Everlasting Moments

In the Eye of the Beholder

2008 // Sweden // Jan Troell // May 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - Fundamentally, I am a sucker for any film that approaches the romantic impulse as an agonizing phenomenon that bears unbearably fragile dividends, when it bears anything at all save tears. For me, there is something unaccountably attractive in the bliss of thwarted love. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that Everlasting Moments, Jan Troell's scrupulously reverent tale of stifled artistic expression and romance, proved to be emotionally engrossing despite its schematic narrative and discursive character. The relationship between Swedish housewife and amateur photographer Maria Larsson (Maria Heiskanen) and camera shopkeeper Sebastian Pedersen (Jesper Christensen) is tragic, succulent stuff. Their unconsummated love, exquisitely formal yet accented with moments of profound tenderness, is so plainly rife with repressed yearnings and resentments that it's a wonder mere Scandinavian starch can restrain such ache. In part, familial obligations keep the couple apart, but it wouldn't be a textbook romantic tragedy without a violent and jealous spouse, a role played here by Maria's mercurial, monstrous husband Sigfrid (Mikael Persbrandt). It's not sufficient that Sigfrid restrain Maria within a living hell of drunkenness, infidelity, abuse, and murderous threats. He also attempts to quash her blossoming creative longings behind the camera, a desire that serves as both a gateway to and an expression of her feelings for the gentle Sebastian. Love doesn't come much more virtuous—or more doomed—than this.

Maria Larsson was a real photographer to whom Troell's wife is distantly related, and her relatively obscure work served as a source for this film. Maria's daughter Maya (Nellie Almgren as a girl, Callin Öhrvall as young woman) narrates the tale of her mother's middle age, when a hitherto unexplored interest in commercial and artistic photography took hold of her. Emotionally, the film is focused on Maria's entrapment in a situation, place, and time that stifles joy and dishes out endless cruelties. Yet Troell can't resist slathering on all sorts of period digressions, and as a result the film often feels less like a biography and more like an expansive panorama of early twentieth-century Sweden. Disease, accidents, rape, strikes, the Great War, and other calamities intrude on the proceedings, and all are afforded an unusual amount of time given how little they add to Everlasting Moments' core narrative. One suspects that Troell loads the film up with such detail as an act of fidelity to Maria's life story. Thus we get subplots such as Sigfied's short-lived dedication to socialism and his entanglement in a bombing plot targeting British strikebreakers. Some liberal trimming would have lent the film's fundamental tragedy—a woman's discovery of her creative voice late in life—much greater potency.

Still, Troell and cinematographer Mischa Gavrjusjov capture even the film's unwarranted tangents with an indisputable loveliness. Shot on 16 mm and blown up to 35 mm, Everlasting Moments replicates the smudged, grainy look of Maria's playing-card-sized sepia photographic prints. However, the lightning and design are so consistently striking that the film still somehow seems crisp, eschewing the grimy visual muddle that so often afflicts period dramas. The film's title points to the obvious thematic significance of the indelible yet fleeting image within Maria's story, but Troell also demonstrates his own sensitivity to this phenomenon, often in the most unexpected places. Hence, he graces us with the film's most haunting shot: a girl's resolute and baffling march out onto a mist-shrouded and frozen sea. The otherworldly chill of this image visually complements Maria's spying of a distant Sebastian as he ambles through summer greenery. This latter shot is then repeated, reinforcing the story's morbid undercurrents and highlighting the comparable pains of romantic loss and death. Lest the film devolve into a sequence of hideous tragedies (as it often threatens to do), Troell engages in a bit of spirited horsing from time to time, as when Maria and her children smudge ashen Chaplin mustaches on themselves and waddle about like the Little Tramp in a fit of post-cinematic delight.

