Gomorrah, Matteo Garrone’s unblinking look into the
devastated Italian provinces where the Comorra crime syndicate does its
dirty work, is like a mobster-movie pizza pie, undercooked and crudely
sawn into half a dozen uneven, indigestible slices of life that don’t
offer its hungry customers much to chew on besides the fearful,
depressing contemplation of corrupt moral and economic systems. Its
dismembered bits of plot are mixed indiscriminately as part of a
puzzling plan to deny its audience the passé pleasures of
narrative, character identification, and food for thought.
The word film critics most often invoke to separate Gomorrah
from other crime films is “unglamorous,” as if the moviegoing public
were a moronic gang of Tony Montana wannabes who needed scolding for
its gangster dreams. But whether that word is meant to chasten
ticket-buyers or simply signal a larger failure of critical
imagination, it’s not inaccurate: To employ the term “mobster” at any
point in the movie would confer a false spats-and-pinstripes elegance
on the stuffed-sausage Cro-Magnons who periodically emerge from
Gomorrah‘s depths and trundle around in sandals, track suits,
and wife-beaters, with guns tucked into their pants like hammers or
scythes.
The film’s rub-your-nose-in-it ugliness extends beyond the
characters, seeping into the landscape. Garrone shoots Naples as though
it’s an abandoned archaeological site, and the beauty of the Italian
countryside is ignored.
Instead, most of the action takes place in and around the
universal-slum skylines of overcrowded housing developments and
half-completed construction sites. And the nervous hand-held camerawork
provides additional irony, as it darts and bobs about its subjects,
seeking some new or fresh angle from which to view the unfair
transactions and displays of brute force as thoughtless and regular as
a ritual animal slaughter.
Opens Friday, April 24th, at Studio on the Square
