Waste, disposal: Gomorrah

Based on the 2006 Italian non-fiction bestseller that made its journalist author Roberto Saviano into both a literary sensation and fugitive from the mob at the age of 26, Gomorrah is a sprawling crime film involving a range of characters and narratives linked via their individual contributions to the poisoned ecosystem of the Camorra, the powerful, organized syndicate whose influence seeps deep into the social fabric of its native Naples, of Italy, and beyond. As directed by Matteo Garrone, this is a film that weaves its way through an immense grid of institutionalized crime as though it were charting an infernal floor plan in time. It’s an epic without the token grandiosity. An epic of pathos? Anyway, something uniquely monstrous, cold and fascinating, and not to be missed.

Waste and disposal form the bedrock of Gomorrah. The proliferation both literally and figuratively throughout is a product of the film’s structural and thematic elegance. That life is cheap here is made clear from the slaughter in the spa that kicks things off. The motives behind these killings are left unexplained because, really, what difference does it make? The carnage is conveyed flatly, the camera nonplussed by the display of a few more bodies being tossed into the mafia’s self-generating meat grinder. Garrone’s approach to the material emphasizes the network and durability of crime, not its allure, because its allure isn’t even necessary in a milieu that dutifully perpetuates its existence. The world of Gomorrah is deterministic. There is no ethnic charm. There is no glamour, no beauty, no opera to the violence, no catchy tunes or flamboyant editing or orgasmic geysers of blood. But there’s plenty horror and insight, too, or at the very least inspired exposé. You have to admire Martin Scorsese for coming on as presenter of Gomorrah for its North American release. It’s in many ways the antithesis of the sort of exhilarating, frenetic bloodletting found in several of Scorsese’s most celebrated films, but Scorsese’s smart enough to recognize that this is precisely why the film is vital. By taking distance from its subject, by capturing it in a documentary style conventionally alien to the genre, Gomorrah excavates the myth of the crime syndicate in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before.

There are two young punks (Marco Macor and Ciro Petrone) under the idiotic belief that they can work independently and even in opposition to the Camorra. They delight in stealing a secret stash of heavy weaponry, and a memorable sequence finds them stripping to their underpants and running along some sludge-lined shoreline blowing random shit up. There is a dour money handler (Gianfelice Imparato) who makes the rounds of the dismal housing complex that functions as the film’s nucleus, collecting and doling out payments. There’s a 13-year-old (Salvatore Abruzzese) who feels ready to be recruited into the Camorra, allowing himself to be shot in the chest while wearing a battered old ballistic vest. “Now you’re a man,” he’s told afterwards. He seems so young, but his youth’s put in perspective by a bleakly comical scene in which a large crew of little kids are employed to drive trucks whose pedals they can’t reach and whose dashboards they can’t see over. In one of the film’s most surprising narratives we find a compromised tailor (Salvatore Cantalupo) who risks his life to teach a warehouse full of Asians the finer points of haute design and construction. He’s escorted to the training facility in the trunk of a car. The tailor was for me the closer thing the film offers to identification, perhaps because of the character’s almost singular thread of integrity, perhaps for the simple fact that Cantalupo gives such a curiously detailed and intriguingly enigmatic performance.

My favourite part of Gomorrah however involves a businessman (Toni Servillo) and his apprentice (Carmine Paternoster) who find locations for their hired crews to illegally dump toxic waste. It’s rare to find modern stories that explore waste disposal as a major theme, through Don DeLillo’s Underworld serves as a brilliant prototype. Where we put the colossal heaps of poisonous trash is arguably one of the great taboo subjects, its invisibility—at least in wealthy countries—being essential to our false sense of peace with our surroundings. It’s an inspired metaphor that manifests here in some awesome and troubling imagery. The burial of undesirable matter is brutally echoed toward the film’s end, when the bodies of undesirable men are disposed of through similar means. I suppose the only hope we’re given that this state of affairs might change comes through the implication that, sooner or later, everything poorly interred will rise to the surface.

We will not call upon the author to explain: Bart Beaty's history of A History of Violence heeds each of the film's brilliant disguises

Would you trust this man to explain his movies to you?

