Gomorra

Directed by Matteo Garrone
Written by Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, Matteo Garrone, Massimo Gaudioso, Roberto Saviano
Full credits from IMDb

Gomorra, a sprawling, footslogging, anti-romantic mob movie, operates under the influence of two contrasting impulses: it’s a brutally realistic glimpse of gangster violence set against a hellscape so vividly decayed that it couldn’t possibly be real. Director Garrone alienates us from the first reel, which he sets amid walk-in tanning booths. (Such things exist? Solamente in Italia!) Large white lamps bathe the screen in navytones as rich as Blue Man Group bodypaint; this isn’t a mob movie set Scorsesely in the next neighborhood over, but on what appears to be a strange exotic planet, something not out of 1974 but 2001.

This is, however, actually Naples circa 2008, and to resituate the audience in something familiar, anonymous assassins soon gun down the dayspa-ists. See? Big Italy is just like Little Italy. Structured as interwoven vignettes of crime and violence in gang-war-torn Scampia, the northernmost district of Napoli, Gomorra concerns a handful of characters loosely or directly related to the Camorra (see the title’s pun?), Campania’s parallel to the Sicilian Mafia: a master tailor, an old man doling out cash-payments, a drug-runner on the cusp of puberty, two Scarface-obsessed teenage knucklenecks (take that, Hollywood!), and a crooked businessman, dumping toxic waste in an empty quarry. (That last one serves as a not-so-subtle metaphor; “poison sludge” undergirds the town.)

What little power Gomorra possesses stems not from its unremarkable but authentic characters—and certainly not in its simplistic narrative thrust—but rather from its eye for detail, most of all in its evocative sense of place. Garrone narrows his focus to the Scampiano day-to-day, which includes not only plumbing problems and grocery deliveries but also armed robbery, drug deals, and police raids. Gomorra’s strength, though, is less in what happens than where it happens: the post-apocalyptic backdrop, packed with housing complexes that resemble Mayan ruins, teems with two-bit hoods up to no good on every curb and in every backalley, apartment staircase, dank concrete shell and abandoned gas station. (A rite of passage includes donning a bulletproof vest and taking a bullet to the chest.) Garrone’s camera, under Marco Onorato’s direction, twists around corners, craning like the neck of a curious child, soaking up whatever is happening in the vicinity of the characters—mostly cash counting and generally shady idling.

There’s a real sense of life outside the frame, but unfortunately little sense of life, er, under it. Despite its slug’s eye view of crime and its effects, Gomorra lacks both drive—at 135 minutes, its structure of stitched-together, unrelated short stories quickly grows tiresome—and substance. Based on a best-selling book, an exposé of the Camorra by a journalist now living with 24-hour bodyguards, the movie needs to do something more than show audiences something they literally haven’t seen before; it has little reason to drag us to Scampia except to point and cry, “see how awful things are?” Preachy factoids, which precede the end credits, explicitly tell viewers how terrible things are, in case we missed it. (We are meant to feel partially culpable, too, I think, as when the tailor watches Scarlett Johansson on television walk down a red carpet in a dress on which he and his staff have spent several weeks’ worth of overtime.) That Garrone has stripped Gomorra of Hollywood’s romantic view of crime and criminals is more a curio than a virtue; the movie’s lessons are as pat as crime doesn’t pay, that bad decisions come back around as violence, and that in parts of Italy, violence is so pervasive that no one—not even children or the elderly!—is free from its reach. The film succeeds photographically, as neo-realism, but with its focus spread across so many characters and shallow stories, it offers little personal or emotional insight, let alone context, into its visual revelations. Grade: B


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Man On Wire

Directed by James Marsh
Full credits from IMDb

From the opening moments of Man on Wire, director Marsh’s tense, sublime and inadvertently elegiac documentary, the stakes are (bad-dum-CH!) sky-high. It opens with the recollection of a nightmare about nailing a coffin shut—a grim foreboding of death. Obscured figures lurk about; ominous music beats on the soundtrack. In recreations, we see Nixon on television, press conferencing about Watergate. Are the talking heads flashing by former “plumbers”? If so, why do they have French accents? Then we realize they’re in NYC, headed for the World Trade Center towers. Are they terrorists? Algerian sympathizers?

