In the Bible, God decides to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sin of their inhabitants. In Roberto Saviano’s book and its adaptation for the screen by Matteo Garrone, the sin is responsible for destroying the city, and God is nowhere to be seen.
Gomorrah is a real-life flick: its shaky hand-held camera shows tired and craggy faces at close range, making us the first-row witnesses of a society’s implosion. The story follows six broken destinies through the filthy streets of depressing housing projects in Naples. Some of them have a direct relation to the criminal organisation: a teenager learns that being with them equals being against innocent people, two other kids realize that they can’t be freelancers in this world, a man whose role is only to distribute money finds himself in the middle of a war between two clans… The demonstration makes even more sense when other characters with less obvious links to the Camorra (like a tailor who betrays his boss or a young professional who discovers appalling toxic waste management processes) see their life affected or destroyed by the mafia’s blind tentacles.
Garrone’s direction is probably really close to the style of the book, skinned and brutal. The movie’s point and ending are dark, uncompromising and leave the viewer with a mixture of helplessness and hopelessness. This vision of the mob is worlds apart from the glamourous American mafia mythology built by Coppola, Scorcese or the Sopranos. Just like in David Simon’s the Wire, the individuals of Gomorrah are powerless and crushed by a dehumanized and merciless institution. Naples doesn’t seem so far from Baltimore.
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