LONDON — Our experience of Mafia movies in North America and Western Europe is almost entirely mediated by Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. The Godfather trilogy plus Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino have heavily shaped the popular perception of Italian gangsters.

A recent Italian film, Gomorrah, challenges those perceptions as it focuses on the indigenous Italian criminal organization known as the Camorra. The Camorra is the oldest criminal structure in Italy. It was strong in the United States in the latter half of the 19th century before merging with the Mafia in the early part of the 20th. In recent years, Camorra members have begun to reappear in the U.S. as they flee gang conflict in Italy. The film claims that laundered Camorra money has been invested in the reconstruction of the Twin Towers.

Gomorrah, directed by Matteo Garrone, was released in 2008. It is based on a non-fiction book written by the Italian journalist Robert Saviano. Saviano’s book exposed the reality of the Camorra’s activity in and around the Italian city of Naples. The book’s impact has forced Saviano to live under police protection since its publication.¹

The film dramatizes five stories from Saviano’s book and weaves them into a single whole. It won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival and is likely to be nominated for best foreign film at the Oscars. It’s not easy to watch. The narrative is fractured and episodic, but Garrone masterfully holds the five plot lines in tension. There is no neat resolution or redemption. In fact there is no redemption at all. The film is bleak in its conclusions about the Camorra’s continuing corrosion of Neapolitan society. The end credits give statistical detail to the human cost graphically shown in the film. It makes for grim reading. The Camorra has killed 4,000 people over the last 30 years.

Here’s how I think Garrone’s film differs from Coppola and Scorsese’s. The latter two directors make films in an imaginative world that has been deeply shaped by their upbringing within Roman Catholicism. I do not mean that either continues to believe in the dogma that gave birth to that world or that either continues to practice the faith. However, their imaginative vision of the world continues to be determined by it. Scorsese last went to confession in about 1965 but has said, “I’ve been confessing most of the time on film since then, so it doesn’t matter. My old friends who are priests, they look at my films and they know. Still, I can’t help being religious. I’m looking for the connection between God and man like everyone else.”²

The Jesuit film critic Richard Blake, in discussing the work of Scorsese and Coppola, talks in terms of an “afterimage” - even when the initial light source disappears, an image remains that will not quickly disappear.³

Let me make that concrete. One of the most famous scenes in The Godfather trilogy happens at the end of The Godfather. Michael Corleone has assumed control of the family following the death of his father, Vito. In one sequence Michael is standing as godfather at the baptism of his nephew. The priest invites the parents and godparents to reject the devil and all his ways. As they are doing so various people are being assassinated by Michael’s command. Coppola intercuts the two scenes to make the contrast all the more powerful. In Coppola’s films, whatever the Mafia does it does within a world shaped by a strong Christian view of the world. It may reject it, but it cannot escape it. Issues of justice, tradition and ritual predominate in its dealings with one another.

In films such as Casino, Goodfellas and Mean Streets, Scorsese is obsessed by the categories of the Christian faith viewed through a Roman Catholic imagination. Sacrifice, blood atonement, sin, guilt, judgment and redemption are all present. The plots of these films either take place in reaction to or in accordance with these categories.

Gomorrah stands in stark contrast. The film is godless. Its punning title (‘Gomorrah/Camorra’) points in that direction. In the biblical narrative, the city of Gomorrah has so abandoned God that it is fit only for his judgment (Genesis 18–19). It is beyond redemption. The only Christian symbol that appears in the movie Gomorrah is a cross above an apparently terminally ill man’s head. He wheezes out the word ‘euros’ as his family sells their land to a Camorra-linked businessman who is poisoning it with illegal toxic waste.

The complete lack of redemption is also illustrated by the fate of the young. One story line centers on a 13-year-old boy named Toto. He tries to join one of the Camorra clans and eventually is admitted. A point comes where he is asked to help the gang assassinate a woman who is a friend of his family. Her son has defected to another gang. Within the world of the Camorra, her assassination will be an act of necessary retaliation. As one gang member puts it, “Are we meat for the slaughterhouse?”

The gang tells the boy that either he is with them or against them. If he is against them, they cannot allow him to live. He’s trapped with no way out but death. The incident serves as a metaphor for the Camorra’s grip on the city. Either you are for them or against them. If you are against them, you cannot live. The film ends with the murder and callous disposal of two teenage wannabe gangsters who have dared to challenge Camorra’s control. The film is relentlessly claustrophobic in its portrayal of hopelessness.

A major motif within the film involves parallel lines and lives. A boy with a backpack full of drugs walks along a sidewalk as a police car passes by; a wedding party proceeds along a walkway in a residential project as the walkway above is patrolled by drug dealers; children jump in a small swimming pool as the rooftops around them are covered by Camorra lookouts. Normal life continues alongside the relentless ‘normality’ of illegal activity. There is no sense that one day all will return to normal.

Why the difference between the Coppola/Scorsese vision and Matteo Garrone’s? All are Italian and I assume all were raised to one degree or another in cultures profoundly shaped by Roman Catholicism. I speculate that the difference is both generational and continental. Garrone is from a younger generation than Coppola and Scorsese. The grip of the faith on his imagination might have weakened in a post-Vatican II world. The hellfire burns a little bit less brightly; the angelic chorus is not so loud.

Also, Garrone was raised on a different continent.  American immigrant Italians fought for their cultural and religious identity in a predominantly Protestant culture. Again, this might have led to a heightened sense of religious imagination. The grip of Roman Catholicism on 21st-century Italy is weakening. Like much of Western Europe, Italy is becoming secularized. The image of the terminally ill man under the cross, concerned only about money, is a potent one. A godless movie makes far more sense here than in 1970s and 1980s America, the time and setting in which Coppola and Scorsese made most of their Mafia films.

In conclusion, I think Gomorrah helps to de-romanticize the myths that have grown up around the Mafia and other gangs. It takes a cinematic microscope to contemporary human reality as lived in the shadow of the Camorra; a reality that costs real lives every day. Maybe it’s too much to ask for redemption. It’s enough to portray life as it’s lived where many are “meat for the slaughterhouse.”

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¹Nick Pisa, “Why mobsters want author behind Gomorrah film ‘taken out,” news.scotsman.com, http://news.scotsman.com/world/Why-mobsters-want-author-behind.4591669.jp. <January 3, 2009>
²Andy Dougan,  Martin Scorsese (London: Orion Books, 1999), 28.
³Richard A. Blake, AfterImage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (Chicago: Loyola Press, 2000).

Andrew Jones is Vicar of Grace Church Hackney, which meets in Shoreditch, London, England.