"Gomorrah" (2009)

Realism has its merits, but it has also its pitfalls.

The italian neorealist tradition's alive and well: it has taken a turn toward the Bourne steadicam intensity, the City of God crossnarrative, the Amores Perros metacommentary on the postmodern condition; yet in Gomorrah, the elements which had made those films excellent are condensed to a tasteless soup. What had made those films exceptional, in Gomorrah are made aesthetically trivial. It may be for reason that the film has no aesthetic preoccupations whatsoever which has caused some to acclaim it; but the intentional design of its dramatic unremarkability is stretched beyond its capacity to make a lasting description. Following on the heels of the established american interpretation of mob violence (glorified and exaggerated), Gomorrah makes no pretension to imitate the already patently unrealistic; its asset is to display violence as it really is: spontaneous and banal. We may be so desensitized to violence on screen that Gomorrah comes across as a rather tame film. Its final scene in which two young adolescents are killed is not ruthless nor is it atrocious; it is played out very clinically, and there is no taste left in the mouth, hardly an emotional impact made, since the irony had long played itself out: the boys at the beginning of film pretend to be mini Tony Montanas ruling the world of crime: by the end they are the result of their fascination with violence, the sacrificed. The filmmakers find it sufficiently clever that the adolescents (who are italian and the rightful 'heirs' of mob prestige) mimic american films that themselves mimicked a good deal of italian mafia subculture (granted, Scarface is a cuban narquero fighting colombians for control of the coke game); the italian boys are fed back what the americans had packaged out of a longstanding attraction to the glamorized violence of mobsters. So it appears that Gommorah's filmmakers' obligation to their own culture was not only to expose a serious issue at the heart of italian socioeconomics, but also to steal back what had been grossly misinterpreted as a romance with the way of the gun (in much the same as the samurai are romanticized, in the way of their sword.) To do this the filmmakers displaced the effective dramatic import of the violence by diffusing the points of impact: the Camorra family is vast, and its victims numberless, hence the narrative undertakes a broad and indirect communication with its diverse but nearly nameless characters: despite their linkages, they are unknown to each other, and one character never ends up meeting another. Their dramatic vitality is restricted by the film's overcompensation for the anecdotal; the overall message is sucked dry by the tedium of realism sans cinema, and the violence (which in film is nearly always an unreal proposition) is tendered with nary a signature nor reason.

It followed from this sucking dry of the dramatic value that violence would unveil itself as a chance intersection of wilful blindness, unfocused hatred, and utter accident; rather than as the life force for which the eagle is moved to prey on the meek rabbit, violence shows itself to be a shadow to the volition that designs memorable acts: violence becomes merely an insipid habit, a deformity, a brutal stutter...