Far from it, actually: They’re executing a guerilla high-wire walk from one tower to the other. But Marsh, as has been written elsewhere, styles the film as a heist picture. The wonder of Man on Wire, though, is not merely in its expertly suspenseful storytelling. (Like a classic magazine article, the film smartly opens at the climax and steps back; the tower-to-tower walk functions as a thru-line, interrupted often by expository flashbacks.) It’s in the actual filmmaking. Marsh proves a master of assemblage: he seamlessly blends archival footage (many of those involved, thoughtful enough to understand the historical heft of the occasion, documented the preparation and the act itself in still and moving pictures), interviews and reenactments (filmed in sharp, shadowy black-and-white textures that evoke, alternately, Jean-Pierre Melville’s French New Wave noirs and Guy Maddin’s silent film pastiches) with a pitch-perfect, pan-genre score by J. Ralph that adds tension and levity as needed.

Marsh also gets significant help from his protagonist, wirewalker Philippe Petit, a master storyteller in his own right. Animated, enthusiastic and good-humored—he balanced an Oscar statuette on his chin at the Academy Awards!—he knows exactly when to give and when to withhold. A modest ancillary cast of curious characters round out his presence: it took roughly half a dozen conspirators to case, break in and prepare for the wire walk, which they finally executed one morning in 1974. Marsh digs into the gritty details of the “crime,” the sheer logistical impossibilities—getting all that equipment up 102 floors, running the wire from roof to roof, coping with the wind conditions—as well as the personal strains, including the fear of arrest and, worse, death. (One nagging question is never addressed: how is this whole operation bankrolled?)

That a documentary focused on the Twin Towers should be so focused on death, whether through omens or spoken fears, is fitting. Man on Wire’s ostensible tribute to risk-taking fizzles, and the film is instead reborn as a loving tribute to the Towers, which, neither in life nor in death, ever seemed so majestic, so awesome or such a testament to human ingenuity as they do here. (In reality, they were eyesores.) Marsh wisely never mentions September 11th, knowing it would be overkill, crassly sentimental arm-twisting, as of course it’s already on the minds of every audience member. When an arresting officer at the scene says, of the walk, that “it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing” that no one would ever see again, the audience is able to add an extra layer of cruel irony to the remark without Marsh’s prodding.

Those involved in the walk are brought to tears on camera as they recall the glorious beauty of seeing a man walking, godlike, across the sky. Those teardrops are so genuine that I was brought to tears, too, even though all I witnessed were videotaped photographs: reproductions of reproductions. Such is the sophistication of Marsh’s filmmaking. After this transcendent climax, the film ends ruefully, back at sea level with broken hearts—much like the end of the towers’ lives, too. Not that it needs to be said. Grade: A


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Katyn

Directed by: Andrzej Wajda
Written by: Andrzej Wajda, Przemyslaw Nowakowski, Wladyslaw Pasikowski
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 2/5

Above all, Katyn is (sigh) a WWII movie, but with a minor twist: the victims aren’t Jews — they’re Poles! And the villains aren’t Nazis — they’re Soviets! (Well, and Nazis.) In March 1940, Stalin secretly ordered the execution of 22,000 Polish prisoners, including army officers and academics, who he felt threatened the communization of Poland. Director Andrzej Wajda’s account of the act and its effects is sprawling but inepic: scaled to the individual level, it imagines the conditions of the men captured; the women left behind to wait, wonder and worry; and the survivors coping (or not) with the subsequent cover-up.

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Must Read After My Death

Written & Directed by: Morgan Dews
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 2/5

Watching Must Read After My Death, writer-director Morgan Dews’ found-footage narcissistumentary, is akin to listening to a stranger describe his nocturnal dreams: it’s dull and confusing, not nearly as intriguing as the storyteller believes it to be. After Dews’ grandmother (Aliss, last name omitted to protect the privacy of the living) died, the filmmaker discovered a trove of media in her home preserved for posterity, including photographs, Dictaphone records, magnetic audiotape and reels of Kodachrome. Aliss had a habit of recording herself confessing her fears, concerns and insights, as well as taping the family’s feuds. Assembled, the collection documents her family’s descent into dysfunction during the 1960s.

