City of God

Most horrifically violent films—not films featuring huge explosions that amplify the volume and dilute the shock of death, but films that show lurid person-to-person savagery—stylize their violence and revel in it. They play their vileness for surface shock just as they play the rest of the movie for surface certainty. It's cool, sometimes in both senses of the word, and occasionally entertaining and ultimately amoral.

"City of God," a Brazilian import devoted to chronicling the evolution of crime in a government-constructed slum, flashes cinematic stylization in its depiction of violence, but mostly sticks quite close to its protagonist, street name Rocket, as he tries to navigate the only neighborhood he's ever known without catching crossfire. Directors Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles and cinematographer César Charlone often make use of documentary-style camerawork, turbulent and dizzying, but even when they go for the effects, the camera stays just calm enough that the terror and power of the events depicted hit the audience with a sick thud. But in the end, all "City of God" has to offer is that very sensation, which, when you consider its implications, becomes dangerous indeed.

Most violence here erupts from a hood called Lil Zé, played by Leandro Firmano de Hora with a deadly gleam in his eyes and hair bursting uncontrollably from his head in all directions. Rocket (played impressively by Alexandre Rodrigues) came up in the City of God with Lil Zé back when he was known as Lil Dice, and Rocket knew to fear Dice even then; this fear is shown to be justified when Dice manipulates older men, including Rocket's brother, so that his bloodlust may be satisfied.

Now rechristened Zé, he and his childhood partner Benny are making a play to control the drug trade of the entire slum, not because Lil Zé wants to control the drug trade so much as he wants to control the slum. The only man standing in their way is Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele), and he looks to be outgunned until random chance aligns him with the dangerously skilled and charismatic army veteran Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge). A series of brutal battles, chaotic and hapless and beyond pity, are all made even more fearsome by Lil Zé, with feral smile and enormous rifle, charging into the fray.

Meanwhile, Rocket is growing up. This is what takes "City of God" away from pure gangland drama and into disturbing reality: we see Rocket making friends, having and losing a first crush, yearning to get laid, hanging with friends, and otherwise coursing the neighborhood, even as the kingpins grapple for the City of God. Screenwriter Bráulio Mantovani condensed the story from a 700-page novel by Paulo Lins; while I have not read the novel, my Portugese being a little rusty, the film has a novelistic diversity of experience and sweep of story that serves it well, as incidents horrific, hopeless and hysterical heighten the sensation the other incidents provide.

But there's one important thing missing from this film. We see it in what eventually becomes the main storyline: Rocket tries to become a photographer, to depict the chaos and loss in the City of God so that he himself can escape it. This seems to be an admirable goal. Any thinking person would be roused to action by what happens here. Children known as "the runts" roam the streets robbing from storekeepers and scoring joints. People are shot for having attractive girlfriends, for talking too much, or simply because they can be shot without consequence. The police are unconcerned as long as they get paid on time.

However, following Rocket's story, for the most part, denies us a context. It's perfectly understandable that Rocket is simply concerned with day-to-day survival, but he has brought the story to us, and now we need more. What produces Lil Zé? Is his destiny written on his character from birth or was it shaped by the slum he grew up in? How could anything be brutal enough to shape such a destiny? How do people who aren't hoods in the City of God cope with him? For that matter, what produces a slum like the City of God, which first appears to us as row upon row of anonymously inadequate housing, tossed up by a government that, we are told, wanted all the homeless people to stop marring nearby Rio with their poverty? In asides like that, and in later scenes when Rocket interacts with people from the "civilized" world at the paper, we start to see why a place like this can exist. But we don't see enough to get any answers, or even to ask the right questions.

Admittedly, this is not a problem for "City of God"'s Brazilian audience, which probably knows a lot more context for this story than it would like to. But for Americans, there's not much to separate this film from a splashy, screaming tabloid in terms of content. It's depressingly easy to think that poor people are a species apart from those of us with jobs and relatively violence-free lives; "City of God" does nothing to remind us that slum dwellers have been put into an astonishingly extreme situation that they must deal with in extreme ways. Rocket can't see this, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to, even if just for a few moments.

This is not to say that the skill with which "City of God"'s actors, cinematographer and directors depict the awfulness here will not blow your mind. It will. But it won't put anything new in there, either, and by the end of the movie that's become a sad thing indeed.

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