Many of Everlasting Moments' weaknesses and even some of its bright spots melt away under the sway of Heiskanen and Christensen, who lend the film a humanistic pulse whenever they are on screen together. I hesitate to use the term "erotic" to describe the interactions of two characters that barely have any physical contact and are discomfited by the casualness of first names. The film's most sensual moment, after all, involves Sebastian demonstrating the principle of the camera obscura by projecting the silhouette of a butterfly onto Maria's palm. The eroticism that Everlasting Moments offers is the type that springs from shared joy when the surrounding circumstances are otherwise harsh and loveless. The sort of eroticism, in other words, that we could easily imagine holding two ordinary people hostage in early twentieth century Europe. Heiskanen and Christensen capture this delicate emotional condition marvelously, her with weary apprehension and him with fussy courtesy. Their relationship—and its ultimately squandered potential for happiness—is the emotional core of the film, and all the time Troell devotes to other characters seems like so much noodling. Persbrandt's narcissistic, domineering husband is so cartoonishly dim and two-faced as written that he has no hope of evolving into a coherent character. He serves strictly as a foil to burnish the virtues of the not-quite-lovers. And while Maya might be the story's ostensible narrator, do we really need a subplot about the lascivious brother of her employer? When it can maintain its attention on the flaring and slow guttering of Maria's passions, Everlasting Moments is pure, bittersweet pleasure.

Adventureland

These Are the Best Days of My Life?!​

2009 // USA // Greg Mottola // April 22, 2009 //Theatrical Print

B- - Don't permit the promotional campaign to fool you into supposing that Greg Mottola's wistful, kitschy coming-of-age tale, Adventureland, is in any significant way a successor to the director's superb, bromatic comic odyssey, Superbad. Certainly, the two films share an unexpected curiosity and emotional generosity towards their characters. If one can discern a pattern from just two feature films, then a signature feature of Mottola's work is his oddly humanistic approach to caricature, where he glories in ridiculous characters even as he probes at their inner lives with remarkable affection. If anything, Adventureland, with its rich stable of personalities and the enthusiastic, bittersweet tone of a "That Crazy Summer" anecdote, applies this approach much more generously. What it lacks, however, is Superbad's deliciously crude belly laughs, the poignancy of that film's central narrative of a delayed pubescent leave-taking, and--let's be honest--the presence of Michael Cera and Jonah Hill. That first item is the most conspicuous, as the gags featured in Adventureland's trailer are, more or less, the only gags in the film. Mottola's script, based loosely on his own experiences working in a cruddy amusement park, just isn't that funny. Which is okay, since Adventureland isn't really comedy but a bemused and pleasantly miserable bit of post-collegiate nostalgia.

The film's premise is pretty simple: In the summer of 1987, recent graduate and aspiring journalist James (Jesse Eisenberg) finds himself stuck at home in Pittsburgh when his plans for a pre-Columbia U. jaunt to Europe are foiled by a meltdown in his family's finances. Lacking any "real-world" experience, James is obliged to take the most dismal of summer jobs, a stint at the thoroughly cheerless local amusement park, Adventureland. While Mottola employs his setting to squeeze some theme park-related sight gags and absurdities out of the story, Adventureland the place is utilized primarily to establish a space of squalid despair thinly veiled in merriment. In short, the park serves as a stage for the film's punchy, disposable exploration of dissatisfaction, tawdriness, and cowardice, and also of the ways that one finds small pleasures in lousy circumstances. (Those pleasures consist primarily of sex and weed, in the case of Adventureland's hapless, apathetic teenaged carnies.) Accordingly, Adventureland is not really an enjoyable ride, but it is affecting in its way, not necessarily because the characters are believable, but because their plights are excruciatingly familiar.

