Gomorrah

I got a look last night at Matteo Garrone 's Gomorrah --the movie based on Roberto Saviano's book about the Neapolitan Mob. It's worth the watching, though not as good I might have expected from its passel of awards and its 91 percent Rotten Tomatoes ranking (that's as of this writing).

Tbe film is presented as six not-very-interwoven stories of footsoldiers trying to scrimp out a living in the life of crime. Perhaps the most interesting is he account of "Don Ciro," the poor slob who has to deliver money every week to the mob's retainers. It's one of those vignettes (like my favorite scene in Donnie Brasco--the one where Al Pacino cracks open the parking meter) the reminds you that the mob is just another business, and not a very good one, at that. You can only wonder how in the devil Don Ciro--far more frightened than naturally violent, or even corrupt--ever got into this mess and, for whatever it is worth, you are left wondering how he will get out of it.

Overall, the movie is well shot in a lot of soul-draining suburban Naples locations, with a style refreshingly free of the "violence porn" that proved all too seductive in some of the late episodes of The Sopranos. There's plenty of death here but (as it should be) it seems off-handed and stupid more often than dramatic or spectacular.

The trouble is that the director seems (or wants you) to believe that he is presenting the epic of a vast international crime syndicate. And there may very well be such a syndicate but he hasn't shown it. For the most part, he hasn't even hinted it. The most ambitious and enterprising of all the mobsters (if can call him that) is the Franco, who takes a trip north to Mestre, the ugly backwater just inland of Venice, where he acquires a waste disposal contract. We are to assume that the waste is toxic, and that it does great harm to a trucker, and that the disposal operation is illegal. This is a nasty business, but you can't help feeling at least a bit of sympathy for Franco who is, after all, doing a job that a lot of people want done. Too, you've got to admire his enterprise when, in the movie's most memorable scene, short of "real" drivers, he recruits a bunch of street kids to pilot his giant disposal vans.

But Franco is as far up the chain as you go, and for all we see here, he might just be a freelancer. As to poor Don Ciro--we don't even really get to know who it is that he is delivering money from. As to the rest, they are just street punks (and one cadet punk) or neighborhood heavies. So, a good movie, perhaps a welcome corrective after the excesses of The Sopranos (which, to be fair, I liked a lot). But still not a major movie, nothing that redefines the landscape (unless, of course, you count the truckloads of toxic waste).