There's a popular nitwit theory that movies like The Godfather and TV series like The Sopranos "glamorize" Mafia life and make it look attractive. Again and again, the point may get made that Michael Corleone and Tony Soprano and the people in their orbit are ruthless moral idiots who actually grow less and less loyal to their closest associates the longer they have to endure the sight of them, but the idea seems to be that as long as they're treated as fascinating characters, people worthy of the audience's interest, somebody's going to look at their way of life and think, it doesn't look half bad. The new Italian movie Gomorrah may be less likely than any crime movie ever made to be accused of romanticizing gangsterism. The movie, which runs two hours and fifteen minutes, uses Robert Saviano's nonfiction book about the Neapolitan-based criminal organization known as "the Camorra" (which means, simply, the gang) as its jumping-off point. The book is fiercely angry about what the Camorra and its corrupting influence does to innocent people who are just trying to live their lives. The movie, which was directed by Matteo Garrone, provides grounds for anger, though its own emotional temperature is basically even and steady, even frigid. It cuts back and forth among several characters, most of them barely blips on the Camorra's radar screen: a bookkeeper who works distributing money to the families of clan members who are in prison; a mobbed-up tailor; a thirteen-year-old boy just beginning to get his bearings in the crooked world in which he'll be growing up; a couple of teenage meatheads who, unlike the professional big boys, see themselves as romantic outlaws and run around with guns causing so much aggravation that they'll eventually have to be put down. (To better make the point about what kind of movie this isn't, the knuckleheads shout lines from Brian De Palma's Scarface as they play cowboys and Indians.) There are also some guys who work in "toxic waste management", which translates into directing trucks full of poisonous materials to out-of-the-way sites where they can be dumped or buried. Thus the Camorra's influence extends to literally despoiling the land itself, adding one more thoughtful conceit to a movie already groaning with them.
Gomorrah has been highly praised for its stubbornly unexciting handling of this potentially shocking material, but for Matteo, that may be the choice of a director who doesn't have many other options. His previous movies, the dysfunctional love story Primo Amore (2004) and The Embalmer (2002), about a dwarfish taxidermist who is employed by the Camorra to hook up a corpse so that it can serve as a drug mule, also treated sensational material in a flat, affectless way that minimized the viewer's ability to connect with whatever was going on. He either doen't know how to involve the audience or consciously rejects involving them because he's aiming for something more challenging and cerebral. He mostly winds up with something flatter and deader. He's not above using violence and noise to get a rise out of you; the movie opens with a bloody mass execution carried out in a tanning salon, and Matteo makes a point of never making it clear who the victims were or why their were killed. Because the movie never invites you to care about its characters beyond the level of seeing them as faceless victims of a corrupt society, the frequent violent explosions serve the same purpose they do in the sleaziest kind of exploitation films: they nudge you awake between the lapses into total boredom.
Any movie that deals with power and crime that doesn't acknowledge the attractions of those things is as much a lie as a movie that makes a gangster's life seem noble. When Francis Ford Coppola made The Godfather, he didn't think he had to make the Corleones both colorless and unrelentingly disgusting to prevent viewers from thinking he was making a campaign commercial for the Mafia, because he assumed that most people have more sense than that. Gomorrah is being congratulated for assuming that people don't, and that a gangster movie's moral intelligence can best be judged by how hard it is to sit through it. The first step towards constructing a meaningful condemnation of organized crime might be to examine why people are drawn to it, but in Gomorrah, the reasons seem boiled down to: there's no resisting it. Nobody wants it, but if you try to stand up to it or even live apart from it, you'll get your head blown off. A lifeless depiction of a hopeless world, Gomorrah is an epic shrug of resignation.