sorrentino instead daringly suggests the Mafia/government axis in crosscut scenes and playfully treats politicians like powerful mobsters. There's a witty early sequence when Andreotti's formidable inner circle – including cabinet ministers and a Catholic cardinal – are shot arriving for a meeting in balletic slow motion, as if they were the sexy thugs of Reservoir Dogs. And, in a nod to The Godfather, Servillo's Andreotti blurs the difference between politico and padrino, at one point receiving a Christmas visit from his humble constituents and doling out little gifts.

It's hard to keep track of the players in this dizzying danse macabre – set to a propulsive score by composer Teho Teardo – even though Sorrentino identifies some of them in blood-red lettering as they swirl by. The standouts are the lively finance minister Pomicino (Carlo Buccirosso) and Livia (Anna Bonaiuto), Andreotti's wife, who matches her husband in stoicism. Buccirosso, looking like a balding Tim Roth, acts as a kind of elfin counterpoint to Servillo's dour Divo; when he isn't frenetically canvassing fellow MPs to support a vote to make Andreotti president, he's sliding across the polished marble floors of parliament like a high-spirited teenager. Bonaiuto's Livia, meanwhile, gives some insight into the younger Andreotti when she reminisces about their long marriage. Ironically enough, he proposed to her in a cemetery.

Andreotti, now 90 and a senator for life, has seen Il Divo and – not surprisingly – didn't like it. He's in the minority. The film won the Cannes Jury Prize in 2008 and Servillo picked up this year's David (the Italian Oscar) for best actor. Unlike Langella's Nixon, you won't come away feeling any sympathy – deserved or otherwise – for Servillo's wily political animal. His Andreotti, however, is far more complex. He suggests that the man called both divo (divine) and Beelzebub may in fact be a chameleon – sad proof that a successful politician is whatever he has to be to survive.

In Italian, with English subtitles.

Il Divo opens in Toronto on July 10 and across Canada this summer.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.