City of God

Almost Kubrick in status, Martin Scorsese has pushed the praise reflex button with the lamentable Gangs of New York. The movie’s specious ad copy, "America was born in the streets," alludes to Scorsese’s past urban films while taking those exploitation-movie instincts displayed in Mean Streets, Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Goodfellas and inflating them into historical profundity. When you finally see the overhyped (and obviously truncated) Gangs of New York, it’s clear that Scorsese’s worshippers are not responding to his civic-minded historical authenticity, only–as with Kubrick–to his technical flamboyance. /> Since the enshrinement of Raging Bull, Scorsese’s rep has been based on flashiness–few people have ever really scrutinized his ideas (whether New York’s hostile ethos, the yoke of masculinity or the Christian struggle as seen through either). It’s the showoff emphasis on cinema-making that has turned Scorsese into a god for several generations, including imitators like Spike Lee, Tarantino, Nick Gomez, David Fincher, Hype Williams, Joe Carnahan and a new style-happy group outside the U.S.: Britain’s Guy Ritchie, Mexico’s Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and now Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles. In City of God, Meirelles’ second feature, the young filmmaker succumbs to the Kubrick/Scorsese fascination with style and violence. Since ostentatious technique has now become the global mode–expressing how young filmmakers choose to see their world post-MTV–City of God feels a lot like Gangs of New York. In fact, it’s the movie Gangs of New York should have been.

Meirelles observes almost a quarter-century of life in Rio de Janeiro’s ghettos (favelas), where the mostly black indigent class boils in heat, rots in squalor–the setting is a housing project mockingly referred to as "City of God." It’s actually a social hell where, from the 1960s on, an alternative society of youth gangs laid the ground for theft, murder and drug-dealing that defines Brazil’s contemporary surreality. Meirelles’ aggressive style–fancy editing, shifts in rhythm, scenes shot in varying tints and at funny, odd angles–is a visual language portraying a civilization out of control, always vicious. On a State Dept. tour of Rio last spring, I gasped at an enormous graffito–Inhumanismo!–on a favela wall. I also gasped at Meirelles’ audacity because Inhumaniso! surely applies when filmmaking too often becomes an ultra-violent carnival.

Despite its greater social sense, City of God suggests Meirelles has adopted the Kubrick/Scorsese hauteur even while applying it to a social experience as fresh today as Mean Streets was 30 years ago. That’s an important distinction; City of God connects to modern American urban despair while Gangs seems to be romanticizing the audacity of America’s white founding fathers. With Gangs’ lame references to past movie genres (the western, the swashbuckler, the noir, the picaresque–even the fireworks in Avalon), Scorsese tells more about his own cultural isolation than about social history. Thus Gangs lacks critique–it can be dismissed while City of God grips our social awareness.

Something seems missing from Gangs (even with Scorsese’s hoary good-vs.-evil allegory) but soullessness is part of City of God’s irony. Seeing the gang members age almost 30 years from heartless ragamuffins to lethal adults indicts Brazil’s corruption in human terms. The white world of advancement and affluence is almost entirely offscreen but Meirelles creates a broad vision of the underclass (based on a novel by Paulo Lins) that implicates Brazil’s self-deluding racism. His rainbow troops of young thugs feels expansive, recalling Dickens’ use of characters as social archetypes. Starting with a 60s gang named the Tender Trio, the story moves to their 70s inheritors–Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who goes straight, Benny (Michel de Souza Gomes), who tries to, and Li’l Dice (Leandro Firmino da Hora), who loves to kill and becomes the notorious Li’l Ze. In the 80s these young men’s destinies are set. Like many of their hoodies lost along the way, each one’s history synopsizes Brazil’s unending problems, suggesting that ghetto gangs (acting with increasing cleverness and malice) are a product of constant, ubiquitous poverty.

City of God maintains a clear and sensible outline, even as its story frequently splits and Meirelles flashes narrative and visual bravura. Segments like "Story of the Apartment" (featuring jump-cut dissolves showing the history of deals and deaths in one tenement); "Story of Li’l Dice" (observing a kid discovering he has "the gift of crime"); "Story of Knock-Out Ned" (relating an older army vet’s being sucked into gang life) add detail to the film’s complexity. The cruelty is appalling but always surprising. Meirelles’ formidable storytelling resources keep driving forward–vivifying Brazil’s history–with an anti-mythological objective. (Life is naturally seen as full of stories–more an effect of tv than real experience.)

Meirelles forsakes the genuine political inquiry seen in the Brazilian classic Antonio das Mortes. This modernity is to both the film’s credit and its disgrace. Without the ostentation (big budgets and preening stars) that bogged down Kubrick and Scorsese, Meirelles’ breathless stylization (familiar from media overload) must still be associated with dominant advertising technique and capitalist indifference. Its semi-doc look is very trendy like Narc, The Salton Sea and Amores Perros, using urban blight as an excuse for the filmmaker’s own intoxication. The slo-mo action, the Matrix-like accelerated camera moves and fragmented screens convey immediacy but not for purposes of realism. These affectations are about enjoying crime and violence–dislocation of the moral impulse that has also tainted Scorsese’s exhibitionism.

In Gangs of New York, Scorsese delivers genre-movie zing with a wallop. The opening tribal battle between Irish immigrants and white Nativists attempts to outdo Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan in savagery. It isn’t even comprehensible as an historical re-creation but it’s guilefully mounted, guaranteed to make film geeks gawk. And they do–unconcerned with the intricacies of tribalism, naive about the notion of white power (and white ethnic solidarity) that Scorsese then shamelessly sentimentalizes in his Twin Towers coda. There’s nothing so fatuous in City of God’s emphasis on race as the root of a New World society’s injustice. It embarrasses Gangs’ short shrift of New York’s race riots. Fact is, Gangs exposes Scorsese’s unfortunate cultural chauvinism–a defect of his excessive artsiness. Even City of God’s music cues make it a superior pop epic. Rocket, Li’l Ze and Benny chose allies based on their music tastes and personalities–soul, church, samba, groovy. The cavalcade of music (James Brown, "Kung Fu Fighting," Bachman-Turner Overdrive) implies that despite cultural progress, society can regress.

Indeed. It’s quite lamentable when filmmakers use the latest technological advances yet misrepresent society. Hip Meirelles’ portrayal of Li’l Ze as a dark-skinned racist stereotype–and a social superstition (Li’l Ze gets his evil moniker in a wicked graveyard ceremony)–betrays pop potential. This parallels Scorsese’s misguided belief that he could examine the history of New York (of America) by only telling the story of white ethnic ambition (Ron Howard’s Far and Away went deeper). Admirers of both these movies are swayed by the potential of an acknowledged master taking on a big subject and a prodigy mirroring his world’s heat, romance and tragedy. Sadly, style gets in the way of sense for both these directors. Meirelles’ technique goes dead when Rocket’s photo-journalism career takes off and he enters the middle-class world. Excitement only being associated with crime–a sign of Meirelles’ immaturity and Scorsese’s basic nerdiness. Excessively stylized, both City of God and Gangs of New York lack commitment to society or justice or history.