Adventureland is not so much the story of James' shitty summer job as it is the story of his friendships and rivalries, especially his romance with painfully cool girl-next-door Em (Kristin Stewart), a fellow hawker in the park's midway. Stewart's acting might be as colorless as window glass, but she does have the sort of effortless prettiness (and adorable overbite) that could easily woo a sexually naïve, over-educated hipster nerd like James. Perhaps unsurprisingly for the director of the haltingly quasi-feminist Superbad, Mottola devotes a sizable chunk of the film to exploring Em's problems from her perspective, particularly her insufferable home life and the married boyfriend she just can't seem to drop. Indeed, this is Adventureland's approach to most of its characters: sketch an easily digestible personality, then crack open the door and permit the viewer to peer into their private pain. Thus, we get characters like James' fellow carnie Joel (Martin Starr), a gloomy nebbish who is painfully apologetic about his affectations and passions. Or Lisa P (Margarita Levieva), the park's obligatory sexpot, a savvy sweetheart with an unfortunate misogynist streak. (In one of the film's unexpected moments, James calls Lisa out for giving an adulterous man a pass while denigrating his mistress as a whore.) Or maintenance stud and moonlighting musician Mike (Ryan Reynolds), whose endless bullshit and too-cool-for-this-job facade start to crumble upon casual scrutiny.

The only notable characters who remain essentially cartoonish are the park's space-cadet owners Bobby (Bill Hader) and Paulette (Kristen Wiig), a pair of blissfully oblivious opportunists who are alternately corrupt (frying up spoiled corndogs) and authoritarian (policing guests for littering with steely eyes). Still, their enthusiasm for their sleazy little enterprise is palpable, and their devotion to each other and their ad hoc family of park employees is non-negotiable. (Just to prove the point, when a customer threatens James, Bobby bursts from his trailer wielding a baseball bat, bellowing like a maniac.) It's hard not to grin whenever they're on screen, not matter how outrageous their behavior, because they are the clowns of this tale, much as Hader and Seth Rogan were in the roles of Superbad's lunatic cops.

Adventureland is quite adept at summoning the post-college ennui that settles over middle class wannabe intellectuals. (Not that I know anything about that...) Certainly, its design and soundtrack seem tailor-made to tap into the brainstem of a thirtysomething demographic that will respond viscerally to the film's despairing tone and pop cultural texture (call it The Graduate Ultra-Lite). It's a charming little achievement in this respect, and fortunately Mottola doesn't overreach by trying to be anything more, which makes its mildly deft emotional touch all the more pleasing. To be sure, the story isn't anything revolutionary: Adventureland is ultimately about James' struggle to overcome self-doubt about his career, sex life, and worldview. As written by Mottola and embodied by Eisenberg, James is amiable, but not nearly compelling enough of a character to enliven such wrung-out themes. The result is that Adventureland feels a little underwhelming, in the manner of any fried confection that gratifies but doesn't truly nourish.

Sin Nombre

Long is the Way, and Hard, That Out of Hell Leads Up to Light

2009 // USA - Mexico // Cary Fukunaga // April 19, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B - Here is a simple story, familiar almost to the point of triteness. A Good Woman searching for a better life in a faraway land and a Bad Man haunted by his past meet by happenstance on the road. They bond, after a fashion, and gradually the fates of these two travelers become entwined. In Sin Nombre, the stark directorial debut from Cary Fukunaga, the Good Woman is a young Honduran named Sayra (Paulina Gaitan), heading across Latin America with her father and uncle to an uncertain, undocumented life in New Jersey. The Bad Man is a Mexican gangster known as Willy (Edgar Flores), who is fleeing the wrath of his gang after having committed the gravest of sins. The road they share is a freight train heading north, towards Estados Unidos. In most reviews, this would be the point where I suggest that the particulars don't really matter, that Sin Nombre plumbs thematic territory that transcends its setting. Yet I can't, in good conscience, make that claim. The Timeless Story that Fukunaga is striving for is modestly successful, hindered by occasional clumsiness and all-too-frequent contrivances. Sin Nombre's principal appeal is firmly grounded in its specifics. The details of his setting—both sulfurous and sweet—lend the film a mythic richness that the creaky story and weakly drawn characters fail to convey.