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The Class

Directed by Laurent Cantet
Written by François Bégaudeau, Robin Campillo and Laurent Cantet
Full credits from IMDb

The Class (Entre les Murs) humbly and deceptively masquerades as a straightforward, documentary-style account of a year in the life of a French middle school; narrowly focused, it never travels outside the walls mentioned in the French title: it bounces from the classroom to the teacher’s lounge, occasionally jumping to faculty meetings and parent-teacher conferences. Cantet and his cast imbue the film with authenticity: the teachers complain and the students misbehave; debates over soccer and national loyalties, confessions of vulnerabilities, and challenges to the professor-protagonist’s investment in his students emerge organically from interactions between the raucous 14-year-old students (Arabs, Africans, West Indians, Chinese) and their French teacher. (That is, a Frenchman who teaches “French”.)

The Class is, on one level, the student-teacher movie finally done right. The phony inspirationalism of Hollywood’s set-‘em-straight high school picture (the best of which is Christopher Cain’s maximally absurd The Principal) is entirely absent, replaced by something more authentically matter-of-fact: Bégaudeau, the teacher, does his darndest, but he’s imperfect—a flawed hero. He remains sympathetic, but he calls a few girls “skanks” and allows his class to get out of control, which in a climactic scene provokes an act of accidental violence that threatens one student’s future. (This lately introduced storyline is the film’s only stab at some semblance of narrative.) Each classroom conversation scene bursts with sincerity; each child comes across as a real person, rather than an allegorical storytelling device.

And yet symbols are just what the kids are: The Class unobtrusively doubles as a microcosmic exploration of France’s failed melting pot society; Cantet handles both the literal and the symbolic with dexterity, allowing both to exist independently. In recent years, French identity, never quite flexible to begin with, has been called into question by an influx of unassimilated immigrants. Cantet’s film, based on the semi-autobiographical novel by Bégaudeau, who stars as himself (and does a heck of a job of it!), examines the obstacles to integrated citizenship—including, for example, parents who don’t speak the native language—as well as the relationship between colonizer and colonized, authority and subject. (One student accuses the imperfect subjunctive tense of being “bourgeois”. Très pas Français!) Expulsion becomes a parallel for deportation; doing well academically for assimilation. Some students succeed, others are left behind—and it is the latter that leaves a black mark on the country. The film ends with a nice, quiet girl approaching the French teacher at the end of the year. “I didn’t learn anything,” she admits meekly, fearfully. “I don’t understand what we do.” With quiet devastation, it signals Bégaudeau’s failure. And France’s. Grade: A


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Shotgun Stories

Written & Directed by: Jeff Nichols
Full credits from IMDb


Shotgun Stories fails as a whole, but it has one redeeming virtue: it’s as an evocative portrait of the hardluck rural South, populated by animalistic archetypes. It falters whenever writer-director Nichols tries to turn those mythic forces into emotional individuals, ripping them from the primal story to which they belong. Almost biblical in its rivalries, the film centers on a family feud within a single family: two sets of half brothers at loggerheads over the legacy left them by their shared-father, recently deceased. One set was born before his conversion to Christ; they sport perfunctory names—“Son,” “Kid” and “Boy”—and boast a bitter, absent mother. The other set has human names, a loving mother (with lace curtains and an ornate headboard in her bedroom, oo la la) and a small parcel of inherited land.

Despite these differences, the two groups of brothers have something in common beyond a shared patriarchal line—they lead similar lifestyles, at least to this urban Yankee’s eye: both slog through the day to day drudgery called Life in Southeast Arkansas, boxed in by endless fields, strip malls, freight trains, and aortic power lines—ramshackle environs that seem one quick twister away from reverting to a state of nature. Work is fisheries and tractor repair; rides are on the back of a flatbed; food is cheeseburgers and Doritos. Life is largely uneventful, save for the occasional parking lot brawl. The little that happens in Shotgun Stories involves sporadic encounters of escalating violence: fisticuffs beget poisonings beget beatings beget knife-fights beget death. Otherwise, the film is almost French in its steady, largely uneventful portraiture—in its slow-boil violence. Longstanding contentions are set off when Michael Shannon, sporting a Brokeback Ledger mutter and his naturally sharp facial features (which seem to curdle at their termini), publicly denounces his father at the man’s funeral, turning the two fraternal factions into feral animals, stolidly fuming until they happen onto each other, at which point they pounce.

