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Guidos In Speedos | Two Neapolitan youths play out gangster fantasies in Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah.

Gomorrah

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GOMORRAH
Directed by Matteo Garrone. Starring Salvatore Abruzzese, Marco Macor, Ciro Petrone, Gianfelice Imparato, Toni Servillo, Salvatore Cantalupo. Opens Fri, May 15.
****

Watching Gomorrah, director Matteo Garrone’s meticulous and dizzying investigation into the inner workings of the organized crime circuit in Naples, I realized that one of my absolute worst fears has come true: The Wire has ruined everything. Critics have been saying for years that David Simon’s ultra-nuanced, morally grey HBO series about the Baltimore police department and the never-ending web of drug dealers it chases has permanently raised the bar for complexity and grit, but Garrone and his film are casualties of an even more tragic order — they’re peers who nonetheless remain stuck in Simon’s colossal shadow.

That’s because while Gomorrah brutally exposes the idiocy and decrepitude of the Neapolitan mafia, in the process de-pantsing pretty much the entire crime genre as we know it, a lot of it still feels overly familiar. That’s kind of an unfair complaint, I realize, but there’s something to be said for getting there first, and Simon and company were rewriting basically this same playbook back in 2002. On the positive side, if you’ve never seen The Wire — or can selectively forget everything you ever learned about the Barksdales — there’s very little to stop Garrone’s film from hitting its rightful stride as a minor classic.

Comparisons between the two works are inescapable. Both take their cues from capital-A authentic source materials — in Garrone’s case, the 2006 nonfiction exposé by Roberto Saviano, which revealed so many Camorra secrets that the author had to be put under 24-hour police surveillance (though he has emerged long enough to lend a hand to the screenplay). Both are infinitely more interested in the mundane, everyday details of crime rather than its flashy payoff. And both are soul-punishingly bleak; those who come in search of happy endings are in for disappointment after disappointment.

Most obviously, both Garrone and Simon tell dense, knotted stories that don’t so much fit together so much as rub shoulders, coexisting but essentially oblivious to one another’s existence. Gomorrah packs in five stand-alone narratives, which are, briefly, as follows: the two Scarface-worshipping teens who try to carve out their own territory; the kid who retrieves a stolen gun and gets a chance to join the ranks; the tailor who moonlights teaching Chinese immigrants the tricks of the trade; the businessman who arranges for barrels of corporate toxic waste to magically disappear; and the deliveryman who disperses payola to everyone on the Camorra’s keep-quiet list.

Yet unlike The Wire, Gomorrah gives no screen time whatsoever to the law enforcement side of things. Vigilante justice is the only kind of justice in this universe — the best the police can do is show up every half-hour to tape off a new crime scene and scratch their heads. Citizens not under the Camorra’s protection are worse than helpless; they’re chalk outlines waiting to happen. That’s why when the deliveryman (Gianfelice Imparato) has a sudden change of heart, the first thing he does — aside from strap on a bulletproof vest and break out in a cold sweat — is yell around the apartment complex, his usual delivery route, for people to stay inside. “It’s dangerous!” he barks, and nobody has any reason to doubt him.

This ugliness is only further punctuated by the occasional burst of beauty, thrown in when you least expect it. In the midst of dilapidated condos that look more Incan than Neapolitan, a group of kids splash in a pool on a lush green roof. When one of the teens, an impossibly lanky kid named Sweet Pea (Ciro Petrone), breaks down in a forest after forgetting where he buried a stash of stolen weapons, the trees shine brilliantly on behind him. Even the soundtrack — a barrage of obnoxious, too-slick Europop — serves as a stark, strangely civilized counterpoint to the rest of the onscreen savagery.

Perhaps the real complaint about Gomorrah is that even at 130 minutes, it’s way, way too short. After all, we had five years and more than 60 hours to get to know the nuts and bolts of The Wire’s Baltimore — and we still barely learned anything. As the final murders unfold on a desolate beach, you realize that you never even really figured out who was fighting whom. Was it sparring families? Rival neighbourhoods? Or just your run-of-the-mill drug cartels? The journalist Saviano could probably help us out, but I get the feeling he’s not exactly listed in the phone book.