Not since Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) or P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997) has there been a film of such relentless cinematic energy and sprawling narrative intensity as Fernando Meirelles’ Brazilian crime saga City of God (Cidade de Deus). The title derives from a slum neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, a scant 15 miles from the paradisiacal beaches and hotel resorts known by tourists. The ironically named slum is rotten with corruption and crime to the point that certain areas are like war zones.

As all great crime movies do, City of God grounds its vast narrative in a set of compelling characters. If there is a “good” character, it is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), a young man who grows up in the City of God but, perhaps because of his sensitive demeanor and his intellect, aspires to something greater. Unlike so many of the boys he grows up with (including his older brother, who is “hood”), he wants to get out of the slums and become a professional photographer, not another criminal. He is an innocent—a virgin, even—cut adrift in a sea of pathological adolescent turmoil that is vented with guns and violence. But, as the film so painfully shows, dreams and desires are not always enough to overcome a lifetime of deprivation, and Rocket’s success by the end of the film is really more about serendipity than a pious statement about the fruits of hard labor.

The opposite of Rocket is L’il Ze Leandro (Firmino da Hora), a young man with a truly frightening capacity for violence. He establishes his sociopathic propensity as a kid who strives to hang out with the older hoods. When tagging along on one of their robberies, he kills an entire roomful of people in cold blood just to see what it feels like. He eventually murders his way into being the slum’s top criminal, lording over an empire of drugs run mostly by kids barely in their teens. In City of God, youth is not a time of innocence and idealism, but rather a time of learning how to navigate the means streets and survive by any means necessary. Yet, for all of L’il Ze’s ruthlessness, we also get to see how his violence is rooted in a deep sense of insecurity. Even the most “evil” characters in the film are resolutely human, which is why it never sinks into soapbox denunciations about the dangers of criminality.

Somewhere in the middle is Benny (Phelipe Haagensen), L’il Ze’s childhood best friend who grows into his righthand man. Yet, the two couldn’t be any different. Where L’il Ze is impatient, temperamental, and frequently cruel, Benny is easygoing and affable. He is the one who frequently restrains L’il Ze from his worst impulses, and he quickly becomes the most popular hood in the slums, known far and wide for his generosity (even if said generosity entails handing out addictive drugs to people who are already hooked). Benny’s association with L’il Ze, though, complicates his character immensely; like everyone else, we want to love him for his personality, but the fact that he is in league with someone of such low character taints him.

The screenplay, written by Braulio Mantovani from a novel by Paulo Lins, uses a temporally discontinuous structure to tell the story. Although most of it runs in a straight linear path, following the growth of the main characters from kids to young men, it sometimes breaks off on tangents or rewinds or fastforwards to clarify points, almost like a storyteller who naturally forgets details from time to time and has to go back, or gets to a point and decides that he wants to return to it later.

The majority of City of God is given over to a years-long battle between two rival gangs for control of the slums. One gang is led by L’il Ze, while the other is led by Carrot (Matheus Nachtergaele). Carrot is in league with Knockout Ned (Seu Jorge), a young man who had been dutifully living the “straight life” until L’il Ze killed his brother, after which he swore vengeance and allowed his entire life to be consumed by that passion. Always on the fringe of this war is Rocket, who provides the voice-over narration and through whose eyes we witness much of the action. Yet, he is never a detached, outside observer, but rather someone who is constantly caught in the line of fire, quite literally in the film’s opening.

Cinematically speaking, City of God is a boiling cauldron of techniques, each lending itself to the film’s exuberant, headlong rush. Meirelles, a former television and commercial director, has an innate sense of the power of the medium, and his dexterous juxtapositions of techniques such as slow motion, freeze frames, fast motion, jittery handheld camerawork, and gliding Steadicams gives the film a ferocious visual power.

The story his film tells is one of significant and horrifying violence, and he never shies away from the visual power of bloodshed. But, unlike so many directors, Meirelles understands that violence is at its most shocking when it is grounded in characters and situations in which we have an emotional stake. When we witness violence in City of God, it is like a reckoning. Yet, the film is not all violence, and one of its primary pleasures is the breathtaking way in which it captures the lived experiences of its characters—the small details of their daily lives and the way in which the slums are a place of great culture, excitement, and diversity, even if they streets are at times a war zone.

The film also works largely because Meirelles is working with a cast of nonprofessional actors, most of whom come from the City of God, a real slum in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, they have an inherent understanding of the material and what’s at stake; great credit should be given to Katia Lund, who is credited as a co-director on the film and who spent all of her time working with the young cast. Together, Meirelles and Lund have crafted a devastating epic about the roots of criminality and the ironic cruelties of life that also works as an intimate personal drama. City of God is, in a word, a magnificent film.

Copyright © 2004 James Kendrick