A history of violence

Matteo Garrone's kaleidoscopic Gomorrah wallops you with Italy's crime crisis.

We Americans love welcoming violent offenders into our living rooms—none more so than the fictional Mafia boss, who virtually crashes on the couch. He’s Tony Soprano, devoted father and whacker, or Vito Corleone, idly playing with a kitten while listening to requests for “justice.” Even Al Pacino’s animalistic Tony Montana in Scarface has his adoring fans, all but happy to say hello to his little friend time after time.

“These movies are masterpieces and I’m not criticizing them,” says Matteo Garrone, director of Gomorrah. “But the reality of my country—Naples especially—is very different. And I wondered if we could make a Mafia movie not from the top down, as we usually see it, but from the point of view of the people at the bottom, the real people caught up in the crossfire.”

The result, an epic crime drama about the shadowy Neapolitan “Camorra” organization, casts a darkly ironic eye on small-scale misfortunes and large-scale tragedy. The film, which opens Friday, was a critical hit at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and a commercial, if controversial, success at home. Based on journalist Roberto Saviano’s 2006 exposé (itself a huge sensation), Gomorrah is shot City of God–style on location in the teeming tenements of Naples and Caserta, employing local denizens and even a perp or two.“I did have some previously arrested actors in small parts,” Garrone, 40, confirms. “I know that’s why Roberto Saviano never came to the set.” (The writer has been under police protection for two years.)

More provocative than castmates’ shady pasts, however, are the palpably recognizable characters who aren’t your everyday thugs, including a sweet-natured tailor swept up in the criminally controlled fashion world and a pair of jerky teens whose taste for gangster movies leads them way out of their depth. Gomorrah opens with these two kids bouncing around the balcony of a burned-out foyer—one with a sweeping staircase and a suspicious resemblance.

“Yeah, that’s the real house of a criminal boss who gave a tape of Scarface to his architect and said, ‘I want that,’ ” Garrone relates, chuckling. “The home was completely destroyed when he went to prison. I remember feeling like I was discovering some kind of modern archaeology, like the remains of the Roman Empire.”

In a way, Garrone’s “empire” might not be so unrecognizable to a younger generation of Americans, facing calamitous recession yet saturated in thug culture; Gomorrah has big, timely ideas in mind. “Matteo really respected my book’s mood,” Saviano says by e-mail from Barcelona. “It doesn’t condemn anyone. Symbolically, it could be the lower-income areas of any big city, overdeveloped and without any planning or authority.”

Garrone is more comfortable speaking to the visual and human aspects of his movie (“I don’t think of myself as political,” he contends, a statement supported by earlier films such as the 2004 tale of obsession First Love). But, he offers, “the problems of the black market, violence, drugs, the confusion of fantasy and reality—these are worldwide concerns that we can all relate to. It’s a very complicated situation. I can’t find the answer myself, but I can show it.”

If Gomorrah often feels like war, with lengthy scenes of urban strife involving semiautomatic weapons, waged on tense front lines, that’s exactly its point. “For me, as a Roman, it was shocking to discover that, only two hours away, there’s a territory filled with people who are constantly battling,” the director says. “Honestly, after our movie became so explosive, the government sent the army to Naples. They decided to declare war on the Camorra.”

Did it work? In Garrone’s mind, no. “I don’t think the army is enough,” he says. “Yes, it’s important to send criminals to jail, but also that politicians do something from the inside out. It’s about education, employment.” That doesn’t sound especially apolitical. “I’m too close to it,” the filmmaker concedes. “These people welcomed us, helped us, trusted us to tell their story. They were my first audience, standing behind the monitor, laughing. I need to return their emotional experience.”

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