A lot of people have praised Gomorrah, which played tonight at the New York Film Festival, for its brutal look at the Italian Mafia in Naples. I’m curious though—are they simply praising it for its political stance that condemns such a system from existing, or do they believe it is great filmmaking? Director Matteo Garrone, working from a script he co-wrote with six other people (including author of the book Roberto Saviano), has shown us a brutal and realistic look at the terrible price people pay for the Mafia, but I really never found a reason to care.

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Garrone’s epic, which does recall some of the neorealist films of Rossellini and De Sica, is so darkly cold and unsympathetic that I found it impossible to care about the characters. He also has so much going on—the film weaves five different stories of people who become involved, only to either lose their lives or their morality. But none of it even really makes sense—the first hour is so complex and so confusing that I never really understood who people were or how they were connected. And by the time I didn’t figure it out, I realized that we had no alliance to any character here. They are never really shown outside of their mafia business, save a few select scenes, and they are almost always bad, or at least confused characters.
Individual scenes often work—Garrone has an acute sense of detail and visceral brutality, and shows it well—but the whole picture feels disjointed. It’s a tough picture, and it has an important message that attempts to rally people against the Comorra. But I wouldn’t call it great filmmaking.

Gomorrah will be released by IFC Films in early 2009. It was picked by Italy to represent them for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.