For my money, there are precious few filmmakers working in the popular genres these days whose movies reward repeat viewing with the same sort of intellectual/imaginative force as David Cronenberg’s. Even among those Cronenberg movies that initially strike the viewer as his weakest—perhaps especially those ones—there always lurks the promise of some rich, implied proposition, some biological, ontological, biographical or psychological notion coded to varying degrees in the many fleshy layers of filmic tissue. Crucially, these layers rarely trumpet their own significance in Cronenberg’s films but are left to be gleaned by us in our individual ways. His characters, like Cronenberg himself, are frequently articulate, yet they don’t have any privileged understanding of the full consequence of the story they’re traversing—as protagonists in good genre fare should be, they’re too busy dealing with what’s immediately at hand to give speeches explaining the movie’s themes to us.

By the same token, it is arguably precarious to invest too much authority in Cronenberg’s own statements about his work, which can be found in countless, imminently readable, often fascinating interviews—see Chris Rodley’s superb career-spanning book of conversations Cronenberg on Cronenberg for a full feast of them—and, more recently, audio commentaries. Martin Scorsese, Cronenberg’s nearly exact contemporary and an unabashed, vocal admirer, once said something to the effect of Cronenberg not knowing what his movies are about, and I think he has a good point. Cronenberg’s comments on his movies are always smart, often insightful, sometimes very witty—he’s memorably dubbed The Brood his version of Kramer vs. Kramer—but he himself is insistent on the intuitive nature of his creative work, stating that “understanding” his movies is for him a process that begins exclusively in the wake of a project’s completion. He’s an unusual artist in that he at once resists analysis and is so very compelling an analyst.

For this reason, the real lynchpin in the thesis of David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (University of Toronto Press, $16.95), Bart Beaty’s captivating new monograph on the eponymous, widely acclaimed 2005 film, is Beaty’s overt skepticism regarding Cronenberg’s public statements about his work. This questioning is an elegant extension of Beaty’s thoughts on A History of Violence as a whole, a movie of proliferate disguises in which Cronenberg’s directorial role can be seen as yet one more form of clever misdirection. As Beaty states in the book’s introduction:

“The very foundation of A History of Violence is a network of lies… Nothing here is what it seems, and all evidence points to the fact that the filmmakers are playing games when they talk about the movie. The concept of masquerade, of pretending to be something that one is not, has a long and close affinity with filmmaking, precisely because actors put on roles. Yet in A History of Violence, I would suggest, it is also Cronenberg who is playing a role: the Hollywood filmmaker.”

Indeed, the “Hollywoodness” of Cronenberg’s recent return to commercial cred after 20 years in the art house ghetto is embedded into its every intuitive/reflexive brushstroke, making it easily the most cinematically referential work in the director’s oeuvre, a movie which consistently dances between embracing and subverting filmgoers’ expectations, generating power through its always ambiguous relationship to tradition, genre and spectacle.

When I spoke with Cronenberg for Vue Weekly upon the release of Spider back in 2002, we mainly discussed his literary influences—his beloved Nabokov, and of course William S. Burroughs and J.G. Ballard, novelists whose work he’s adapted—while he made virtually no mention of cinematic ones. Even when he mentioned Luis Buñuel, it was to cite the great Surrealist director’s memoir, not his movies. How interesting then to see in A History of Violence a movie so soaked in the history of cinema, and not art cinema, but the classical genres.

Beaty, following a great deal of critical groundwork, emphasizes throughout his book that A History of Violence is very much a genre hybrid, assuming the guise of the western, the thriller, the bully movie or serial killer movie, for as long as it serves a purpose before discarding it, usually in a dynamic, engaging, even shocking manner. I think his point is astute, yet the way Beaty arrives at his conclusion requires the reader to generalize genres to sometimes problematic degrees, like when Beaty defines the western as “the most triumphalist of genres” equating “technical proficiency with a weapon with moral superiority, justice, and righteousness.” Speaking of the western in such simplistic terms only holds water if we ignore the last 60 years or so of movies—more than half the medium’s lifespan. Westerns have been “revisionist” or dismissive of its own myths at least as far back as The Gunfighter (1950).

Likewise Beaty lists several reasons why A History of Violence isn’t a film noir, the lack of urban setting, femme fatale, expressionistic lighting and such, but besides the fact that many of the most iconic noirs also lack these same ingredients—Border Incident (49), with its rural setting, Born to Kill (47), with its homme fatale—I don’t think anyone has ever made a convincing case for noir as a genre in the first place. Crime dramas and thrillers are genres, whereas noir is alternately best labeled a style or cycle. And Cronenberg’s film, in all its ambiguity, subversion and self-consciousness, is perhaps quintessentially noir, or more precisely neo-noir.

