If we’ve learned anything from movies and TV, it’s that even in New Jersey, the Mafia are a glamorous lot. There is, however, little opportunity for Johnny Fontane to turn up and croon during Matteo Garrone’s Gomorra, an awesome reinvention of the Mafioso movie.
Based on an Italian nonfiction bestseller detailing the operations of the Neapolitan mob known as the Camorra, Gomorra depicts a society that is riddled with mob corruption all the way down to the slums, where money movers demand or make payments to and from the bottom rung.
Competing narratives add to the general commotion. Over here, we find two Scarface-quoting, teenage blowhards who attempt to stage an ill-advised attack on their local Camorra boss, a boozy, video-game jockey with friends in high places and munitions aplenty. Over there, we meet a haute couture tailor who has betrayed his mob masters by going to work for their Chinese-sweatshop rivals.
Soon enough, everyone starts to look like an insignificant insect that might be squished by the Camorra at any given moment. These same feudal rules apply whether you’re the businessman who illegally dumps his corporate toxic waste or just a kid who finds a gun on his grocery delivery route.
Mr. Garrone’s film takes all the swagger out of the Mafia as we know it. There are no sharp suits here, just toothless old men counting money in back rooms. The accumulative effect of discombobulating drama and the director’s gritty docu-realist style (Naples, Open City, anyone?) packs a wallop the Camorra itself might be proud of.