Sin Nombre's first shots are some of its most fascinating. I hesitate to say that the film goes downhill from there, but it is a mysterious and wondrous bit of cinematic poetry that promises a bit more than Fukunaga eventually delivers. Stretching out before us is a breathtaking autumn forest, positively glowing with scarlet leaves. The Hudson Valley perhaps? Then we see Willy, also known as El Casper, a Mexican street thug, old beyond his years already with teardrop tattoo, a smattering of scars, and a requisite "conflicted tough guy" demeanor. The relationship between Willy and the almost fantastical woodland scene is not immediately apparent. (Is it a dream? A memory?) Then the film unites the two elements: the forest is revealed to be a floor-to-ceiling landscape photo that covers one wall of Willy's bedroom, which the young tough regards with hazy distraction. Then the reverie is broken, and Willy returns to the reality of his barrio existence. His cartel has tasked him to mentor an initiate, an eager-to-please kid named Smiley (Kristian Ferrer) who is still years from his first whiskers. However, Willy's secret liaisons with a Nice Girl on the (literal) other side of the tracks proves to be a distraction, landing him and Smiley in hot water with their diabolical boss, Lil' Mago (Tenoch Huerta).

Meanwhile, in Honduras, Sayra is about to set out on a grueling journey to the United States, accompanied by her uncle and a father she has not seen in ages. She exudes the silent discontent of a young woman weary of following the advice of others, but too diffident to do otherwise. Blunt and anxious, her father makes her repeat a string of numbers out loud as they trudge overland through scorching fields. This is the phone number for his New Wife, the mother of his Other Children, who dwell in distant New Jersey. It's not clear what exactly Sayra thinks of starting over in a foreign land with these people, but she's plainly not thrilled with the notion.

From the outset, there is zero doubt that Sayra and Willy will cross paths eventually, so the only question is whether Fukunaga handles their meeting and the eventual entanglement of their fortunes with skill. The answer is "Sort Of."  Willy stumbles into Sayra and her family on board a freight train, where the gangster saves the woman from a grisly fate, in a character reversal that is both ridiculous and completely understandable. Given that Sin Nombre is, in essence, a romantic tragedy sans eroticism, Sayra is, of course, drawn to this mysterious gangster, contrary to the advice of her father and all common sense. The woman claims that a fortune-teller told her she would reach the United States in the hands of the Devil, and, in her eyes, Willy is obviously that fiend. (Personally, I found this to be an irksome bit of off-screen ex post facto characterization.)

This sort of thing is emblematic of the broader problems that plague Sin Nombre's screenplay. Fukunaga runs afoul of a narrative gracelessness with sufficient regularity that it borders on the off-putting. The film has a distressing tendency to imitate the sort of lazy, evasive plotting that is endemic to bad thrillers. Hence its reliance on reversals and chance encounters that serve no purpose beyond satisfying a particular scene's tension quota, or perhaps providing an escape hatch whenever Fukunaga writes himself into a corner. Characters perish suddenly; traitors are revealed; violence erupts and then peters out without consequence. It's all presented in a fairly rote and inert manner, signifying with dismal resolve that Sin Nombre is not a commentary on the cruel and fickle character of the universe, just an unremarkable adventure tale. Thank goodness, then, that the film invigorates in spite of its sloppy and often silly story.

The film's heart is its ferocious and haunting realization of ancient motifs within a twenty-first century Latin American milieu. Fukunaga adapts forms that will be familiar to any student of Greek tragedy or Renaissance poetry. Sin Nombre evokes both the plutonic visions of an Orphic journey as well as the grotesque geography of Dante and Milton, all without declaring itself the successor of any particular mythical or literary tradition. Though it might echo familiar narrative frameworks, its iconography and spaces are thoroughly its own.

In other words, what Sin Nombre does exceptionally well is conjure an utterly immersive and haunting stage for its essentially feeble story, enlivening that story through sheer style. Fukunaga lures us into the twin tales of Sayra and Willy by creating a world that seems to exist in a moral and cosmological twilight. His Mexico, in particular, seems peopled with lost souls, some aching to move on, some content to rule their twisted little domains as resident demons. One is tempted to simply catalog the mesmerizing and chilling locales that Fukunaga presents. There is a railyard purgatory, mired in garbage, where travelers quake in anticipation whenever the trains lumber in like fuming behemoths. Or the cemetery where tattooed gangsters brew their schemes, looking for all the world like skeletal fiends as their cavort among the graves with their guns. Or the muddy-green waters of the Rio Grande, with death-infested reeds on one side and a dubious Wal-Mart Elysium on the other. This is a film redolent with the odors of a waking Hell: diesel, cordite, blood, broken blisters, shit, ash. However, Fukunaga also lights the path northward with daubs of sunlight: a bouquet of flowers, a warm tortilla wolfed down gratefully, a glimpse of a distant saint on a mountainside.

