Feb 27, 2009 12:25 pm US/Eastern
'Gomorrah'
LOS ANGELES (AP) ―
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Two cocky Italian teenagers run around their dilapidated Naples neighborhood, melodramatically riffing on "Scarface" lines to each other: "Now it has to be ours, the whole world. Miami, all of it."
AP
Two cocky Italian teenagers run around their dilapidated Naples neighborhood, melodramatically riffing on "Scarface" lines to each other: "Now it has to be ours, the whole world. Miami, all of it."
They're certainly no more over-the-top than Al Pacino. But this is the closest director and co-writer Matteo Garrone comes to any sort of traditional, Hollywoodized depiction of mob life. It's appropriate, though, that Brian De Palma's bloody epic is the source of inspiration for these wannabe thugs.
That film, and the genre in general, are so entrenched in contemporary pop culture that they've become a source of self-parody. That's what's so compelling about "Gomorrah": It upends everything you think you know about the mob, and mob movies. In adapting the 2006 book about the Camorra crime organization by Roberto Saviano -- which has forced the author, now 29, into hiding -- Garrone has made a movie that's so defiantly minimalist, you'd think it was a documentary.
Through hand-held camera and natural light, it's as if Garrone has made an Italian film in the Danish Dogma tradition. Innovative and daring, to be sure -- and that's simultaneously the movie's greatest strength and its weakness.
For a while, it's hard to tell who's who among the five different story lines -- difficult to determine why they matter and how they're connected, if at all. Garrone's reasoning makes sense: "Gomorrah" is more about the powerful machinery than the individuals who inhabit it.
But the approach does keep you off guard. Unrated but contains graphic violence, language, nudity and drug use.
135 min. Three stars out of four.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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