Brilliant but tough to watch

Rating: 9/10 (22 December 2005)

There are exactly two characters in this movie -- Rocket and Knockout Ned -- who are in any way sympathetic. Everyone else is a villain or victim, usually both. The film does not contain a single frame that relieves the brutality, violence, poverty and degradation which are its themes. See it but understand what you'll be seeing: drug trafficking and casual murder (mostly done for "business" reasons but also for the sheer pleasure of killing) by young people and even by children in a terrible, terror-ridden Rio de Janeiro slum. In its way it is harder to watch even than Hotel Rwanda because of its apparent "artlessness." You have more of a feeling in City of God that you are actually there, witnessing unbelievably awful events without the small distance that Hotel Rwanda afforded because it was scripted and acted and "directed," because it was art. This movie, on the other hand, feels like you are watching it happen in front of your eyes without a scriptwriter's story telling or a director's mediation. Those illusions are helped along by the fact that there's not a single actor that I recognized from any other movie. The actors ARE the drug dealers, the killers and the victims -- not, as in "Traffic," well-known actors "playing" at being drug dealers, killers and victims. "Traffic" was very well done. This movie is harrowing.