CITY OF GOD

"It was like a message from God: 'Honesty doesn't pay, sucker'."

Once in a great while an entertaining movie hits you with the dramatic force of a punch to the face. Fernando Meirelles’s CITY OF GOD (CIDADE DE DEUS) is such a film. From the incredible, frenetic, eye-popping first scene involving a gang of teenagers running after a chicken (and yes, shooting at it as well), the film never stops moving. Meirelles has crafted one of the finest first feature films in all of history, a film whose entertainment values are as equally resounding as its dramatic values.

City of God takes place in the slum outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The main character and main character is a boy who grows into a man over the course of the film. His name is Rocket, and the world he knows is one of crime. He comments in the beginning of the film that ‘while the slum was only fifteen miles from Paradise (Rio), you could feel the heat from hell walking through every street, sitting in every building, and looking at every person’. This statement becomes truer than anyone watching would have suspected. Meirelles covers dozens upon dozens of characters over the course of the film, cutting back and forth in time to reveal the back stories of every major player in the City of God. Because of this the audience feels a connection with that is rare in today’s cinema. It is hard to mold characters who seem alive in a movie, characters who reflect life on Earth perfectly. Meirelles not only does this, but he does this for dozens of characters spanning two decades.

Rocket tells the story of life in the slum starting with his brother. The two of them and the kids in the neighborhood are playing a simple game of soccer when Rocket’s brother and his two friends ditch the game and rob a gas truck, really for the fun of it. Things get out of hand that night when the gang goes out with a boy named Lil Dice, who is Rocket’s age. It is clear from his introductory shot to the film that Lil Dice calls the shots in the CITY OF GOD. He, at the age of seven, organizes a plan that has the four of them robbing a hotel and making sure nobody leaves the building to inform the cops. Lil Dice shows his uncontrollable bloodlust by executing everyone in the hotel, and then takes off with the cash.

Rocket and Lil Dice first cross paths a few months later when Lil Dice murders Rocket’s older brother, who is trying to leave the slum in hopes of a better life. They will run into each other again, years later, but not after walking down very different paths in life.

After stepping back and taking a look at the film, one can see that the two main characters are really quite like most other teenagers, living everywhere in the world. They both have hormones that control their actions, but to different degrees. They are both given opportunities thanks to the CITY OF GOD, but accept these opportunities in different ways. Rocket wants to become a photographer so he and the city can receive some recognition for what is happening in the slum; how the gangs rule the streets, the cops abandon them, and how most people want to leave the violence for a better life but can’t. Lil Dice, who now demands to be called Lil Ze, is similar to other hotheaded teenagers who want things their way. Ze just happens to have an unending supply of guns and money from drugs, and doesn’t shed a tear when he kills anyone.

Lil Ze’s rise to power begins by killing off his competition. He goes to a dance club with envious eyes one night, seeing the diamonds, gold, and women that are all over the biggest drug dealers in the slum. He tells his friend that he wants this, all of this, for himself. By the same time the following night, he has killed off all the men he had so enviously watched and is now more powerful than anyone else in the CITY OF GOD.

Meirelles’ shaky camera-style of cinematography works extraordinarily well in CITY OF GOD. Often times this style is used to make jaggedly-edited action sequences seem more realistic, but in CITY OF GOD it serves a better purpose. The viewer feels as if they are another person living in the slum, and everything that happens there affects them. The violence is hard-hitting, brutal, and comes often. Sometimes we feel it is justified, while other times we hate it but know that it is something that we just must accept. A thought crept through my head after a particularly hell-like scene involving Lil Ze. I said to myself, “somebody has to kill that guy”. It was then, I believe, that the film was its most transcending and had reached its dramatic peak. I cared for the characters safety as much as they did, and I felt like I had been drag through hell, as the characters living in the slum feel like throughout life.

On a technical level CITY OF GOD is breathtaking. Every performance is spot-on accurate; many of the actors used in the film were from the slum itself. The frenetic, kinetic direction is mind-blowing and adrenaline-pumping (I’m sorry to use the cliché, but it really is), and the shaky camera-style cinematography captures the essence of hell that all the characters in the film feel. What may be most impressive about the film is its screenplay, and how it encompasses the lives of dozens of people from childhood to manhood, and manhood to death in the CITY OF GOD over more than a decade of time. It chronicles how violence affects them and establishes its characters well, making them three-dimensional with relatable personality flaws (they may be of greater proportion, but they are the same flaws most other people share). I can not say any bad words about City of God. It is an exemplary, incendiary, and heartfelt film that will be considered one of the greatest crime pictures of all-time one day, and that day may not be far off.

A+