Gomorrah
Directed by Matteo Garrone
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- Courtesy IFC Films
Adapted from Roberto Saviano’s “nonfiction novel” raking the muck of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mob, Gomorrah has been received as a wake-up call, an engagé panorama from an often stagnant culture. Which it is, right from its cold-opening assassination under hot blue tanning lamps, a close-up on a corpse’s manicure encapsulating the dual malignancies of vanity and violence. A seemingly random eruption in an everyday place, it’s a brutal tone-setter — but the key word there should be “seemingly.” In fact we never see these characters again: Saviano and cowriter-director Matteo Garrone prize emphasis over context.
Garrone’s camera keeps close to its subjects, so that violence hits without warning — or reason. This visceral impressionism informs Gomorrah’s plotting, which is more opening statement than direct examination: five narratives aim to replace mob-movie awe with moral outrage, particularly through twinned (redundant) scenarios of machismo’s siren call and middle-aged deflation. Two Scarface fans get off playing kingpin, shooting stolen firearms in their skivvies, while a 13-year-old delivery boy comes of age as a drug runner for a turf-warring syndicate. Children are innocence corrupted; women either whores or madonnas betrayed by their male protectors: the fastidious bagman, doling out welfare in a fortresslike apartment complex, can only say “I’ll pass it on” when the water is shut off. But we’re restricted to his foot-soldier’s knowledge of — and responsibility for — such machinations, just as we only glimpse how a tailor’s knock-off couture touches us. More superstructural are the waste management dealings through which Saviano and Garrone expose no-questions-asked commerce, circumvented border controls, endangered cheap labor — and the toxic ooze just below the surface of the earth. Gomorrah, though, leaves things mostly buried.
Opens February 13
Garrone’s camera keeps close to its subjects, so that violence hits without warning — or reason. This visceral impressionism informs Gomorrah’s plotting, which is more opening statement than direct examination: five narratives aim to replace mob-movie awe with moral outrage, particularly through twinned (redundant) scenarios of machismo’s siren call and middle-aged deflation. Two Scarface fans get off playing kingpin, shooting stolen firearms in their skivvies, while a 13-year-old delivery boy comes of age as a drug runner for a turf-warring syndicate. Children are innocence corrupted; women either whores or madonnas betrayed by their male protectors: the fastidious bagman, doling out welfare in a fortresslike apartment complex, can only say “I’ll pass it on” when the water is shut off. But we’re restricted to his foot-soldier’s knowledge of — and responsibility for — such machinations, just as we only glimpse how a tailor’s knock-off couture touches us. More superstructural are the waste management dealings through which Saviano and Garrone expose no-questions-asked commerce, circumvented border controls, endangered cheap labor — and the toxic ooze just below the surface of the earth. Gomorrah, though, leaves things mostly buried.
Opens February 13