What's refreshing about Sin Nombre's marvelous texture is that it resists feverish searches for symbolism, of the obvious or obscure variety. Rather, Fukunaga revels in the literal elements of his setting: water, vegetation, metal, plastic, mud, dust, cloth, ink. Here is a director who plainly adores the material he's working with—the wretchedness of it, the beauty of it, and the terror of it—and doesn't need a reason to graft on ponderous layers of connotation. The film rarely gets bogged down in winking allusions, even when it could go for the cheapest of metaphors. A Messiah-like sacrifice late in the film is presented with severity and anguish that derive entirely from its immediate, tragic impact. What it "means" or symbolizes isn't all that fundamental to the potency of Fukunaga's presentation. This is a film that burns its resonant imagery into your mind, like a harrowing dream of escape and deliverance that refuses to fade in the light of day.

Sunshine Cleaning

Scrubbing Out the Dead

2009 // USA // Christine Jeffs // April 11, 2009 // Theatrical Print

C+ - Christine Jeffs' Sunshine Cleaning lounges comfortably within the plush confines of the indie dramedy framework, but it mostly resists the roteness and simple-minded platitudes that usually bedevil the genre. It's apparent from the first scene that we are not traipsing through feel-good territory: an anonymous man walks into an Albuquerque sporting goods store and proceeds to blow his head off with a shotgun. However, another early scene more gracefully signals Sunshine's modestly sophisticated approach to the well-traveled premise, Spunky Protagonist Discovers Her True Purpose. House-cleaner and single mom Rose (Amy Adams) stands in her bathroom, still dripping from a shower, and reads aloud from a note taped to the mirror: "You are powerful. You can do anything." It's an intriguing gesture that reveals a woman both more vulnerable and self-aware than one might expect of a film like Sunshine. (There is even a gentle echo when a character later discovers a poignant reminder note posted on a door.) And so it goes: Jeffs begins with a story that seems dully familiar, but adds sufficient half-twists to fashion something far more satisfying than might have otherwise emerged. Often these are omissions that intrigue by their absence and add dollops of authenticity to the film's quirky form. Jeffs shaves off bits and pieces here, skips over the unnecessary there, and generally keeps the viewer on their toes while also ensuring they leave their seat pleased as punch.

Sunshine's starting point is a factory-model grab-bag of characters with oddball attributes and a plethora of personal demons. Rose is our heroine, a skinny working mom with fear and weariness behind her pixie eyes, not to mention a married high school sweetheart (Steve Zahn) she can't quit. Her young son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), is clever, troubled, and constantly getting into things he shouldn't. Rose's sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), is a habitual fuckup with a waspish tongue and a heaping helping of confusion about her identity. Norah lives with their father, Joe (Alan Arkin), a widower who is perpetually embroiled in ill-advised get-rich-quick schemes.

If you guessed that Sunshine Cleaning is, at bottom, about how these characters learn a little about themselves, survive a calamity or two, and make some positive changes in their lives... well, you'd be pretty much on the nose. What makes the film a bit more intriguing than most indie fare that operates in this mode is the way that Jeffs and screenwriter Megan Holley (in an impressive debut) keep things just a little off-kilter. The beats don't arrive at exactly the expected places, which gives the proceedings an odd tinting of genuineness, a valuable thing when so much about the film otherwise feels so calculated and gratingly Sundance-friendly.

