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Gomorrah

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: R
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Gomorrah is the story of a damned city and the crime that envelops it. Set in Naples, marking it with the title as Italy’s modern sin city, the film shows a place overrun with the crime of the Camorra, the oldest and most infamous organized crime syndicate in Italy. It depicts the brutality and chaos of living in a world where law and order have long since fallen by the wayside with a beautifully harsh realism. While Italian mobsters have always been glamorized, particularly in America, this film makes Don Corrleone and Tony Soprano look like nothing but the stuff of child’s play and fairy tales.

What makes the film so fascinating is the way it ignores all conventions attached to mob films. In Gomorrah, there are no mansions or seductive strip clubs populated with the mafia’s elite. Here, even the Don lives in squalor. Small and dirty apartments stacked one on top of the other and littered and dusty fields compose most of the films backdrop. There is the sense that everyone is shoved together and isolated at the same time.

The bulk of the film doesn’t seem to be concerned with the elaborate police chases, hit lists, sex and money of the typical Hollywood fare. Instead, the film lets you inside the various wheelings and dealings of the way crime works. There is no great build-up to the business transactions, betrayals and deaths. The film presents them plainly and straightforwardly because these things are simply facts of life that the characters cannot afford to give elaborate pomp and circumstance to; in Naples, people are dying every day.

The varied cast of characters illustrates the way that the city’s crime has seeped irreparably into all of their lives. From the young boy Totó, who seeks out a clan to accept him, to Don Ciro, a meek money-carrier whose future seems frighteningly uncertain, the men of Gomorrah, and in this film it is a man’s world, are all colliding with one another, with the violence, and with their own morality.

At nearly two and a half hours, Gomorrah is slow at times and may be particularly excruciating for those hoping for minute after minute of raucous and bloody violence. Yet the pacing works because it’s not trying to offer a suspenseful thrill-ride that glazes over the intricacies of the crime world to get to the violence. It doesn’t want to be The Godfather; in fact, it wants to destroy the notion that film created of Italian organized crime.

Stripped bare of the glitz of Hollywood and pared down to its gritty realism, Gomorrah feels more like a documentary than a fiction film and in doing so it exposes its audience to the horrible truth: the film is based on fact and the fact of the matter is that real people are really dying and the Camorra is out of hand. This film’s terrifying glimpse into the real world of organized crime is not to be missed.