Gomorra
Naples, Italy, is a violent, corrupt and squalid place, essentially governed by a crime syndicate. You could learn this by spending a few minutes reading any news dispatch filed from there over the past few years, or you could devote two hours and 15 minutes to an unendurable movie called “Gomorra.” Director Mateo Gorrone takes the dour trend in European social-realist filmmaking to such preposterous extremes that even gunplay isn’t enough to jolt the senses. The movie is dead aesthetically. The camera just follows around a couple dozen low-level gangsters, all of them loathsome, cutting from one to the next with no rhythm or reason. Mostly they talk about committing crimes. Sometimes they commit them. Many end up dead. The audience yawns, nods off or walks out. It’s hard to recall a more stultifying movie, especially one that rode a wave of praise into U.S. theaters. There’s no reward for paying close attention, because there’s no story. Nothing that happens in the first act is relevant to the second, and so on. “Gomorra” is not some kind of Brechtian experiment, either. You’re supposed to react emotionally what you see – to be horrified, I suppose. But no one earns our sympathy, because we get little sense of how crime affects ordinary citizens. The movie is insular, entirely devoted to showing the grim reality of the outlaw life from the eyes of those who live it. “Gomorra” is a failed docudrama: It neither informs nor entertains.