Word: gomorrahism
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...Less a traditional crime film than an as-told-to social document, Gomorrah reveals the reach of a business that has poisoned an entire region; for Camorra is both a crime syndicate and one of the nation's largest employers - southern Italy's own stimulus package. Where else in a sluggish economy can a young man find work? (In the movie, a college graduate, lured into a job supervising the dumping of toxic waste, decides to quit the business. His padrone, disgusted, spells out what awaits him: "Go make pizzas.") When everyone in town is either a gangster...
...Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, called Gomorra in Italy and based on the best-selling exposé by Roberto Saviano, is probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history. In its depiction of the Camorra crime family, there are no good guys, no crusading cops, no mama pleading with her son to stay out of the rackets. There's also no Mr. Big, Dr. No or Don Corleone stroking a house cat and intoning gritty or pearly aphorisms. The movie stays at street level, showing the lower- and middle-rung employees enmeshed...
...style of Garrone's film - long, episodic, solidly acted by a mix of familiar screen faces and nonprofessionals - is no more than efficient. But because violence erupts without warning, Gomorrah keeps you alert through the mundane parts. In the first scene, meaty men get gunned down in a tanning salon. That sets the movie's dramatic coordinates. People die stepping outside their front door, or in a whorehouse, or just fooling around on the street. In a typical crime movie, there's a suspenseful buildup to the bog kills. Here, death explodes prosaically, capriciously, as in Baghdad or Kabul...
...legitimate businesses around the world, including the reconstruction of the World Trade Center; that in the past three decades, the Camorra has murdered more people than al-Qaeda has. It is these statistics, rather than the movie's viral vignettes, that hold the real power and horror of Gomorrah...
...instead competed against herself for best actress - we'll never know. And France's I've Loved You So Long (starring British actress Kristin Scott Thomas, who speaks fluent French) raised a few eyebrows when it beat odds on Oscar favorite Waltz With Bashir and Italian Mafia flick Gomorrah to the foreign language film award. (See pictures of some of the greatest ever animated movies...