Gomorrah

Gangster films are an art in themselves: anyone who knows more than the basics about films and film can tell you that. It’s not intended to be a shattering revelation. Nevertheless, it does mean something around which filmmakers and their audience need to tread more carefully than otherwise: a unique set of rules and regulations, and tighter scrutiny. Action movies or Dramatic movies can get away with vague, generalised nitpicks – and they are also less likely to be held up top the light and compared with whatever was Bruce Willis’s finest work, or Aliens. Gangster movies, on the other hand, like Westerns, face first of all a decidedly finicky audience, who have come to the cinema expecting to see something rather than awaiting blissful surprise, and secondly the inevitable comparison to The Godfather (if the film is cerebral and deals with organisation) or Goodfellas (if it is gritty and has no orchestral music whatsoever). On the other hand, I’m no connoisseur in the genre – I merely look for a good game. A pity, then, that either way I have would up disappointed.

Gomorrah arrived in London over a week ago and I had intended to see it ever since I read the reviews, written by reviewers who appeared to have had simultaneous epiphanies whilst watching. It came so highly recommended that Solomon himself would have been delighted to have it seated at his table and I remember in particular one reviewer claiming that if enough people saw it, it could replace The Godfather as the premium example of mafia life as depicted filmically. To which I can only now reply: ‘I do hope not.’ The Godfather may be unrealistic, unfairly idyllic, to concentrated on class and family to really convey the true callous nature of mafia life, but at least it made for a watchable movie.

Gomorrah is a film with its priorities wrong. The first scene is set in a tanning salon and I loved it: middle-aged Italian men, the arrogance dripping off them as tangibly as the sweat, viewing their bodies as the prizes of their labour. The whirring hum of the tanning machines gave a threatening atmosphere to the proceedings (an ironic choice of words, given pretty much nothing was happening), and one man even managed to make getting a manicure seem dangerous. Then, half of them are shot where they stand by the other half in a taut snapping of bullets and I thought ‘Yes. We are looking at another slick, stylish, fascinating portrait of gangster life.’ Unfortunately, I was wrong. We weren’t. We were looking at a deceptive opening to a film which seemed to expect us to care about it without giving us any reason to.

In a nutshell, Gomorrah is about the Camorra, effectively the Italian mafia. It is renowned for being more violent and less organised than its American or Chinese equivalents. The film follows the unlinked stories of various personages all linked to the mob: a pair of lethally stupid teenagers; a young, impressionistic boy who seems to lack personality; a tailor with a large order to complete; a money carrier working on the estate where most of the events take place; and a few others. To be honest, nobody was particularly memorable and I couldn’t care about anyone owing to them all being completely unlikeable. A first failing: the film evidently wants us to sympathise with some characters and dislike others but they all fall into the same category of ‘Unlikeable Italian bloke, possibly called Giovanni’. (I am not being xenophobic; there are at least six people called Vincenzo in the cast list and many names are commonplace.) The pace is sluggish, often spending far too much time on trivialities, and the camera wavers about during the scene as if either it doesn’t know what it is looking for or it assumes the audience will want to see everything and therefore tries to include it all at one time or another. In reality, it just seems the former, which isn’t a good impression to make.

I know what Gomorrah is trying to do: it is trying to be a snapshot into the lives of those living under the wing of the mafia, but even there it falls down. It’s trying to be representative – fair enough; City of God pulled it off – and yet by confining the characters followed to only a few, and mostly of no consequence, it makes the film feel irregular and unconvincing. There is only one point in the entire film where I get the idea of just what it is like living in such a place, which is poor when the film is actually genuine – shot on location, nice; real-life gangsters hired for some of the roles, lovely. I’ve no quarrel with the acting but I do with the characters, and the director (Matteo Garrone, never helmed anything which made an impact outside of Europe before) appears to have missed something at film school: to care about a character, they have to be interesting. Otherwise you just want them to stop taking up space on the screen. There is precisely one interesting character in Gomorrah, the tailor, and he has about one eighth of the film to himself. A shame. Everyone else is dull, and for a film relying so much on the force of its population this is worrying.

The other problem is location. In setting most of the film around a single estate, Garrone tries to make it feel representative. Unfortunately, I live in London and I know all about sink estates, where once one crosses the grassy border they are unsure of ever coming out again. Shootings in estates are no novelty, so the idea that amped-up young men, high on arrogance and bravado, might shoot each other hardly strikes me as endemic. I found it much more easy to imagine such problems limited only to the flats in question and the rest of the city harmless as any other. Therefore, the majority of the film had no impact whatsoever as I could brush it off as irrelevant. Take us away from that estate and one would expect the problem to cease existing but again it is all too social: scenes taking place between only a few people, in bedrooms or on the beach, the same faces returning all the time. This is not an example of a pervasive all-powerful criminal fraternity, this is a group of old men with too much power and some sub-prime real estate. There’s no web of power, no influence, and there should be. At the end of the film, pre-credits, a number of facts about the Camorra are shown, including how many people they have killed and how much dumping of radioactive waste they are killing the countryside with. Upon leaving the cinema, I wondered why on earth that information hadn’t been provided at the beginning. It would have allowed a welcome contextualising of what I was seeing, rather than the aimless meandering I felt it was.

