Gomorra

Gomorra is a critically lauded and prize-winning film directed by Matteo Garrone, based on a book by Roberto Saviano, about the Camorra, a crime syndicate that has a choke-hold on a section of Italy around Naples. Despite the accolades this film has received, I found myself mostly baffled and bored. It's a real stem-winder--about two and a half hours, punctuated by scenes of raw violence, but mostly dealing in the tedium of daily life in a crime-ridden city.

The film begins with some men being killed in a tanning salon. We never learn who they or their killers are. Then we follow roughly five different stories as they touch upon the activities of the Camorra. I spent much of the first two-thirds of the movie trying to keep everyone straight and wondering how they connected with each other, mostly unsuccessfully. In the last half hour or so the bigger picture emerges, but it took real fortitude to wait that out, and in fact a little voice inside my head urged me to walk out about half-way through, as the couple behind me did.

The most compelling of the five stories involved the young: a pair of teens, who want to emulate Tony Montana of Scarface, steal some weapons from the mob and defy the warnings from the local boss, and a grocery-delivery boy is initiated into his local gang (this involved being shot in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest) and is asked to betray the mother of his friend. If the film had been pared down to deal with these two stories, it would have made a better show, I think. The cycle of violence, which is common to many big cities around the world, is vividly etched here.

The other stories are more quotidian. A dress maker takes on a dangerous, second job of training Chinese garment workers, a waste disposal manager illegally dumps toxic waste on land leased to him by a local godfather hard up for money, and a meek middleman who pays off relatives of imprisoned gangsters gets caught up in an internecine war. These stories at times crawl by and are rarely engaging.

Gomorra is largely nonjudgmental. Only in the closing credits are we even made aware of what we have been watching (I may be wrong, but the word Camorra is never mentioned in the action of the film, nor do we know for sure where it's taking place until then) and these end titles express an outrage over the violence perpetrated that the film itself lacks. The film has a docudrama feel, with hand-held cameras, very tight closeups, and naturalistic acting (much of it is very good). I just never got a sense of why I was watching this, and what it all meant.

Incidentally, most of us non-Italians think of that country as a home to some beautiful buildings, but the architecture on display here is downright depressing, worthy of an Eastern bloc nation in the bitterest cold of the cold war. If I lived in an apartment building that ugly I might want to shoot the architect.