Gomorra is a critically lauded and prize-winning film directed by Matteo Garrone, based on a book by Roberto Saviano, about the Camorra, a crime syndicate that has a choke-hold on a section of Italy around Naples. Despite the accolades this film has received, I found myself mostly baffled and bored. It’s a real stem-winder–about two and a half hours, punctuated by scenes of raw violence, but mostly dealing in the tedium of daily life in a crime-ridden city.
The film begins with some men being killed in a tanning salon. We never learn who they or their killers are. Then we follow roughly five different stories as they touch upon the activities of the Camorra. I spent much of the first two-thirds of the movie trying to keep everyone straight and wondering how they connected with each other, mostly unsuccessfully. In the last half hour or so the bigger picture emerges, but it took real fortitude to wait that out, and in fact a little voice inside my head urged me to walk out about half-way through, as the couple behind me did.
The most compelling of the five stories involved the young: a pair of teens, who want to emulate Tony Montana of Scarface, steal some weapons from the mob and defy the warnings from the local boss, and a grocery-delivery boy is initiated into his local gang (this involved being shot in the chest while wearing a bulletproof vest) and is asked to betray the mother of his friend. If the film had been pared down to deal with these two stories, it would have made a better show, I think. The cycle of violence, which is common to many big cities around the world, is vividly etched here.
The other stories are more quotidian. A dress maker takes on a dangerous, second job of training Chinese garment workers, a waste disposal manager illegally dumps toxic waste on land leased to him by a local godfather hard up for money, and a meek middleman who pays off relatives of imprisoned gangsters gets caught up in an internecine war. These stories at times crawl by and are rarely engaging.
Gomorra is largely nonjudgmental. Only in the closing credits are we even made aware of what we have been watching (I may be wrong, but the word Camorra is never mentioned in the action of the film, nor do we know for sure where it’s taking place until then) and these end titles express an outrage over the violence perpetrated that the film itself lacks. The film has a docudrama feel, with hand-held cameras, very tight closeups, and naturalistic acting (much of it is very good). I just never got a sense of why I was watching this, and what it all meant.
Incidentally, most of us non-Italians think of that country as a home to some beautiful buildings, but the architecture on display here is downright depressing, worthy of an Eastern bloc nation in the bitterest cold of the cold war. If I lived in an apartment building that ugly I might want to shoot the architect.
Gone Elsewhere 
I liked it more than you did, but I still feel like most of your criticisms were on the mark.
I wonder what the general reaction would have been without the title cards at the end. Because you’re right, without that bit of contextualization, it’s a baffling film. If a viewer were to walk into it cold (as I mostly did, knowing only that it was a mafia film), they’d have a real uphill struggle on their hands.
As it was, even with the explanation at the end, I had to get home and read a bit about the Camorra to know how the dress maker and the toxic waste guy fit into things. I guess I didn’t connect the dots in that way; I just thought it was a Babel-like story about semi-interlocking crime stories.
But I will say that, even with the occasional disorientation, it was mostly compelling. Like you, I think the two stories you singled out were more powerful than the others, but only the toxic waste thread completely lacked interest for me.
I’ve been thinking more about why I didn’t like this film, and it ties in to your comment on Watchmen, Brian. Gomorra doesn’t have a central figure, which is okay–lots of films have multiple storylines with no protagonist, but this film needs an emotional center, because otherwise I had no way in. It was like being in a pit with no footholds to climb out of, and what I saw on the screen was meaningless hurlyburly. And I, too, had to read about the film to fill in the gaps after seeing it.
I agree that some storylines in the movie lack transparancy, but it is undeniably different from any mob movie out there. This is reality, so that is why some people may be turned off by it. It was, by far, an amazingly captivating film that will go down in history!!!!
“It was like being in a pit with no footholds to climb out of”
Of course, it was the director’s intention to make you feel that way… ;-) I loved the film, because I think it brings you the closest to that reality possible by watching a movie.