What we have, then, is a film where the direction remains locked up tightly in the mind of the director. There was a lot of potential – good locations, fine acting, a definite sense of gritty realism aided by the sensible lack of soundtrack – but it was negated by the apathy felt by both the characters and myself. For a film such as this to work it must be sure of itself: is it a gangster thriller, or a docudrama? It advertised itself as the former, and it wasn’t. Instead, we had what should have been a controlled and focused example of expose filmmaking resulting as a messy, nihilistic mess, where the continual callousness and arrogance of the players left you deadened and dispassionate. There is no point in watching this film expecting entertainment. My advice? Watch half of it one day, and then the other half the next, and view it as a performed documentary. That way, you will still care enough to be engaged. What I can applaud, however, is how well it showed the dehumanising effect of mafia life. It managed to bore even me.

Emma

This is the 1996 version of Emma, which I saw yesterday and felt it deserved a good, comprehensive review.

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And so, we return to the idyllic English countryside for another round of drawing-room politics in the company of Jane Austen and her ever-wonderful gallery of characters. 1996 was an interesting year for Austen, not least because any Austen adaptation – or any English period piece whatsoever – had to compete with Andrew Davies’ Pride and Prejudice, a brilliantly engrossing selection of character studies which presented the word with a wet-shirted Mr Darcy and therefore a heartthrob to unite womankind a full decade before Gregory House. Also in 1996 we had Clueless, with Alicia Silverstone – back when she was in the same league as Reese Witherspoon – heading up an alarmingly-effective relocating of Emma in a modern American high school and proving that Austen’s ability for characterisation was noteworthy enough to be more than a mere product of its time. Now we have the real deal: a white-dresses, fireplaced, bonnetted English feature film starring an American and an Australian. Personally, I’m not one to whine about the cultural standards of casting so long and the eventual performance is up to standard – this scenario was repeated last year with Becoming Jane, where Miss Austen herself was portrayed with an idealistic yet wry friendliness by Anne Hathaway which I can’t honestly have declared passable by any actress solely on the grounds that said second actress would be English – and here, the American (Gwyneth Paltrow) is near-perfect, and certainly game.

Now, I’ve never read Emma – it’s on my to-do list – but this, if anything, puts me at an advantage. Every review I’ve read of this film thus far, even Anthony Lane’s, had been hung up on the irregularities between book and film and how it, as an adaptation, could be improved. I’m in no position to do that, and therefore can view it as a film alone. The first scene of the film is a wedding, and there is no time wasted in informing us that Emma (Gwyneth Paltrow) was instrumental in the formation of this marriage as a matchmaker. It is the best way to introduce someone: a display of the main facet of their personality, without coming to the conclusion just yet as to whether is is a positive point or a character flaw, and we will be able to make our own minds up on the subject soon enough. Moving through a succession of drawing rooms, green fields and leafy paths (and I will swear that at least nine-tenths of the film takes place in one of these three settings) we see Emma as a mischievous, meddling figure – or, as I preferred to term her, an Machiavellian egotist, though I will probably be killed by a vigilante mob of young female book club members if any of them ever get around to reading this. She runs the film (she has to, given the camera is always on her) as she runs around the sunny countryside doing whatever she pleases in whatever manner she wants, blest as she has been by such a pliable best friend, Miss Harriet Smith (Toni Collette, deciding to play the role as a blushing collection of toothy giggles and losing our sympathy in the process). Emma plots the further marriages of Miss Smith, gets into a few escapades of her own and, inevitably, it all winds up the sunny Austen way: happily, with a marriage or two. Not complicated. Not taxing. The film, seeming to bear this mind, goes out of its way to avoid either of those.