Anyway, my nitpicking is if anything a testament to just how solid Beaty’s book is. Not once in its entirety does he survey any single established idea about what A History of Violence is really all about—especially where its thorny political subtexts are concerned—and simply accept it at face value. His a restlessly inquisitive critical mind, driven by some real passion for the possibilities of movies. Light on jargon, heavy on analysis and—especially considering that this is the product of an academic press—shot through with a real sense of voice, Beaty’s provocative take on our country’s most provocative mainstream director is pretty much exactly the sort of writing on movies we can always use more of.

Table manners: a good pool movie is hard to find, but Turn the River's not bad

There’s this moment in Turn the River (2007) where this guy who sells phony passports waits for a client in a pool hall, one of these gloomily slick looking joints where the proprietor actually brushes the tables, where everyone seems to be on the make, and amateurs don’t feel too welcome. Passport guy’s been waiting for a while, killing time shooting stick on his own, and once his client finally arrives he can’t keep himself from venting his sheer annoyance at the game, its tedium and unforgiving geometries. His client, who happens to be a lithe lady pool shark, someone so attuned to the game she actually sleeps on a pool table, tells him the reason he doesn’t like pool is simple: he sucks.

This moment struck me because, well, I suck. Okay, I can probably beat my grandma best two out of three, but basically I stink. Yet I love pool. Which means that I steer clear of halls like the one in Turn the River, sticking to musty dives where the sticks are warped and the tables shabby, booze-stained and uneven, where the jukebox is always in the way when you need to make that decisive shot and everyone’s too drunk to bother noticing how we bend all the rules just to stretch our buck as long as possible—that much more time to sip beer and listen to the happy snap-drawl of those chalk-smeared spheres rolling along the spot-lit green expanse. How, you might ask, can I enjoy something so much when I’m so bad at it? I don’t know, blame it on the movies maybe.

I probably saw The Color of Money (1986) on pay-TV a dozen times as a kid. I remember my astonishment, even then, at how much I actually kinda loved Tom Cruise, how perfect he seemed as the young hot shot, how elegant and infinitely more alluring Paul Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson was, the aging version of some other young hot shot from some movie of 25 years ago I’d never seen, and how Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, the woman with tenuous allegiances to both men, was the most intriguing of the three. But mostly I loved the atmosphere, that is, of the game as it played cinematically. And it’s a good thing I dug The Color of Money as much as I did back then, since, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, the field of pool movies would prove either barren or badly tilled in the subsequent 20 years.

I knew zilch about Turn the River, but it had Rip Torn, a friendly quote from critic David Edelstein on the case, and a rather fetching cover image of Famke Janssen confidently handling a cue stick. It’s the writing/directing debut of Chris Eigerman, a seasoned actor, which perhaps explains why he wanted to make what is essentially a character study in the New Hollywood vein, a movie about a loner who lives out of a truck, apparently owns maybe two outfits, has what we call “a past,” and does one thing really well: beat the pants off of cocky pricks, taking them for all they’ve got in merciless rounds of one pocket. Every character study is of course also a study of milieu, and Turn the River promises viewers a 92-minute plunge into those long-neglected pool halls.

Kaily (Janssen) is wearying of the hustling life. We know this because whenever some old acquaintance sees her again—like Torn’s crusty sage—they always tell her how she looks like shit. (I just kept thinking, “Dude, that’s Famke Janssen. She looks good.”) She’s got a plan to snatch her estranged preteen son (Jaymie Dornan, a great find, with a goofy, Tobey Maguire smile that catches you off guard) from his dad and head for Canada, exactly the sort of lame-brained plan that these loner antiheroes always seem to make, but hey, people do stupid stuff in real life, too. All she needs to do is build up some serious funds for those passports…

The movie’s not bad. It does indeed generate a pleasingly distinctive air, lurking along the peripheries of the tables, echoing those theatrical overhead lights in other interestingly stylized scenes, and even offering a colorful array of eccentric supporting characters to back up Janssen’s genuinely compelling, textured lead, like Kaily’s ex, a sad dad nakedly jealous of his own son, and Kaily's ex's mom, an overbearing Jesus freak. But the movie’s awkward, too, and doesn’t quite earn its tone, faux-urgency, or ending. That this is Eigerman’s first feature is fairly obvious to anyone with even a passing habit of nitpicking—did those same two extras just pass by three times in the last 30 seconds, walking in the same direction?—but what matters is that Eigerman seems to have decided on what kind of movie he wanted to make before he actually made it, failing to capitalize on what he actually had in the can. To narrow it down, I’d argue that the biggest single problem here is actually the music, which comes courtesy of Clogs and is perfectly interesting in itself, but steals all the potential humour—sorry, but sleeping on a pool table should be funny, guys—and the actual sense of studying this character, rather than just dunking her in a bath of generic indie moodiness. …Still, she looks just right craning her long body over those tables.