Example: Rose eventually tumbles to the fact that her flame, Mac, who happens to be a plainclothes Albuquerque cop, will never leave his wife and children. She breaks their affair off, in a sad, awkward little scene that plays out in her front doorway. In another film, this scene might have appeared at the conclusion, but Holley places it between the second and third acts. There's a pleasing intelligence at work in that decision, as dragging Mac along into the film's climactic events would be needlessly complex and a diversion from Rose's more fundamental problems. Yet Sunshine also gives us a taste of the lingering pain when Rose runs into him at a crime scene later on. There's no explosive confrontation, just rueful and wounded glances. This sort of storytelling grace is refreshing, as is Sunshine's resolve to let some aspects of its narrative dangle a little. Not everything happens on screen, not every question is answered, and not every subplot is followed through to a tidy little conclusion. It's a testament to Jeffs' skill that the result doesn't seem tattered, but instead limber and confident.

Ah, but now I realize I haven't even talked about the plot. Primarily it revolves around Rose's decision, prompted by a suggestion from Mac, to start a crime scene cleanup business. Perhaps unwisely, Rose takes her undependable sister in as a partner, but she also curries favor with the quiet, obliging owner of a janitorial supply store (Clifton Collins, Jr.). As might be expected, Rose and Norah's struggles with the unfamiliar realms of biohazard disposal are played for pathos and mildly black humor. And wouldn't you know it that both sisters are haunted by their mother's suicide, and much of the familial tension stems from this trauma? The story isn't awful or anything, or even that uninspired, but it does seem suspiciously cute as a button, while the morbid aspects of the film often verge on tastelessly manipulative.

Still, Sunshine's performances are sufficiently strong—not great, but pleasantly seamless—to lend the film emotional credibility. And, again, Jeffs knows how to shake things up, almost as if she is straining against the very conventions she has enthusiastically embraced. There are a lot of story elements that remain veiled, when they could have been deployed as pellets of crass melodrama. We hear nary a peep about Oscar's biological father, or about why, exactly, Rose and Norah's mother killed herself. Oscar asks Collins' shopkeep about his amputated arm, but he never asks how the man lost his limb. Curiously, none of this is unsatisfying, but rather sort of stimulating. One gets the sense that Jeffs isn't talking down to us, even if she is telling a story that we know pretty well. Ultimately, there's nothing extraordinary about Sunshine Cleaning, unexpectedly sharp through it may be. It fulfills its promise, evincing an unwarranted reverence for a stale form even as it grooves engagingly within the confines of that form.

Gomorra

It Turns Out That Violent Organized Crime Has an Ugly Side

2008 // Italy // Matteo Garrone // April 2, 2009 // Theatrical Print

B+ - The publicity for Matteo Garrone's Italian crime behemoth, Gomorra, lauds the film as a willful de-glamorization—a "grittification," if you will—of gangster mythology, cinematic and otherwise. Yet even this claim doesn't quite convey the peculiar, bracing subversiveness of the film. What Garrone delivers is not another Mafia Movie, but a finely crafted movie about the Mafia (or, to be precise, Naples' crime syndicate, known as the Camorra). Gomorra is a fearful, agonized panorama of a criminal organization's place in an apartment complex, a neighborhood, a city, a nation, a world, a universe. It is a vast, fragmented, and repulsive film. You can taste the dust on it, smell the garbage, feel the flies brushing past your eyelashes. Many crime dramas have countered the romanticism of The Godfather by cranking up the brutal violence and moral degeneracy. Gomorra takes a more daring approach, tossing out the entire epic form, cribbing loosely from the hyperlink cinema style of Altman and Iñárritu, and binding its storylines together with the frayed twine of locality and human weakness. It's mesmerizing, in its way, even if Garrone never molds it into a graceful shape. Of course, given the film's approach to its subject matter, I'm not sure it would be wise or even possible to do so. Gomorra is a film deformed by dread, full of discomfiting vibrations that rattle the viewer deep in the belly.

