Gritty Cities.('Gomorrah', 'Two Lovers')(Movie review)

The first thing you should know about "Gomorrah" is that no fewer than three members of its cast have been arrested on suspicion of illegal activities. There could be no more unimpeachable testament, surely, to the integrity of Matteo Garrone's film, which is about organized crime in Naples. Many of the actors were recruited from the area, presumably on the basis that they already knew the ropes, not to mention the Kalashnikovs.

You might say that the project smelled of trouble from the start. It began as a nonfiction book by the journalist Roberto Saviano, published in 2006, entitled "Gomorra"; one letter less gave more weight to the pun, yoking the Camorra, or Neapolitan Mafia, with a place of Biblical folly. The book, which opens with frozen Chinese corpses falling out of a shipping container on an Italian quayside--a small matter of human trafficking gone awry--was so detailed, and so incensed, in exposing the venalities of the Mob that Saviano now lives in hiding, under police protection. It was hard to picture his writhing tales of revenge being unpicked and sorted into cinematic sense, but somehow Garrone, working with a clan of screenwriters (including Saviano), has brought order to the sprawl. Even so, the result demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone's mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, the author's courageous toil.

There are five stories, layered and stuck together, raising the possibility that Garrone modelled the whole thing on a lasagna verde. We get them morsel by morsel, and the brisk dicing between them can catch the viewer unprepared. There is Toto (Salvatore Abruzzese), age thirteen, who spies a dropped gun in the street, returns it to local thugs, and, in reward, becomes a mini-mule in the drug trade. There is a pair of teen-agers, Marco (Marco Macor) and Ciro (Ciro Petrone), fools in love with a gangsterish ideal; "I'm No. 1! Tony Montana!" they cry, acting out their pantomime of "Scarface" in an empty tenement, where a sunken, unused bath echoes not just old Brian De Palma movies but much older tubs, in the balneae of Pompeii, across the bay. There is Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato), whose name hints at potency, but who is, in fact, a frightened hireling in a cheap blouson, distributing cash to those families who exist on the say-so of the Camorra. There is Franco (Toni Servillo), the most accomplished gentleman on view, and the one most at ease with evil; aided by a reluctant sidekick, Roberto (Carmine Paternoster), he arranges for the disposal of industrial waste. That sounds like a filmmaker's convenient symbol, but, if you live in certain parts of southern Italy, the poisoning of the land is right in front of your nose, and under your skin.

Last, and best, of the central figures is Pasquale, played by Salvatore Canta-lupo. (Has any bunch of actors had better names?) Pasquale is a Thurberish drone, keeping his head down but unable to stop lifting up his eyes to resplendent things. He is a tailor, working his fingers off in the service of couture, or, rather, of its speedy, backroom simulacrum. In a bid to earn more, he accepts a secret offer to tutor Chinese immigrants in his delicate art, and what follows is a touching nocturnal farce. Bundled into the trunk of a car, he arrives not at some dripping sweatshop but at a spotless workplace, lined with eager apprentices who applaud his entrance as though he had come to conduct them: "They called me Maestro!" he whispers to his wife, creeping back at dawn. Moments like this achieve what so few American movies seem to be doing just now: they take on a big subject, unwieldy and unglamorous--in this case, the illegal economies that thrive under globalization, and on which we unwittingly feed--and dig out from it a cluster of private dramas that are highly specific (some Italian audiences required subtitles for "Gomorrah," so parochial is the Neapolitan dialect), and yet which could, you feel, find an answering gleam almost anywhere on the planet. Toward the close, at a truck stop, Pasquale glances at a TV and sees a clip of a radiant Scarlett Johansson parading at a movie premiere, wearing a dress that he himself ran up at cut price, or perhaps its costlier identical twin; the expression on the tailor's face is, you might say, his final master class, proving the beauty of ruefulness.

But then "Gomorrah" is a beautiful movie. That may sound perverse, given its welter of drive-by shootings and toxic dumps, but what is most impressive about Garrone is his refusal to let his style be bulldozed by the runaway violence of his subject. This is organized crime. Not for him the panicky, catch-me-if-you-can approach of a film like "City of God"--or, indeed, like "Slumdog Millionaire," which next to "Gomorrah" seems like an adventure vacation. The mobsters may be trigger-frenzied, but the movie takes constant care, with a kind of appalled wonder, to survey the arenas of their mayhem. Don Ciro does the rounds of Scampia, a northern suburb of Naples, where people live and die in tower blocks that look like ruined ziggurats. Most of the camerawork is handheld, but now and then we pull back for a lofted view: a panorama as unruffled as an Andreas Gursky photograph. Meanwhile, Toto and other kids, in some murky shell of a building, take turns to strap on a makeshift bulletproof vest, get shot in the chest, struggle to their feet, and thereby prove themselves as men-in-waiting; as each vanishes into the gloom to receive his blow, we could be watching a parable of the ancient underworld. Few recent films have been as timely as "Gomorrah," yet time itself seems to melt around the ...