When not expressing itself as violence (mostly off-screen and bloodless), that seething is too quiet; despite the infrequent comic flourishes, Shotgun Stories is exhaustingly somber, takings its tonal cues and steady, rolling pace from the angry faces of the men who fill its frames. (Women appear only fleetingly, usually as external stabilizing forces.) Nichols misfires when he stops the conflict to unnecessarily develop his characters for a tragic but manipulative pay-off: the brother with the tres-90s slacker-hairdo who might marry his girlfriend; the tubby brother who coaches basketball; the alpha brother with the gambling problem and troubled marriage. At root, these are angry, somber-faced men acting as groups, and we’re told all we need to know about them by the conditions of their existence: one lives in a tent in his brother’s backyard; the other in a van (which, alas, is sometimes down by the river.) Their imposed emotional arcs are mere padding, distractions. And, rather than enhance the drama, the softly melodramatic acoustic guitar score (Goo Goo Dolls-y bullshit) merely teases out the absurdity of trying to wriggle emotions out of an emotional void. Shotgun Stories builds to a finale that preaches the futility of vengeance, embracing the notion of family while rejecting its destructive underside: the fallacy of loyalty-expressed-in-violence. It’s another thoroughly Bush-era movie about the futility of vengeance, this one about opposing clans locked in symbiotic destruction, fighting to “right wrongs”. Too bad that it feels way too long, even at a meager 87 minutes. Grade: C+


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Friday the 13th

Directed by Marcus Nispel
Written by Damian Shannon & Mark Swift
Full credits from IMDb

As the popularity of slasher movies waned, “torture porn” filled the hole they left in multiplexes; as horror goes, that new subgenre often boasts a relatively complex, almost progressive moral underpinning: Hostel's victims are largely misogynistic or boorish Americans-abroad, in desperate need of comeuppance; the Saw series punishes those who don't fully appreciate the Gift of Life. The Friday the 13th "reimagining," or whatever we're supposed to call it, marks a return, if only temporarily, to the simplicity of late-Carter/early-Reagan Puritanism: its victims are punished because they enjoy life, albeit bacchanalianly, through good ol' fashioned youthful debauchery — beer-swilling, sex and, above all, marijuana use.

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Coraline

Written & Directed by: Henry Selick
Full credits from IMDb

The mescaline-trip-tinged Coraline is like Pan’s Labyrinth without the self-serious pretense to prestige. Director Henry Selick’s first return to stop motion animation in 13 years (and his first full non-Monkeybone movie without Tim Burton’s guiding hand) centers on the title character, a little girl bored both by her relocation to a baroque, off-the-map manor and her inattentive parents, who won’t indulge her adventurous spirit. Serendipitously, she discovers a small, wallpapered-over door in her gray, unfurnished living room; though bricked-up by day, by night it leads to an other-dimensional Wonderland, opening onto a rabbit-hole-ish portal, a fleshy touch-tunnel reminiscent of the birth canal. It’s as though she’s crawling back into the womb...

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Memorial Day

Written & Directed by: Josh Fox
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 3/5

Memorial Day draws an explicit parallel between Spring Break-y Girls Gone Wildry and Abu Ghraib. As such, it’s simplistic and smug, but also intermittently enthralling — much like Michel Haneke’s widely reviled Funny Games. This film’s first half is set in Ocean City, Maryland, during Memorial Day Weekend. While strip mall signage and FM radio announcers proclaim the dutiful importance of remembering and thanking those who sacrificed their lives for freedom and country, the American youth on display are consumed only with politically apathetic debauchery. Populated by a cast that makes Cloverfield’s twentysomethings look like desirable cocktail-party company, Memorial Day features crude, drunken depravity: characters hook up, strip, beat up homosexuals and engage in general misogyny (“if a bitch don’t give good head, I don’t want her”), all of it publicly performed for director and cameraman Josh Fox’s shaky handheld. It’s morally deplorable, truly reprehensible; in one scene, consensual, heterosexual sex in the backseat of a moving van filled with onlookers quickly turns into rape. “She’s telling you to stop — fucking go deeper,” one (male) observer encourages as the girl weeps.

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