Garrone takes a discriminating, studious line of attack in presenting the film's multiple threads. He selects five stories connected to the Camorra and observes each tale's rot with an eerie calm and sickening clarity. These stories are only loosely stitched to each other, if at all, and the decision to forgo the typical preoccupation with synchronicity serves the film well. The connective tissue here is much less contrived, as it is comprised of setting, tone, and theme. Gomorra's thesis is hardly provocative: organized crime is an awful institution that gobbles up and spits out everything it encounters, lacking any other mode for interacting with the world. It's not the most original sentiment, but Garrone presents it without the now-tired operatic grandiosity or relentless homage. (Well, not much, at any rate. A character does cite Scarface and the film visually quotes The Godfather wedding scene, but these are completely apropos and tremendously sly, respectively.) Indeed, although Gomorra is a fictional work inspired by real events, it strikes the look and feel of a low-budget nature documentary, what with its handheld camera work and mood of wary observation. It invites a wondering queasiness that these events are happening in the world, in one form or another: this treachery, this corruption, this abandonment, this ultimatum, this folly.

The stories all have a familiar odor, but Garrone presents each with a vigilance for both character and place. Tito (Nicolo Manta) is a young adolescent who ingratiates himself to the neighborhood gang, a move that eventually requires him to betray friends and cover himself in innocent blood. The money-carrier Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), who doles out payments to old gangsters, widows, and families of jailed members, finds himself caught in the middle of a clan feud. The master tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) angers his company's mob backers when he tries to moonlight at a Chinese factory. Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), a deputy for Camorra waste management kingpin Franco (Toni Servillo), begins to doubt his chosen path when he witnesses the environmental and safety disasters he helps create. Finally, hopelessly dim wannabe tough-guys Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone) go on an inept crime spree that draws the lethal ire of the local Camorra boss. The performances are commendably genuine, especially that of Cantalupo, who expertly conveys Pasquale's gentle, modest demeanor while also revealing the bitterness in his heart. Paternoster also deserves praise for lending heft to a role with sparing dialog, as almost everything we need to know about Roberto is conveyed through the way he watches his boss.

Garrone's Naples has the look of a former Soviet metropolis, festering with corruption, crime, and neglect. No, scratch that: It evokes some kind of urban dystopia just beyond the horizon. Much of the action takes place in locales oozing with a profound despair: crumbling housing projects strewn with garbage; abandoned quarries full of toxic sludge; sweltering textile factories; shabby arcades and strip clubs. This environment, established with such striking fidelity and ruthlessness, veritably bellows the film's disgusted subtext. The Camorra's violence and depravity contribute to a grueling negative feedback loop: the organization is fighting over scraps at the end of history, even as its actions hasten that end. Or, to put it another way, the mob shits where it eats—carelessly, even gleefully, so.

Much of Gomorra's thematic meat is the stuff of countless films about organized crime: loyalty, machismo, peril, deceit, enterprise, and so on. Garrone's treatment of these element isn't really extraordinary or even particularly novel. The five primary storylines—and a few tangents—are fairly simplistic stuff. Characters make foolish decisions, suffer consequences, and then either rectify their mistakes or blindly proceed down the same path. Individually, none of the stories is tremendously enthralling, although all are told with a reserved style that turns the head, if only because observing a drive-by shooting the way one might observe a lion attack on a wildebeest herd seems so incongruous with the strained "humanity" we expect of a Mafia Movie.

What makes Gomorra compelling is Garrone's skill for dribbling in unsettling moments and details which either reflect an artistic sensibility more sophisticated than the film's rough edges might suggest, or which simply contribute to an overwhelming aura of doom and madness. In the former category, consider an offhand remark from Tito's friend about his infected lip piercing, obtained as a gang initiation, or the way that Ciro's raspy tenor evokes the ailment of the film's aging don, who can only be understood when he clasps his hand to his throat. Examples of the latter include the blackened, bombed-out apartment (never explained) that Don Ciro passes on the way to a delivery. Or the chilling yowl that the emaciated Marco unleashes, seemingly to himself, as he stands in a polluted river wearing only a Speedo and assault rifle. These elements knit together to convey a sense of both claustrophobia and vulnerability, the smell of a civilization cornered, exposed, teetering, dysfunctional beyond all hope of salvation. That Garrone establishes this nightmarish tone so decisively from a neat stack of five sad little urban dramas is not just impressive, it's downright spooky.

