Gomorra

Sometimes you get lucky.

A couple weeks back, by some stupid error, I let Gomorra slip out of the theaters in Boston without seeing it. It had been my own darn fault. After having just missed it in New York in February, I anticipated its arrival in Boston with great eagerness, only to lackadaisically let it meander from one indie theater to another, until in wound up at the Capitol, which seems to be the last on the food chain. Somehow I had I misread the Google movie listings, on what I thought what the last Thursday to see it, I found it already gone. It had already come and gone out of the Red River in Concord, New Hampshire. That left one last hope: my old stand-by, the Wilton Town Theater.

The listings in Wilton confirmed it was on their schedule, but when? It didn't say. It was far down on the list, and so I didn't expect to have a chance to see it before I left for overseas. But by some act of grace, when I checked the listings last Wednesday, for what would be my final days during this stay in the Boston area, there it was.

It was a double joy, since it gave me once last chance to go back to Wilton. I had been up there four times in the last six months, but not at since February, since I had caught up on all the smaller independent films. But Gomorra came me one last opportunity, at least until I return.

I took off on the backroads on late Saturday afternoon. On all my previous trips, the short winter days had meant I had made the trip in total darkness. The beautiful May sun of New England gave me a chance to see what I was missing. The green rolling hills and orchards up along the border reminded me of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. I already learned that Silver Lake State Park actually has a huge lake right beside the road.

I rolled onto Main Street with about forty minutes to spare, and as had become my custom, I had dinner at the homespun Greek diner across from the theater. The television was showing a minor league baseball game between the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees. The brilliant sun gave me a chance to take a few shots of the hulking town hall. It turns out they have been showing movies there since 1912.

From the photo, you can see the entrance on street level. You have to climb the stairs to the second story, where you buy a ticket at the concession stand.

Gomorrah was showing in the smaller of the two auditoriums, which is where I've seen every movie that I've seen there. The larger auditorium, which has a stage and big velvet curtain, always shows curtain releases, which I usually have seen already.

There were less than ten people in the small auditorium and its plain-brown-wrapper wooden fold-up seats that sit flat on the floor. I always sit in the same place, in the third row, for some reason. It's one of my quirks, that I usually sit in the same seat when going back to the same place.

As I like to do lately, I recently read the book upon which the movie is based. Robert Soviano's non-fiction action of the seedy underbelly of Naples strikes one as nearly impossible to capture on screen, for the fact that it contains some many, many little vignettes. They could literally make dozens of movies out of it, even though its less than three hundred pages long.

In this case, they made five separate but overlapping stories, which they follow in linear fashion. All five of the stories essentially have the same theme, which is the devil's bargain of being involved in the underworld depicted. Each of the protagonists, either before the beginning of the story, or during the course of it, has made some kind of personal deal, to obtain money or other rewards by getting involved in this world, at least on some level. That each story winds up showing the price for this bargain inevitably makes this movie in the tradition of the Italian medieval stories, such as Boccaccio, or more recently, Italo Calvino.

What eventually struck me about the movie, as opposed to the book, was that the structure of the narrative was inverted. Although the book is billed as an expose of the Naples organized crime, it opens not with the street-level gang wars but with the macro picture of globalism. We learn that Naples is to Europe what Long Beach is to the West Coast of the United States---the funnel through which the mind-boggling and endless stream of cheap goods from China enters the continent. This towering fact is the one that supports all other activities in Soviano's expose, and it is why the crime of the Naples suburbs is woven into the highest levels of globalist trade. Only after the midpoint of the book do we finally get to the street-level Cammora gang wars, when the killinugs of 2004, largely done by kids on mopeds, arrive with numbing succession.

But the movie takes an inverted structure. We start with street wars, and then move on to the global picture only in the midpoint of the movie. Even then, we get only a glimpse of the influence of global trade on Naples. This was somewhat disappointing to me, because the street-level violence, althoug easily romanticized, is really no different from the violence we have seen over and over again in movies.

No movie can ever capture everything in a novel, but I couldn't help feel that many, if not most, of my favorite episodes from the book were missing. I was sure the cell phone ringing in the coffin would make it in. Also the story of Pasquale the Tailor really lacked something that gave the book its globalist punch, especially the story of Angelina Jolie's dress. Anyone who read the book will understand why Jolie was kept a low profile at this year's Oscars.

I've heard so many raves about this movie that I couldn't help feeling a bit let-down. I had expected a full-throated expose of globalism, but what I got was more of a post-millenial neo-realist updating of traditional mafia movies. It certainly is a very good movie, but not quite the one I was expecting.

All right. That will have to do for commentary. I'm sitting in the Aer Lingus lounge in Boston Airport, and they have just called boarding for my flight to Dublin. The adventure begins...

note I wrote this a week ago. I'm finally getting around to uploading it, now that I have wireless working.