Gomorrah

Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (spelled without the 'h' in its homeland) is a film that seeks, Iñarritu-style, to tell a story through multiple perspectives with a subtextual link. It is also, despite being a film by Italians and for Italians, so heavily indebted to the crime pictures of Italian-Americans that not one but two characters look like young De Niros, one of whom is such a blatant ripoff of his Johnny Boy character from Mean Streets that I hope somebody sent a royalty check. And therein lies the problem with Gomorrah: it's so concerned with miming American crime films that it fails to offer up a unique portrait of Italy's own problems with organized crime.

Split into five distinct storylines, Gomorrah opens on a scene set apart from those stories, in which a group of gangsters relax at a salon. As they bask in tanning booths and pamper themselves with manicures, I couldn't help but think of MTV's recent nightmare Jersey Shore and fear that the "guido" lifestyle has affected even full-blooded Italians. As they fatuously argue and tease one another, another group of thugs enters and shoots the lot of them before leaving as quickly as they entered. This moment emphasizes the "here today, gone tomorrow" lifestyle of these criminals; one day they'll have everything in the world, the next they'll end up in a pool of their own blood.

The five stories all have their own abrupt conclusions, though not everyone must die in this world. Don Ciro, an impotent middleman, takes payouts to the families of incarcerated gangsters to remind them of clan solidarity and to prevent the temptation of squealing to the cops for a nice deal. The money, though, never seems to be enough, and every family rages and begs Don Ciro to secure more money for them from his bosses; he always assures them he will try his best, but even the families can plainly see he's too timid to demand anything of his Camorra bosses for himself, much less a group of strangers. Meanwhile, a young delivery boy, Totò, spots a couple of gangsters dumping drugs and a gun in a police chase, and he returns them to the gang, who accept him.

I don't even know what to write about this film, to be honest. There is a massive gap in my notes between first impressions and final thoughts: its narrative is multilayered but its meaning isn't. I enjoyed the lack of a contrived link between the five stories, allowing the stories to exist independently of each other in the narrative, but unlike Iñarritu's films, they don't match up conceptually as well, save for a basic reading of "crime is bad; some people love it and some people wish they could break free of it." That's certainly not a weak theme -- it's powered some of Scorsese's best works, as well as Pulp Fiction and a number of other films -- but Gomorrah never breaks free of any of its influences. When young Totò joins one clan and his close friend joins another, we know ultimately how the character will react to his new life. When Marco and Ciro, two teenagers who model themselves after Brian De Palma's Scarface, attempt to break into Neapolitan crime by stealing drugs and guns, we know immediately how the story will end. Garrone treats these situations, however, as suspenseful, placing all of his effort into shocking us with depictions of criminal life and never guessing that we might want something more.

Some of this, of course, is the result of Robert Saviano's novel, a mix of a fictional arc with factual news reporting he conducted. However, judging from the stories presented here, he does not appear to have gotten remotely close to the actual Camorra. Only three of the five stories feature any influence from the actual crime organization, and of them only one follows a character who is actually connected to the syndicate: we never see Don Ciro with his bosses, but at least we know that he's trapped in the Camorra, forced to take paltry handouts to loyal members and shyly deflect blame and frustration. Pasquale, a fashion designer, proves that even those with innocuous, innocent careers can somehow offend the Neapolitan crime lords when his enterprise offers competition to Camorra-controlled businesses.

The two most interesting stories have the least tangible connection to the crime syndicate. Marco and Ciro dream of breaking into Italy's underground, but they, like the film itself, define themselves by the movies they've seen. They remind me of Harry Hill from GoodFellas, two dumb, violent kids who see mafia life as the most opulent lifestyle in town. Unlike Hill, however, these kids never find acceptance in the crime bosses. It's impossible to root for these idiots, but they share a perverse moment of fractured innocence after stealing a weapons cache and shoot their spoils in the town outskirts, reciting all their memorized movie lines and blasting the hell out of imaginary Colombians (Tony Montana's enemy). More interesting, though ultimately unnecessary, is the subplot concerning a waste disposal company, amusingly not a front for the mafia but a legitimate business. The boss, Franco (Toni Servillo, so memorable in the other notable Italian import of the year, Il Divo) pays local farmers struggling with debt to essentially ruin their fields by dumping toxic waste in them to undercut competitors. His newest protégé, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), witnesses his boss' crimes but suffers in silence, debating with himself whether to say something and lose the numerous perks of his position (for a legitimate waste disposal unit, these guys sure do dress and act like gangsters).