What struck me right from the first scene and even more strongly as the film went on was the fact that it does not feel of its time. Its quick, witty dialogue and relaxed camerawork – often staying in a single fixed position – results in this not feeling like Austen so much as Oscar Wilde. I felt a definite sense of it being pre-planned, which characterises much of Wilde’s work: dialogue has a clear beginning and end point, and the lines after which the audience is meant to laugh are clearly defined. More than anything it reminded me of a Berkoff theatre production minus the threat and obscenity: movement is deliberate and almost choreographed, and while that might suit the stage perfectly, an elegant period piece is not the place for exaggerated movements, even if meant to emphasise the humour. Much of the film does also seem desperate to modernise itself, to make itself feel contemporary – if it was because the director (Douglas McGraith, whom I had never heard of before and had no desire to seek out his back catalogue after) felt threatened by Clueless he deserves a slap – but it goes about it the wrong way, with its theatrical pouting and heavy sighs. To modernise a classic novel (and to mess around with the chronology of this review somewhat) one must envision the setting with as many flaws as our current system, in the same way Ridley Scott did with Blade Runner to such revelatory effect. Two years later, Andrew Davies’ Vanity Fair (a BBC adaptation) showed exactly how to do this and since then other period pieces (such as Joe Wright’s 2005 film of Pride and Prejudice) have adopted this. Emma shows why it was necessary: McGraith’s vision of Austen’s England is nothing but cosy and lush and happy – almost a utopia of middle England. It can absorb any quarrel or upset and come out smiling, even when you’re not entirely sure how. In such a world Emma can get away with what she does. In any other, she’d be eaten alive.

The other factor of a period piece which one looks at in detail when it comes to a period film such as this is the cast, and it is serviceable yet forgettable. The problem is that there’s precious little to do for so many of them except to simply play foils to Emma’s impulsive meanderings. Characters aren’t notable, they don’t stick in your mind. The exceptions are Paltrow herself and a few others. Paltrow can certainly play Emma, chirping out the lines with spirit and always playing along with the intended tone of the scene, but the problem comes from her doing what is required rather than having thought the character through. She misses motivation: I assume she had Emma explained to her as a girl who likes to play Cupid and thought that that was enough, but while you see her enjoyment in her role you’re never precisely sure what drives her to do it. I would describe her as Machiavellian because of her actions, but she does not strike me as a plotting person. On the other hand, she has certainly recreated Emma’s emotional core and balanced it perfectly: her Emma can be on top of everything but still be shamed. In the pivotal scene – and the only one where I felt any genuine emotional shock – she screws up her face like a petulant schoolgirl, about ready to stamp her foot. It is infinitely more effective than a slow, silent tear trickling down her cheek because, arguably the only time in the running, it grounds the film in reality and has it shaken by a blow which could not be calmly deflected. The deliverer of the only council which penetrates Emma’s confident countenance comes from Mr Knightley (Jeremy Northam), a character whose every word I agreed with throughout the entirety of the film. He is immune to her smirks and knows her well enough to not be distracted, and it doesn’t hurt that his lines border on Shakespeare. “Vanity working on a weak mind produces every kind of mischief”, he tells her, when it is quite possible no-one else would dare to. He is unamused, and refreshingly so. Other figures include Ewan McGregor as Mr Churchill, sol endearingly miscast it is impossible to not warm to him (McGregor, for all his widely demonstrated talent, is not and will never be a period actor), and Juliet Stevenson as the pushy, self-flattering Mrs Elton. Now, I like Juliet Stevenson, because she’s always struck me as being able to play the kind of strong female character that no man could find off-putting, but she has always been at her most effective when allowed to shoot strong, sceptical glares at everyone and anyone, communicating through glances – she has the eyebrows for it. Here, she is simply given too much to say. Without enough chance to step back, purse her lips and make somebody in the room feel very small indeed, I got the constant feeling that she was being wasted.

Emma is a film impossible to take offence to, and also one you cannot fail to be entertained by. There’s life in it: idyllic and unnatural, but sprightly and inviting. You feel uplifted after seeing it (no doubt aided by the only truly faultless part of the film, the wonderful score) and will walk for the rest of the day with a spring in your step and Gwyneth Paltrow’s fast, clear voice in your head. This film is certainly worth watching, and goodness knows there are more things to complain about in other period adaptations than the fact that Highbury seems to have been lifted squarely off a greetings card; not least the recent and highly dangerous trend of BBC dramas filled with actors who look incredibly modern and made-up to the hilt. No, Emma stays consistent and in the same place, even if it is a place which never existed. If you are new to Jane Austen, this film won’t make you understand why she and her work are so revered, but you may also have an inkling to read the book, in which case you can find out for yourself the quality of the original. It’s something I plan to do shortly. And you’re never left, after the film has closed, with a feeling of being wronged; sometimes you get that, as though a poor point in a film has left a bad taste in your mouth. Innocent, pleasant and eminently watchable. Jane Austen may have intended something with a little more bite, but I don’t think she’d have been offended by this.

A quick recommendation.

Okay, under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do this, but this person knows how to review films. He’s a pleasure to read.