May 18, 2008

Cannes. Gomorrah.

"Powerful, stripped to its very essence and featuring a spectacular cast (of mostly non-professionals), Matteo Garrone's sixth feature film Gomorrah goes beyond Tarantino's gratuitous violence and even Scorsese's Hollywood sensibility in depicting the everyday reality of organized crime's foot soldiers."

Gomorrah

Natasha Senjanovic in the Hollywood Reporter: "The characters of the film's five stories all work for the Camorra - the Neapolitan 'mafia' behind over 4,000 murders in 30 years in Italy, and countless illegal activities - and besides being extremely dangerous are relentless, petty and anything but wise."

Updated through 5/25.

"Probably the most authentic and unsentimental mafia movie ever to come out of Italy, Gomorrah is a courageous, bruising and harrrowing ride," writes Lee Marshall in Screen Daily. "But the film suffers from its own bravery: in adapting Roberto Saviano's bestselling book for the screen, Matteo Garrone and his five co-scripters (including Saviano himself, currently living under police protection) have jettisoned the journalistic context of the Neapolitan Camorra war and left us only with the dog-eat-dog, carpe-diem chaos of life in the crime-ridden suburbs of Scampia and Secondigliano. Like the white powder used and traded by many of its protagonists, Gomorrah provides a kick-in-the-head rush but no lasting buzz."

"Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control," writes Jay Weissberg in Variety. "While the Sicilian Mafia has drawn the lion's share of media attention over the years, it's the Camorra families of Naples who have really created an oligarchy of power and violence, controlling lives and entire economies not just in Italy but worldwide - their profits are estimated at over $233 billion per year.... But Garrone is clearly more interested in how the average inhabitant becomes drawn into the cycle of corruption and violence. Wads of cash regularly turn up in Gomorrah, but the trappings of wealth are nowhere to be seen: no fancy villas, no flashy jewels or expensive meals, since the Camorra's dough never really trickles down to the foot soldiers."

Competing.

Updates, 5/19: "With dozens of characters bulleting around (most of them male, most of them not terribly bright, many of them dead before too long), it's not an action or crime movie so much as a pesudo-documentary on interspecies aggression," writes the Boston Globe's Ty Burr. "With rich, real characters. Sort of like if Robert Altman had directed The Godfather. (And I mean sort of)."

This is "a dynamite reinvention of the Italian Mafioso movie as both a multileveled social melodrama and an Antonioni-style nihilistic contemplation," writes Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "Many critics here found themselves disoriented by Gomorra, but I'm sure that's the director's intention. This isn't one of those crime operas with a cast of finely drawn mini-Lears and mini-Hamlets to follow.... [I]t's hard to avoid seeing it as a broader commentary on Italy's recent social and political paralysis. Furthermore, Gomorra blends the disparate traditions of Italian cinema - the crime drama, the melodrama, the art film - more adeptly than any movie from that country in recent memory."

Updates, 5/20: Gomorrah is "the best movie I've seen at this year's festival, as well as a furious and brilliant engagement with the times in which we live," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Gomorrah is also something of a rebuke to fans of The Sopranos and the countless other television programs, movies and books that traffic in the mythology of organized crime.... And while this complicated, multistranded story is saturated with local detail, its implications resonate further."

"The complex intercutting yields a cascading and revealing sense of how power, fear and the constant specter of death govern the daily activities," writes Patrick Z McGavin in Stop Smiling. "I didn't recognize any of the actors, but the bodies and faces are all possessed of an eerie verisimilitude."

"Gomorra may be better than your standard variety mob picture, but the plot strands themselves aren't remarkable," writes Anthony Kaufman at indieWIRE. "Ultimately, the film stands out because of its meticulous attention to detail."

Updates, 5/21: "Gomorra shows a charmless, down-and-dirty, ruthlessly capitalistic organization where all but the worst are always busting their backs and the good times are few (and often cost, dearly)," writes Glenn Kenny. "The movie's overt yoking of capitalism to criminality boasts the advantage of having a preponderance of facts on its side; one delights in imagining the fulminations of protest this picture might inspire in a glib Randroid free-market cheerleader like Megan McArdle. Its particular social conscience aside, this is an instant genre classic that I dearly hope sees American distribution."

For Boyd van Hoeij (european-films.net), this is "one of the most incisive organised-crime films to emerge from any country since the 1970s" and perhaps "the first Italian hyperlink film since that term was coined a few years ago.... Like the Godfather films, Gomorra looks at organised crime from the inside out, which leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to sympathise with people who are essentially criminals. (Except as extras, police are nowhere in sight and never seem to be on anyone’s mind either.) Certainly, it is possible to find recognisable human behaviour in the many people that populate Gomorra's streets, whether it be their fears, their loyalty or their lust for money, power and revenge."

Online listening tip. In the May 18 NYT Book Review podcast, Rachel Donadio talks about the popularity of Saviano's book in Italy (still waiting to be discovered by many readers in the US) and what it's cost him.

Online viewing tip. Cineuropa has the (un-sub-titled) trailer.

"Normally, comparing a film to a television program's intended as a slight, a knock against a film that didn't have the sweep and scope you'd expect to witness on the big screen, but when I compare director Matteo Garrone's Gomorra to The Wire, I hope you'll recognize I mean it as a compliment," writes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "Set in the provinces around Naples, where the crime organization known as the Cammora is not parallel to the everyday workings of society but instead is the everyday workings of society, Gomorra's a sweeping, stirring drama that has the shoot-and-loot tension of the best crime cinema but also has the scope and serious intent of great drama."

Update, 5/22: Online listening tip. The Observer's Jason Solomons talks with Garrone - and predicts Gomorrah will win the Palme d'Or.

Update, 5/25: The Observer's Jason Solomons is sticking by his guns: "By some distance, the best film at this 61st Cannes Film Festival was Gomorra."

Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

Posted by dwhudson at May 18, 2008 11:40 AM