Garrone attempts with this subplot to connect the corporate crime that occurs every day without sanction to the actions committed by identified criminal organizations, yet the connection is tenuous. It speaks to the film's larger failure to convincingly link its various stories to the core of the Camorra. As Saviano used his reporting as a bedrock for the novel, Gomorrah relies on the testimony not of crime lords or lieutenants but low-level thugs, most of whom are not even involved with the organization but with gangs of Camorra rejects. It attempts to at least partially blame Italy's crime either directly or indirectly on the organization, ignoring socioeconomic and psychological factors that drive people to violent crime. Gomorrah reconstitutes the Italian mafia as the patriarch of Italy's disaffected youth, the neglectful and abusive father who drives the greedy to join its ranks and the poor to form their own groups. It's an absurd message, one made almost unbearable by its murky direction: Garrone appears to have confused hand-held shots without any sense of composition for "realism," and the shallow depth of field in nearly every shot speaks less to the narcissism and solipsism of these self-absorbed characters than the narrow focus of Saviano's supposed New Italian Epic. Ultimately, the greatest lesson I took from Gomorrah is that I really need to reevaluate my less-than-enthusiastic opinion of Michael Mann's use of semi-realistic video in his last two films, for at least he knows a thing or two about placement and detail.

Il Divo

The opening text scroll of Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo, ostensibly a biopic of seven-time Prime Minister of Italy Giulio Andreotti, is a fantastic piece of misdirection. It creates the sort of severe, faux-tense mood we're accustomed to with the life story of the seedy and infamous. Then the director pulls the rug out from under us: Il Divo is, above all else, a riotous black comedy. Oh sure, it tackles serious themes such as corruption and the skewed justice system, but the joy of watching this off-beat biopic comes from how much it ignores the rigidity of the genre.

Imagine the last five minutes of The Godfather and expand them to two hours, and you've got the basic conceit of Il Divo. After a brief and inventive montage of Andreotti's political enemies through the decades meeting their ends, Sorrentino properly opens on the minister on the eve of the start of his seventh term. His unofficial cabinet looks more like an entourage, PR agents and the über-wealthy. Even a fellow politician, Paolo Cirino Pomicino, acts more like a lackey than a respected member of the Christian Democratic Party: sent ahead of his boss like a herald, Pomicino uses fast-talking and coercion to win over potential dissidents within the party. Andreotti does not seem to need real advisers, only people who have the money or the skill to bury something. They've been accompanying Andreotti for so long that they handle potential scandals as trifles; in their jovial presence Italy's governmental buildings seem more like country clubs than executive and legislative landmarks.

They represent a toxic corruption of postwar Italian politics, yet they are but child's play compared to the ringleader. Andreotti is nothing if not fascinating, a gnomic, slouching collection of flesh without an iota of charisma who has somehow managed to sit uninterrupted in some position of Italy's parliament since 1946. He never became president though, as he tells us in the film, only because Italy does not decide that position by direct election. He said a few choice quotes that toe the line between wit and sinister intent, but my favorite would have to be what he reportedly once said to the Pope: "Excuse me, Your Holiness, but you don’t know the Vatican.”

His legend shall only deepen with this film, thanks to a commanding performance by Toni Servillo. In recent years, the United States has reshaped Richard Nixon into a Shakespearean character as the incessant biopics of the 37th president have wrung every ounce of tragedy from the man's life. But if we at last break down and accept Nixon as such, then Servillo's portrayal of Andreotti plays like the evolutionary missing link joining Nixon to Richard III (he also, at times, looks uncomfortably like the vampire of Murnau's Nosferatu). Though he slouches and looks down all the time, at no point does Servillo project an aura of sloth; no, he appears to slouch to present less of a target, some preternatural instinct of self-preservation heightened greatly by a lifetime of skulduggery. He knows what people think of him, because he's too busying planning about more important matters to care. "I have something else too," he tells us in a voiceover: "A vast archive in place of an imagination. Every time I mention it, those who should shut up do so, as if by magic."

Like the best villains, including Michael Corleone, his most obvious cinematic antecedent, Andreotti is too interesting to hate and too twisted to root for. Some of his alleged actions give him pause, but that doesn't stop him from planning the next chess move. So controlling and manipulative is he that his narration can shift the film itself. In the film's most brilliant scene, Andreotti fantasizes about confessing his sins to his wife: and the revelation of the raging torrent of the minister's inner thoughts contained behind that blank slate of an outer façade places Servillo's performance in frightening and astounding context.

It must be said, however, that Italian politics are confusing as hell. I don't know a thing about them, and I suspect the majority of you don't as well. This results in the film's biggest, for lack of a better term, flaw: made by Italians for Italians, Il Divo assumes its large chunks of background as read, thus leaving American audiences with the task not only keeping track with the seemingly endless list of names that pop up on the screen every few minutes but knowing why those names are important without being given any information. As Andreotti is still alive, which makes the film a fairly bold move on Sorrentino's part, one might assume that Italians know all of the backstory, even that many remember some of all of it.

It's unfair to single out this aspect of the film as a weakness, as I never have to judge an American film based on how I think it will play outside the States. Still, Sorrentino's madcap, pulp vision of Andreotti's life, at times the film's biggest stylistic strength, wore me down with its deluge of unexplained events, to the point that I started to drift near the end, brought back only by Servillo's intoxicating, spellbinding performance. If my overall rating seems low compared to my written thoughts on the film, it is, but I couldn't help but feel that the utter lack of context for so much of the film distracted me too often from the dizzy fun of its merciless deadpan comedy. At the end of the day, though, eff the rating: everyone should watch this film, both to see Michael Corleone's life as a comedy and for the sublime work Servillo contributes, the finest I've seen all year.