Of Time and the City

Ode to a Landscape Lost

2008 // UK // Terence Davies // March 14, 2009 // Theatrical Print

[Of Time and the City featured in a limited engagement on March 13-15, 2009 at the Webster University Film Series.]

A - Even the most supple and contemplative documentary features usually make gestures towards a narrative, sculpting their visual and aural components into hand-holds where viewers might find purchase. The only noteworthy exception to this principle in recent memory is Philip Philip Gröning's magnificent Into Great Silence, a film that broke every rule of the medium and achieved something singularly beautiful. While Philip Gröning's triumph strove for a quiet, observational character, Terence Davies' equally superb Of Time and City takes an entirely different track, embracing the director's own memories and emotions with soaring enthusiasm. The ultimate effect is daring and exquisite, resulting in a film that functions as a tone poem to a vanished environment, and yet also as a tuning fork keyed to the viewer's own nostalgic impulses. Via a collage of images, music, and narration, Davies explores the most cherished crevasses of his heart, where the lost Liverpool of his youth still resides, and in doing so he tunnels into our own hidden stores of bittersweet remembrance.

Davies has assembled an astonishing plethora of archival footage—both black-and-white and color—depicting Liverpool's public and private face, with a focus on the 1940s through the 60s, a span corresponding to the director's early life. This material is combined with a smattering of contemporary footage documenting the city's monumental landscape and the babble of its street life, creating a portrait that is both intimate and suffused with a lingering Industrial chill. The archival material is intriguing, perplexing, and revelatory. While I suspect that aerial shots of Liverpool's hideously modern Catholic cathedral are as plentiful as dandelions, one wonders about the footage of an elderly woman salting her dinner, or of children at play in vacant lots littered with brick. Where did these images come from? Why were they captured? It's almost as though some anonymous Liverpudlian's 8mm camera were whirring away in five-decade anticipation of Davies' extraordinary film.

The director knits together this footage with musical selections, most of them classical pieces, and narration he wrote and performed himself. While Of Time and the City's visuals lay out a footpath for the viewer, it's the narration that calls out to us, leading us gently forward through the film's experience. With a superb voice that is all warm cream and scratchy wool, Davies offers recollections studded with dazzling detail, and poetry that wonders aloud at the mystery of change and the meaning of home. Inasmuch as Of Time and the City can be said to have a structure, it is a rhythmic one created by the pattern of Davies' musings, which fall into three broad categories. First are his meticulous remembrances of warmly remembered but decontextualized scenes, such as Christmastime or a trip to the beach. Second are his recollections of specific events in the history of Liverpool and England: the Queen's coronation, the Korean War, the emergence of the Beatles (which Davis dismisses as the moment when pop evaporated from his own cultural consciousness). Finally, there are his more abstract and lyrical ruminations on time's ravaging hand, and in particular how it alters both landscapes and our memories. Streaks of personal anguish, longing, and resentment characterize much of the narration, particularly with respect to Davies' homosexuality, his Catholic faith, and the intersection of the two.

Mere description cannot do justice to the elegant manner in which these disparate elements—sensory, intellectual, and emotional—are united into a wondrous and distinctly filmic experience. It's easy to characterize Davies' meditation on his native city as profoundly personal, but the cunning of Of Time and the City rests on its mingling of the personal and the universal. The film excavates down through the accumulated clay of the creator's life to unearth the essential emotional landmarks of the Western cultural experience, examining them with an eye that is both rational and intuitive. While its anti-royal and anti-Church currents carry a bitter tinge—and justifiably so, in Davies' estimation—what truly astonishes is the film's spot-on admixture of tenderness, sorrow, drollness, and awe. Davies has bottled the wistful ache of unglossed nostalgia in cinematic form, capturing the ineffable urge to savor the past and shake our heads at its passing. It is this perfection of tone that lends Of Time and the City its smudged loveliness, and that makes it such a curiously powerful experience.