Alexandre Rodrigues portrays Rocket
caught between two gangs & two worlds
in City of God

 

When I reviewed Assassination Tango on July 27, I noted that the film was designed to have its audience root for the assassin. Since then, I’ve seen three films, ranging in quality from pretty good to great, all of which are premised on the audience’s ability to empathize with outwardly unsympathetic characters: Nicolle Kassell’s The Woodsman, which stars Kevin Bacon as a recently paroled child molester trying to get by; City of God, by Fernando Meirelles (with some co-direction by Kátia Lund), which chronicles three generations of street gangs in the slums of Rio; and The Sea Inside by Alejandro Amenábar, about a quadriplegic fighting for the right to commit suicide. All three films did well on the festival circuit & The Sea Inside went on to win an Oscar for best foreign film. Indeed, the Internet Movie Database, the most comprehensive & widely used film site on the web, lists The Sea Inside as ranked among the top 200 films by registered site users, a considerable feat for a site that gets 27 million hits every month. City of God, however, is listed among IMDB’s Top 20. The only foreign films to be more highly ranked are Seven Samurai; The Good, The Bad & the Ugly; and the three episodes of The Lord of the Rings. One could argue that, to an American audience, only Seven Samurai is perceived as a foreign film, making City of God the second most highly rated such work. What interests me about this trio is not their relative rankings – I actually think The Sea Inside is a more accomplished film than City of God – but how the three use character & opacity to set up their narratives & construct plausible empathy.

The Woodsman received awards at four different festivals, as well as Movieline’s “Breakthrough of the Year” award for its director and a special mention for excellence in filmmaking from the National Board of Review, opened at a few art houses, then went straight to DVD. Either distributors doubted that audiences were ready to flock to a tale of a sympathetic pedophile (at least one not portrayed in the titillating manner of a Lolita) or perhaps that audiences weren’t ready for an intense psychological performance from the ubiquitous Kevin Bacon. Bacon, in fact, is superb as an emotionally shut-down, deeply depressed individual slow to trust anyone after having done a 12-year-bit in prison for his behavior. He gets a job at a lumberyard & finds a shabby rental directly across the street from a grammar school. During the course of the film, he comes close to re-offending, stopping short when his intended target reveals that she’s already an incest victim. He takes out his frustration on another pedophile he’s spotted. And he finds a lover in another lumberyard worker, portrayed by Kyra Sedgwick, who is herself an incest survivor with a complicated attitude toward her multiple abusers.

The Woodsman began as a play and its strengths are all in its performances – Hannah Pilkes as Bacon’s intended 12-year-old victim earned a “debut performance” nomination from the Independent Spirit Awards¹ but she’s almost required to be terrific in order to keep up with the intense portrayals offered by Bacon & Sedgwick. Bacon does his best work here in close-ups, just through the use of his sad blue eyes. But The Woodsman’s limitation is also that it began as a play, a work of fiction. At some level, there is nothing about Bacon’s character Walter that the director does not know & isn’t willing to offer up. Indeed, in the film’s key scene, Pilkes’ revelation to Bacon is a degree of intimacy unimaginable among strangers in a park. But it’s the only way Kassell can show what’s going on inside both characters. That Pilkes & Bacon pull it off is a testament to their acting, not to the script. Still, it’s an excellent film, very possibly Bacon’s best. That it went almost directly to DVD in a summer that offered filmgoers such trash as a remake of Bewitched, the sequel to Deuce Bigalo & such rehashed action fare as Stealth & The Island is a sad comment on the “not smart enough to watch Barney” perception film distributors have of current audiences.

If the weakness of The Woodsman lies in its lack of opacity, City of God offers the autobiography of Wilson “Rocket” Rodrigues as a frame tale through which the actual content of the film, a history of three generations of Rio street gangs, is viewed. Rocket is a member of the middle generation, the Groovies, children who watch the tame gangster pretenses of their older siblings, the Tender Trio, until one of their own, a sociopath called L'l Dice as a kid & Li'l Zé as an adult, leads the older teens on a heist of a rent-by-the-hour motel that remains mostly harmless until the ten-year-old wastes every adult in sight. It would be a mistake to characterize City of God as a biography of this sociopath, tho in many ways that is exactly what this film is. With only a couple of important exceptions, Rocket is ancillary to the action, a viewer-narrator not unlike Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Yet this is also the tale of how Rocket goes straight & emerges not as another hoodlum, but as a successful photojournalist.

The value of the position in the narrative is that it enables the sociopath Li’l Zé to remain opaque – there is nothing sympathetic about a chronic mass murderer & Li’l Zé’s somewhat lame attempts to pose himself as the capitalist entrepreneur rationalizing vice in his slum – and it is definitely his slum before the film is over – do nothing to endear him to viewers. Indeed, there are key scenes in the film, both early & late, in which other gangsters attempting to extract themselves from the violent underworld being constructed by Li’l Zé end up dead.

The secret of City of God’s success, I think, lies in two things: Li’l Zé’s opacity at the heart of the tale & the film’s structural climax in which Li’l Zé’s reign comes to an end, not through the confrontation with a rival gang lead by one Carrot (the ostensible primary conflict in the film), but because the next generation of gangsters, the Runts, prove unimaginably murderous even to the hardened sociopath. What goes around, comes around could be a synopsis of the plot, a story that would prove horrific if not leavened with the comic persona of its “autobiographer,” Rocket. That a film this violent can be alternately tender & funny isn’t necessarily film news – that’s the whole formula behind Bonnie & Clyde – but City of God ramps up all sides of the equation for a generation raised on contemporary film gore.

The Sea Inside, in contrast, is the quietest of films. It wasn’t written as a play, but certainly could have been, given that its lead character, Ramón Sampedro – luminously portrayed by Javier Bardem, one of the great actors of our time – is a quadriplegic & isn’t going anywhere. The key to this film is that the protagonist is driven by a desire that nobody, not even he, can fully comprehend: he wants to die. The film’s structure follows his attempt to force the courts in Spain to enable him to do so, and what happens after the court reaches its decision. Much of what makes the film work comes from Amenábar’s reticence at using too much flashback or fantasy to enable Badem to act with some part of his body beyond his head – when it does occur, it’s terrific, but it could so easily have descended into the maudlin that one is almost awed at how the director restrains himself.

If the protagonist’s desire is opaque even to himself, the film also enables us to glimpse just how much emotional violence & damage Sampedro’s quest does to all those around him. Indeed, much of the film’s dynamic is the tension of just how much this hurts everyone around Sampedro & how he is incapable of seeing this. Anyone who has had an experience or two with suicides should know just what I mean – it’s a profoundly destructive & violent act, regardless of how it’s carried out, one that is fundamentally impossible for anyone who has not walled themselves off inside their own pain. At the same time, Sampedro is warm & loving & often funny. What makes this film genuinely great is how it embodies the gap between these two things. What’s important is not what these characters know about themselves, but what they don’t.

 

¹ I may be biased. Pilkes is in the same grade with my sons at school.