Fact is, he was talkin' to all of us

The yellow cab emerges silent, hulking, opaque and phantom-like out of the plumes of steam that waft up from the gutters, the gauzy, rain-slick streets bleed super-saturated reds and blues, the brass and snare drum conjure up oppressive waves of portent, and finally the darkness parts its curtain for God’s lonely man to make his entrance. He comes from nowhere, peers the world through slatted fingers, and can’t make convincing small talk to save his life. By his own claims he’s a Vietnam vet, an ex-marine, with no friends or family with whom he can connect or accept consolation from. A genuine outsider with only the most marginal sort of charisma imaginable, he seems somehow the unlikeliest of characters to mount the stage of movie history, but more than 30 years after making his first appearance there’s no denying that he’s earned his place there.

I think I’ve probably seen Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) as many times as I’ve seen any movie, yet every time I revisit it I’m always caught off guard at just how abstract, even hallucinatory, those opening moments are that I’ve described above. I’m equally caught off guard by how goddamned young, even asexual, Jodie Foster is as the child hooker Iris, or just how deeply immersed Robert De Niro seems in the role of the titular cabbie Travis Bickle, how convincingly he nurtures Travis’ loneliness, alienated logic, and the notion that his movement toward vigilantism is inevitable and somehow even heroic, cleansing, this 20th century underground man determined to wash the scum off the mean streets.

“I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” Travis writes in his diary. “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” As delivered by De Niro, the comical, crude poetry with which he expresses his delusions of conformity is marvelous, and just one of several elements that make Paul Schrader’s churned-from-the-gut screenplay one of the most perfectly realized of the New Hollywood era. And you can actually access the script as you make your way through the movie on Sony’s recent Taxi Driver two-disc set, stopping at any point to see how it matches with the final result. Its just one of a plethora of special features designed to entice fans who obsess over the film to a level that competes with Travis’ obsessing over his misguided vocation.

There have been a number of excellent multi-disc packages of Scorsese films in recent years, with the two-disc release of Raging Bull being a major standout. I’m not sure why it took so long to finally get Taxi Driver the same deluxe treatment, but its proven to be worth the wait. There’s good making-of type stuff and testimonies from everybody from Scorsese himself to his one-time student Oliver Stone to numerous New York City cabbies who remember just how mean the city streets were back when the film first came out.

There’s also a pretty smart little featurette that’s got plenty of interesting quotes from the always articulate Schrader, though the highlight of the whole package for me is Schrader’s full length audio commentary, where he discusses where he was at in his life while writing the film (i.e.: in miserable shape), how he’d connected with Scorsese, how they adjusted the project to best accommodate the cast and shooting conditions, how much of the film was scripted and how much improvised, and how little anyone expected the film to become the enormous success it did. Schrader talks matter-of-factly about the underlying themes of racism in the film, explaining why he though it essential that Travis attack blacks in particular, and why the racism in the film eventually became one of the factors that led to Harvey Keitel being cast as the jive-talking pimp Sport, a role originally meant for a black actor.

Taxi Driver is a film that speaks to the ages yet could probably only have come out of the particular conditions of its time. Its fixations are those of young, angry men, and Scorsese, Schrader and De Niro were just young enough to still really feel it. Its singular position both in its response to and shaping of film history is on exhibit all over the place, with Scorsese’s wildly adventurous playing with form indebted to his voracious consuming of the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, among many others. And it’s a film that’s finally a product of the heady 70s, that time when young directors with a newly-gleaned sense of film history's continuity could take control of their work, a time when mainstream audiences occasionally flocked to see films for reasons other than fleeting thrills (though Taxi Driver arguably has those, too), and the battle between art and commerce in movies found some near-perfect harmony for a few golden years. Taxi Driver is the grotesque child of that era, and one that deserves to be visited again and again.