Review: Gomorrah — Five Minutes of Action Crammed Into Two Hours

by Mike Long

Watching Gomorrah is like learning Latin: You’d rather say you’ve done it than actually do it.

Gomorrah is a slightly fictionalized portrayal of life under the influence of the criminal organization Camorra (unknown to most of the U.S., but apparently running things with bloody fists in Italy). It’s a situation that deserves attention. A picture could have presented events as riveting entertainment or art, and perhaps helped to bring about change. Yet Gomorrah fails as art, entertainment and promotional tool. Any publicity about the horror of the Camorra has come from the existence of the film, not the watching.

Gomorrah is dull and flat and emotionally uncompelling: It is a sprawling tour of future-less lives and hollow days punctuated occasionally—very occasionally—by brief set pieces in which something violent and terrible happens. That may be true-to-life, but so is sitting at a desk all day, and neither is particularly interesting to watch. If filmmakers have any foundational obligation, it is to make a picture that makes you want–need–to keep watching. These filmmakers feel no such burden. It is as if they have taken the seriousness of their subject as license to relieve themselves of the obligation to sustain the interest of the audience. They’re counting on guilt or something to keep us interested, and they could not have been more mistaken.

Not that you’re seeing this kind of criticism from most mainstream critics—they have lauded the picture. (As of this writing, it has received a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.) But most critics get it a little bit: If you read the reviews, their enthusiasm is largely for the nobility and realism of the effort, not for the movie as anything viscerally engaging—which is exactly what this material should have been.

Movie critics tend to be cheerleaders for what I call “eat yer peas” pictures: They’re often more interested in a sackcloth-and-ashes display of appropriate concern than they are about whether a picture “works” or is worth your ten bucks and a sitter. Allow me: Gomorrah doesn’t work, and it isn’t worth your money. It’s two hours and 15 minutes of barely developed story arcs and run-it-in-the-ground atmospherics populated by characters we hardly meet. (In fact, the people in Gomorrah are so indistinguishable that the filmmakers could be criticized for painting the poor as interchangeable.) Gomorrah has lots of villains and lots of conflict and lots of interesting locations, but none of them are put to a captivating purpose. What it needs is characters we care about doing things in a timely way toward an identifiable purpose. That’s the heart and soul of storytelling in general and good filmmaking in particular.

If the point of Gomorrah is to publicize the plight of the victimized poor of Naples and Caserta, the credit for any success should go to the marketing department behind this movie, not the filmmakers. Imagine what change might have been generated if the filmmakers had made something that moved people. Instead, Gomorrah is self-indulgent arthouse ballet, slow and uninteresting—and with less than a million dollars in U.S. box office so far, mostly unseen. More’s the pity. Gomorrah is a wasted opportunity. Tragically so.


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Posted Mar 23rd 2009 at 11:47 am in Media Criticism, Reviews | 35 Comments