All you really need to know about how genuine the world director Matteo Garrone (First Love) created for his new film Gomorrah is that a handful of the actors playing thugs and killers within it are under suspicion of many of the same things by the Italian police in real life. This is a movie that oozes authenticity, and watching it one can’t help but feel the blood, sweat, tears and suffering of all the people on the edges of this gangland tornado praying to survive.

Bodies fly in IFC Films' Gomorrah

Not that this makes it perfect. Far from it, actually, this adaptation of Roberto Saviano’s lauded international best-seller a gritty and grimy descent in darkness that made me feel ugly and uncomfortable. It is a journey into misery and pain, everyone inside of it either a victim or a perpetrator (or both) and watching them fail time and time again to do something decent is pretty much as miserable as movie going gets.

But that’s not my issue. I’m okay with pain and pathos, and I’m fine with seeing people struggle. In fact, movies like 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and City of God offer up uncompromising visions of mankind’s inhumanity that are both shocking and magnetic. As horrible as things get (and, especially in that first one, they get pretty excruciating) you still can’t take your eyes off the either of them, the sheer virtuosity of the filmmaking, the complexity of the scripts and the strengths of the material taking both films to an entirely different plain few other pictures even come close to.

That didn’t happen for me in the case of Gomorrah. There are five different storylines battling for attention here, each of them slapping against the other yet never connecting in a way that felt emotionally vibrant. While the general thrust is the same; Italy’s crime families have the country wrapped around their fingers and there is nothing the populace can do about it; their relationship one to the other never materializes. It all ends up being more than a bit disjointed, large portions so frustrating it kind of drove me a little bit nuts.

On the flip side, Garrone is a marvelously kinetic filmmaker with a knack for setting up scenes and moments that pack a pummeling kick. One bit featuring a young, wannabe gangster with an affinity for sports jerseys really grabbed me by the throat, the ferocity of the chaos unleashed by his tragic decision so painfully devastating it instantly reduced me to tears.

This isn’t the only moment like that in the film, either. The director, working in almost perfect symmetry with his cinematographer Marco Onorato (I don’t care what the Oscar nominations say, hands down this was 2008’s best shot picture) the two craft a breathtaking documentary-like verisimilitude that hit me like a slap to the face. There are times where I couldn’t believe what it was I was seeing, the line between fiction and fantasy so thin it might as well not have existed in the first place.

Even so, I cannot embrace Gomorrah completely. Part of that is the very nature of the piece itself, sure, but a large portion is also due to the fact that every time it hit me over the head by a two-by-four it would suddenly pull away again to keep me at arm’s length. It was almost as if Garrone realized that the corrosive nature of this world was more than some audiences could stand, and instead of keeping viewers immersed right in the thick of it he’d instead allow them ample time to catch their breath before submerging them back down beneath the blood-stained muck and mire.

I think this was a mistake. The reason 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is so innervating and memorable is that director Cristian Mungiu did not blink while looking into the abyss, his gaze inside of it giving his film an emotionally devastating power all who see it cannot shed from their brainpans. He understood that if you’re going to tell a story like that you have to have the guts to take it all the way to its bitter end, and if some don’t like it and they have to turn away then that means you’ve done your job to pinpoint perfection. 

Garrone gets frustratingly close to doing just this. The problem is that there are just too many dangling tangents competing for a centrally memorable position in the narrative, each deserving more than their allotted time to try and bring their protagonists to life. After all was said and done, I felt bad for the people of Italy, my heart breaking for their plight and the oppressive thumb so many appear to be living under. But I also didn’t know any more about the how’s, why’s and who’s at the end than I did at the beginning, Gomorrah a powerful, well-made, beautifully shot epic that’s disappointingly running on empty.

Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4) 

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