LINKS
That's all pretty much true.
On the other hand, you may also be under the distinct impression that the film, with its graphic accounts of casually amoral slum kids engaged in endless, bloody turf wars, basically amounts to one long, grim, horror show.
Not by a long shot. City of God is as tough and brutal as they come, but only a moviegoer afflicted with an aggravated case of tunnel vision would call it one-dimensional.
City of God is a movie bursting with life in all its nuances, to the point where it often entwines beauty and ugliness in complex ways that are going to make a lot of audience members somewhat less than comfortable. It's also a surprisingly funny movie, at least at times, albeit one that mixes humor with horror so that laughter is almost always accompanied by a tinge of guilt and a sharp gasping for breath.
The contradictions City of God revels in are apparent right up front, in an opening sequence that sets the tone for what's to follow. A group of young thugs, howling and hysterical with something pitched halfway between mirth and bloodlust, chase a plucked but still very much alive chicken through a labyrinthine system of ghetto streets. It's clear that the boys are up to no good, and the fate awaiting the bald bird is anything but a happy one. But the scene is so absurd we can't help but smile, just as we can't help but be swept away by the sheer, frenetic energy of it all.
It's a virtuoso sequence in a film filled with them, a wild ride that the camera all but makes us participants in, as it darts and weaves through narrow, maze-like streets, skillfully Ping-Ponging from the point-of-view of the featherless fowl to that of its relentless pursuers. Like Ridley Scott, director Fernando Meirelles honed his craft working in the high-stakes arena of television commercials, resulting in an accomplished, effortlessly inventive style that some may find at odds with the terrible events we frequently see depicted on screen in City of God.
Some are even bound to take the film's proficiency and playful hubris as proof the filmmaker isn't truly serious about his subject matter, that Meirelles is just another Tarantino wannabe out to exploit and sensationalize violence.
There's no denying that City of God is an amazing stylistic achievement, but that takes nothing away from its conviction or the dramatic punch it carries. As much as Meirelles owes a certain debt to the bloody ironies of Tarantino and to the flash of MTV (as well as to the epic crime dramas of Martin Scorsese), City of God's gritty power is uniquely Brazilian and uniquely authentic. Hearkening back to another groundbreaking work of Brazilian social realism, 1981's Pixote, Meirelles cast real-life street kids for his movie and then developed their characters and naturalistic "nonperformances" in a series of extensive, improvisational workshops. The film was shot on the actual mean streets of various Brazilian favelas (shantytowns) under the watchful, wary eyes of local drug lords who gave begrudging permission to be there.
City of God is based on Paulo Lins' massive (700-plus page) novel and covers several decades in the lives of various low-level gangsters who inhabit a seedy housing project ironically called Cidade de Deus (City of God) on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. Our narrator and guide through the mayhem is Rocket (Alexandre Rodriguez), an aspiring photographer who hopes to use his talent as a ticket out of the favela. The film takes its shape from a series of tales spun by Rocket, stories as richly drawn and redolent of time and place as anything from Faulkner's Okefenokee County.
We meet a small army of characters with unlikely names like Shaggy, Stringy, Melonhead, Goose and Carrot, then follow them as they grow (they don't really mature) from pint-size toughs to full-grown killing machines. Many of them get cut down in their tracks somewhere in between, and the film covers all of that in excruciating detail too.
As much as City of God follows the paths of its human characters, it's equally adept at tracing the development of the favela itself, beginning in the 1960s as just another innocuous Rio slum the rural homeless flock to in search of postcard-perfect modernity. In the 1970s, Cidade de Deus transforms into an Old West-style frontier town where everybody struts along the dusty, unpaved streets, brandishing six-shooters. Finally, the little shantytown becomes a full-fledged urban hellhole where lawlessness reaches its inevitable, obscene end.
Rocket's stories flip back and forth through the years, giving the film a fluid, elastic sense of time recalling the post-modern playfulness of Pulp Fiction or Amores Perros. Events and characters are briefly alluded to, even as our teasing narrator plays hurry-up-and-wait by informing us that it's not quite time for that particular story yet. The baby-face tyke in one segment turns into the sullen death-dealer in the next, as if illustrating some perversely unkind and ungentle variation of Disney's Circle of Life. Families grow, change and splinter, and gang allegiances are revealed as the true glue that binds the various characters together and, at key moments, blasts them apart.
It could be argued that City of God is occasionally over-ambitious in its vast sprawl, but the film's busy, crowded canvas almost always connects in the most visceral way, as well as working on many other levels. Meirelles' movie comes off as a compelling social history as eccentric and epic in scope as Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights, but it also succeeds on a very personal level. It's a comic tragedy about people who appear to change and who speed along at the speed of sound while, in actuality, they're standing absolutely still.
That's only the beginning of the contradictions that make City of God such a rich, disturbing, and sometimes overpowering experience. The film's frequently lovely soundtrack bubbles along under a sea of brutality, while the lilting beauty of the Portuguese spoken by the characters is often a vehicle for the crudest sorts of profanity and nihilism. That's how the movie operates, mixing levity and dread, savagery and sensuality, in a manner that seems strangely natural, as if this were the only way things could ever be. A terrifying car crash becomes a comical event. A bungled motel robbery is played mostly for laughs, right up to the point where we're assaulted by a series of silent, lingering shots of the bloody victims strewn about like so much meat in a slaughterhouse.
The film's look is a similarly mixed bag, its powerful visual style a blend of raw, documentary-like footage with elegantly composed images that amount to pure poetry. Meirelles constantly dazzles us with a pop-pulp sensibility incorporating cinematic moves that put Guy Ritchie to shame, and finds more nuances of color in the film's parched and dusty landscapes than an Eskimo has words for snow. Each decade is codified with a different look -- the 1960s sequences are shot with a nostalgic, golden glow (although this journey is anything but sentimental), the 1970s make use of saturated, super-8-ish color, and so on. Screens split, motion slows down, speeds up, stops, and every element becomes something to shock or delight us. Sometimes both.
We've seen this story before, more or less -- the blood, the budding psychopaths, the all-too-young victims of urban decay -- but never quite like this. City of God feels like something new, and its power exists largely in the details, in the telling. The picture painted is anything but pretty, but to say Meirelles is glamorizing or exploiting the lives he shows us is missing the movie's point. The truly wasted life, City of God all but shouts at us, is the life that goes unnoticed, buried within endless, unbroken cycles of violence that become a way of life. In the end, this is a movie about a city not in the hands of God, but of babies too clueless to even begin to understand the mess they're in.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
