Questioning life's meaning has become cliché, a question that people ask in order to demonstrate that some questions lack easy answers. Matteo Garrone's ""Gomorrah,"" however, has an emphatic response—under some circumstances, life has no meaning.
The film meanders through the world of organized crime in Naples, Italy, and demonstrates with brutal candor the debasement of human life. The hopeless economic conditions play host to a violent criminal ideology derived from pre-Enlightenment conceptions of law, power and sovereignty. Where we might otherwise see vitality and emotion, ""Gomorrah"" gives us waste and emptiness.
There is almost no humanity in the film. Characters seem to be more like extensions of the surrounding corruption and despair than actual life forces.
People find themselves trapped in the webs cast by crude economic networks of the corrupt and the degenerate. They stumble through the confines of Naples' industrial architecture until someone puts a bullet in their heads, and that seems to be all there is to say.
Late in the film, one character remarks to another, ""You are more dead than alive,"" an observation that carries little impact, largely because it seems to apply to all of the characters in the film, and all of the bodies that litter the barren urban landscape.
The city is everywhere in this film. Garrone offers several vistas of high-rise residential buildings that look like Soviet housing projects (and a little like Witte and Sellery), but most of the film takes place in convoluted hallways, vacant buildings and desolate industrial sites.
Walls, fences and dirty windows obscure the faces of characters as they wander among these architectural obstructions. The film's organization of physical space seems to mirror its conception of the metaphorical life-space of individuals. The people in this area of Naples move among the physical and social walls that confine them, and escape doesn't feel like an option.
This is particularly true of the two most memorable characters in the film: two teenage boys who fantasize about becoming successful gangsters, a narrative that is conspicuously absent from ""Gomorrah."" They binge on cocaine, recite dialogue from ""Scarface"" and carry out petty robberies. In what may be the most important scene in the film, they drag a stolen cache of guns to a dirty beach, strip down to their underwear and scream obscenities while aimlessly unleashing a barrage of bullets into the water. The tragedy of this image is muted by the bleak irreverence that washes out almost every hint of emotion from the film.
Another memorable shot depicts gunmen piling two corpses into the scoop of a bulldozer, which backs them slowly away across an industrial junkyard toward the Sun, human refuse to be carted off and buried in the same illegal dumps that the organization uses for nuclear waste and asbestos. This arrangement of bodies reflects the lack of distinction between money, people, product and garbage in ""Gomorrah.""
The film suggests that essential aspects of our humanity such as compassion and benevolence are not inherent, but rest precariously on the social arrangements that allow them to flourish. When these structures are not in place, humanity is likely to be displaced by the emptiness, degradation and violence that this film portrays.
Grade: AB
