Gomorrah

It's easy to mistake the shocking new Italian movie about organized crime in Naples for simply a crime film or a gangster picture. While it fits under those genres it surpasses them, because despite the scams and hold-ups and buy-offs and killings, Gomorrah is essentially a film about the corrosive effect of unchecked poverty, fully drinking of the Luis Buniel Los Olvidados tradition as much as the post-WWII Italian Neorealist lineage. It's just supercharged without losing any grit, a world where dread is a birthright and life struggles to grow corrupted through the cracks.

When the picture started I thought maybe I'd have seen it all before, but it's an original, large-scale organized crime completely stripped of glamor, making The Sopranos seem as opulent as The Godfather. The tapestry is different than we've come to expect -- five stories that virtually never connect save being in the same geographic criminal economy. There's no causality between plotlines, which works here to make the movie seem larger, more universal, even as it bores down into the deadly and deadened world of the projects, the sweatshops, the illegal dumping grounds. It's a vicious world of pollution, and you can't take your eyes off the screen.

Director Matteo Garrone went deep into the locale and culture illuminated by author/reporter Roberto Saviano in his non-fiction international bestseller, so close that some actors playing themselves have even ended up arrested. But trouble is no stranger to the creative endeavor, as Saviano has had to flee the country under syndicate death threats.

There are characters -- the 13 year-old boy who gets his initiation, the teenage would-be Scarface duo, the young fixer aiding the suave middle-aged businessman, the tailor who seeks respect, the old bagman who's in too deep. But it moves faster than you can blink filled with thumbnail portraits right and left, and the violence is abrupt, short and brutish, like real life. And I think some of them get off lighter than I expected -- crushed is sometimes the best fate you can pray for.

I'm embedding the Italian trailer below because I think the American trailer has too big a spoiler, so avoid that one if you can, until after you see the movie. I went in knowing very little, having seen even less, and while I wasn't sure I loved the movie when it ended, I couldn't deny it was about something, that it was disturbing but for good and pressing reason:



And now I think it's the new benchmark that will take many years to beat, because it easily transcends the gangster genre into the anthropological realm with more immediacy than even Scorsese (and Marty is presenting the movie in the U.S.). On one hand, like the unjust violence of poverty in Slumdog Millionaire, it asks how can we allow such a state to persist in our modern world. On the other, it makes us complicit, as if our own moral paucity is on the line.

After all, isn't someone always paying up to somebody else?