Gomorrah (2008)
Directed by Matteo Garrone
An inside look at Italy's modern-day crime families, the Camorra in Naples and Caserta. Based on a book by Roberto Saviano. Power, money and blood: these are the "values" that the residents of the Province of Naples and Caserta have to face every day. They hardly ever have a choice and are forced to obey the rules of the Camorra. Only a lucky few can even think of leading a normal life.
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Finally, theres Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), two adolescents obsessed with Scarface, who reenact acts of violence and goof around guns, but, soon enough, they get caught up with the real violence of the Camorra.
Two young friends, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), play at being Tony Montana, Al Pacino's character from Scarface.
Story No. 3 tells of two cocky friends, Marco (Marco Macor) and Sweet Pea (Ciro Petrone), idiots who act out scenes from Scarface and have more or less internalized every Hollywood mafia cliché that Garrone’s film rejects.
While the movie is yet another saga of killing and corruption, unlike so many of its forebears, from "Scarface" to "City of God," there appear to be no spoils.
Through films such as “The Godfather” and “Scarface,” along with the television smash “The Sopranos,” there’s been a definite glamorization of life inside the deep layers of the mafia.
Two charismatic but woefully foolish boys, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) hang out in a disused building acting out scenes from Brian De Palma's "Scarface," and dreaming of creating their own two-man crime syndicate.
Between Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia as Greek tragedy, The Godfather, and Martin Scorsese’s high strung Manhattan goombah’s (Mean Streets, Goodfellas), La Cosa Nostra has become synonymous with flowered filmmaking.
In such entertainments as "The Godfather," "Goodfellas" and "The Sopranos," the Italian-American Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is depicted as a strongly hierarchical institution governed not by the laws of society but by its own strict codes of ethics and conduct, including a strict delineation between insiders (that is to say, crooks) and civilians.
And they’ve had to since, no matter what price their characters end up paying, movies like Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino, and Coppola’s Godfather trilogy inadvertently glamorize gangster life.
To lump it in the same category as Scarface or GoodFellas would be misleading.
Directed and co-written by Matteo Garrone from the book by Roberto Saviano (who now has a permanent police escort), Gomorrah depicts Italian clan violence so far removed from the late-Romantic shadings of The Godfather — or the rich suburban irony of The Sopranos — that it might as well belong to another genre completely.
Through films such as “The Godfather” and “Scarface,” along with the television smash “The Sopranos,” there’s been a definite glamorization of life inside the deep layers of the mafia.
Between Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia as Greek tragedy, The Godfather, and Martin Scorsese’s high strung Manhattan goombah’s (Mean Streets, Goodfellas), La Cosa Nostra has become synonymous with flowered filmmaking.
“Gomorrah” is possibly the most authentic representation to date of the depth and influence of organized crime, but it will likely disappoint fans of “The Godfather” trilogy or “The Sopranos.”
In such entertainments as "The Godfather," "Goodfellas" and "The Sopranos," the Italian-American Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, is depicted as a strongly hierarchical institution governed not by the laws of society but by its own strict codes of ethics and conduct, including a strict delineation between insiders (that is to say, crooks) and civilians.
Not unlike the mafia operations we've become familiar with ("The Godfather" series, "The Sopranos," etc., etc.) this one includes drugs, prostitution and a corner in local garbage dumping.
Dropping us in the middle of Italian slum Scampia, itself smack dab in the middle of nothing, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (Gomorra) is the Hud of gangster flicks, all deglamourized, harsh, expressionist stripping-away of illusions and idealism to reveal the gasping, grasping emptiness underneath.
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Between Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia as Greek tragedy, The Godfather, and Martin Scorsese’s high strung Manhattan goombah’s (Mean Streets, Goodfellas), La Cosa Nostra has become synonymous with flowered filmmaking.
Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah is a jolting and utterly original take on the gangster movie — or would be had it been made 35 years ago, before Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets.
Gomorrah's episodic, mosaic structure is in some ways comparable to Steven Soderbergh's Traffic, but Garrone is not so much interested in diagramming a process as mapping a specific terrain.
Gomorrah (the original Italian title left off the "H," to pun on the name of the iniquitous biblical town) makes up for lost time by following at least five separate narrative threads — à la Traffic, Syriana, etc. — about dirty deeds spiraling around each other in the weed patches and disco-bars.
It also has the loose structure of Steven Soderbergh's coke-trade chronicle, "Traffic," although it's even looser.
His previous features, beginning with "Little Odessa" in 1994 and continuing with "The Yards" and "We Own the Night," have all been crime films.
In contrast with the interweaving threads of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" and "Amores Perros," which "Gomorrah" recalls, Garrone's characters neither cross paths nor are doomed to some inevitable horror by a filmmaker's stylish fatalism.
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Garrone focuses on five intertwining storylines in a patchwork film not unlike Crash or Robert Altman's Short Cuts in the way characters bounce off each other and their actions have ripple effects on one another.
In contrast with the interweaving threads of Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" and "Amores Perros," which "Gomorrah" recalls, Garrone's characters neither cross paths nor are doomed to some inevitable horror by a filmmaker's stylish fatalism.
Like Scorsese's film, Gomorrah tells tales of initiation and disillusionment, five of them in this case, all extrapolated from anecdotes in the book, and loosely connected, like the narratives in Babel — it's another look at international misery named after a Biblical disaster area.