Gomorrah - B

In theaters. Rated R, 137 minutes. Trailer.

Billed as "the best mob movie ever", winner of the Palme D'Or at Cannes and a tragic omission from this year's Best Foreign Film Oscar Nominations, Italy's Gomorrah sounded like my kind of film. It ended up being a decent, but ultimately over-hyped film depicting the hellish environment in central Italy. The film follows 6 interconnected stories in the third-worldish environment of this mafia infested patch of humanity. Director Mateo Garrone creates multiple stunning visuals and several powerful sequences, but the lack of serious character development and too much super close camerawork left me disoriented and unsatisfied. Click below for more on Gomorrah:

We begin in a seedy stand-up tanning salon with lots of generic mob types messing around and getting a tan - then most of them are murdered. From there we get introduced to a pubescent boy getting drawn into the mess - making deliveries and ultimately selling his soul to join. Garrone weaves each of his stories in seamlessly, with the most affecting being the "money deliveryman" that visits those the mob supports with cash. He shuffles around pretending that because he doesn't kill people he isn't morally compromised, but his final scene (the film's best and a camera angle nod to Taxi Driver) exposes that fallacy. The other stories focus on two wannabe gangsters (the guys in the undies and uzis) a fashion manufacturer and a "waste removal specialist". Each of them is affecting in their own way, with bleak and unobtrusive messages about man's nature and the complicity of everyone in a global economy in perpetuating and ignoring such activities.

The film shot in a pseudo-documentary style with almost no music or pandering to the audience. It has grown in the days since I saw it, but still it just didn't resonate all that much with me. Throughout the film Garrone shows the character's obsession with machismo and status and, most interestingly vanity. They trim their eyebrows, get tans and pay more attention to their clothes than any normal guy I know. This is yet another subtle comment on the depravity and absurdity of 'the life' for these people. The film did grab me in its nihilistic viewpoint of the fallen world - hopelessness and survival are the daily diet for these people, and I appreciated the depictions of such a stark place and worldview.

The film is swimming in authenticity. It is based on a book by the same name by Robert Saviano, who is now in protective custody because of the revelations in the book. Several of the actors in the film were local and have subsequently been arrested for mob-related crimes.