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Most mob dramas tend to concentrate on organized crime from the inside out. Whether it's The Godfather, Goodfellas, or The Sopranos, we see these operations from the point of view of those running them and those working within them. The communities they impact are often secondary. That's not a criticism; breaking down the codes of honor among thieves, and the interpersonal relationships between people who operate by entirely alternate moralities makes for great drama. But most of the time, the impact of their crimes on anyone but themselves isn't explored in great detail. You might get an appearance from a dying junkie here or there, but usually as a plot device and not an integral character. Don Corleone and Tony Montana may be the bad guys, but they're still the heroes of their stories.
Gomorrah takes a far different approach. The film is based on the book of the same name by Robert Saviano, an investigative account of the modern practices of centuries-old Italian Camorra crime clans. In Scampia, a Neapolitan suburb that has long been a base of operations for many of these clans, organized crime takes on a scope that makes the American mafia seem quaint in comparison. This is the setting for Saviano's book, which earned the author numerous prices on his head for the frank, no-holds-barred look into the inner workings of the Camorra. His ability to do so was aided in large part by the fact that in Scampia, there are few residents whose lives aren't touched on a daily basis by the crimelords. Gomorrah takes a multi-faceted and immersive perspective, more The Wire than The Sopranos. The only major players conspicuously missing here are the police. In Scampia, they are practically a non-presence; crime controls everything. The point is underlined in one scene early on when a lookout calls out "Carabinieri!" from a rooftop overlooking an open-air drug market. After the call is given, the camera never pans to the approaching cops. And few of the dealers or drug soldiers look terribly concerned.
The film tells five separate stories, which are linked in only the most cursory of ways. Some characters may be mentioned in passing in one storyline, and then turn up as supporting players in another one. The only real connection is the vicious world these people live in. This isn't a disjointed, heavily overlapped Tarantino-esque narrative. It's essentially an omnibus film done by one director, with the short films cut together instead of running consecutively. In one, we see the recruitment of a young boy into one clan after he does them a good turn by retrieving a weapon and a bag dropped during a raid (the only real sign of any attempt to regulate the local chaos by the police in the entire film). The boy is presented, up to this point, as a good kid, who delivers groceries for his mom and seems to stay on the straight and narrow. If kids like this idolize the gang soldiers they see walking by and seek to join up, things must be pretty bleak.
Another segment looks at a man who makes his living burying hazardous waste as if it were innocuous trash in landfills and quarries. This is apparently such a widespread practice that cancer rates can be seen to skyrocket in areas of Italy where this is going on.
The film's most entertaining sequence concerns a couple of small-time stick-up boys with criminal ambitions that far outstrip their actual abilities. Their antics — stealing from dealers who are clearly tougher than they are, making no attempt to conceal their identities from the mobsters they're ripping off, firing off grenade launchers in their underwear after stumbling upon a munitions stash — might be more amusing if their stupidity wasn't so tragically alarming.
More simply tragic is the story of a tailor who incurs the wrath of the Camorra when he surreptitiously agrees to train a warehouse full of Chinese immigrant labor seamstresses, who are undercutting the local (mob-run) textile industry's bottom line in cheap high fashion knock-offs.
The one story element that carries through all of these is rising tension between two of the clans, and a mob war that breaks out as a result. In nearly every storyline characters are required to take sides. The fifth story is about a meek and skittish middle-aged payoff man, who's spent his life distributing funds to people who the clan owes money — for years of service, for silence, for taking the fall and doing time. More than anyone else, he sees the war from the front lines, walking those lines every day as he makes his rounds with wads of cash to distribute. As the tensions rise, he seems to become more and more unpopular: the payoffs are never enough, everyone in the housing projects he services (which are some of the most depressingly dank concrete slums you've ever seen on film) are becoming more and more impatient with the state of life here.
Despite its disjointed structure, Gomorrah comes to a narrative convergence without ever actually having to bring its stories together. Each climaxes independently, yet it all feels like one piece. That's most likely a result of the outcomes all serving the overall fabric that makes up the movie. In this land of self-serving criminality, there is little hope. Sometimes the wicked die, sometimes they live a little longer, but those foolish enough to try to exercise the barest hint of virtue are sure to be singled out as the weakest and picked off. Choice between a life with or apart from the crime doesn't really exist here. The only choice is whether to survive or not, and the only poor character traits are weakness and naivete. The whole thing is deceptively slipshod; its journalistic, quasi-documentary style obscures the fact that it's meticulously constructed. There is one scene in which desperate junkies are framed to look like rats in a cage clamoring for a feeding as their fixes are distributed. Highly choreographed scenes such as this one blend seamlessly with the fast and loose shooting of the rest. Gomorrah is a stark, sobering, and frankly scary mob film that reinvents the genre.
Opens today at Bethesda Row Cinema.
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One of my Top 10 gangster movies: Minbo. A story so good it got the director's ass killed by the yakuza. Take that, Mr. Scorcese.
The Wiki page you linked to said the director lived through the attack.
I saw the trailer for Gomorrah last night when I went to go see "The Wrestler" and I was riveted. It will be good to see the last vestiges of the romanticized Godfather myth of honorable men in a dishonorable business stripped from the Mafia.
Itami later died under suspicious circumstances. And his family has refused to comment on the matter.
Given the strictures of Japanese society, neither circumstance proves that the yakuza were involved in his death.
The family would not have commented no matter what, that's just the way it is in Japan.
Convenient, no? Instead of snitches get stitches, it's snitches get pushed out of windows. DC's thuggee crews could learn a thing or two from the Poisoned Fists of the Pacific Rim.