Simple life in a horrible world

Rating: 5/10 (11 September 2007)

I finally got around to watching this much praised movie, and I can certainly understand why so many people have found it fascinating. It is very well done in a technical aspect, and it's easy to be seduced by the way it looks and the constant flow of action scenes, not very different from the efficiency of some glossy & clever commercial. It also shows a way of life and a part of the world that is not very well known to many outsiders, thereby invoking some sense of illumination. Unfortunately, looking beyond the interesting setting & the glossy surface there's not a lot to be found.
In 'Cidade de Deus' we follow some dirt poor kids who live as brutal gangsters in a shanty town part of the Brazilian city Rio de Janeiro. The kids need money, so they steal, they deal in drugs and they kill. This is the basic plot for the movie. And then what, you may ask? Well, then there's  sadly, pretty much nothing more. What we get here is just a grim world contained within itself, where people perform a lot of horrible acts without really wondering why or thinking about any options or consequences. Now somebody could argue that this is actually the way that many people handle such savage situations, and so this movie is just portraying them in a realistic way. But even then, a filmmaker telling a dramatic story has many opportunities to put things into a broader context and he/she can make the choice to give the audience a more multi-layered view without embellishing anything. If you've seen something like the excellent TV mini-series 'The Corner' you know what I'm talking about.
'Cidade de Deus' makes no attempt to explain why these kids don't have any other opportunities than a life of violent crime, so there's no real critique of the society that produces this horrible condition. Without even a glimpse of the reasons for this, you cannot give any real insight into the desperation that drives the characters to behave in the gruesome ways that they do. Instead it comes across as something that's inevitable and almost natural. Like wild animals eating each other, not because they're forced to by special circumstances that could be changed, but simply because it is their instinct. As we all know this will seldom apply to human beings since our existence is much more complex. Any such complexity is totally missing here. In addition there's not much effort made to show the devastating effects that drugs & brutality has on the human soul. Most of the times when something really awful happens in the story, like children becoming killers or getting killed, it's rapidly followed by some non-emotional scene with some cool music and flashy editing. There's no grieving for the victims, the movie is over 2 hours long & the director spends about 30 seconds of that time showing family members shattered by this unnecessary loss of life, which means there's no depiction of the deep sorrow & hopelessness that extreme poverty & violence creates. We get little or no reflection, just one gun-blasting action followed by another & then another. A lot of stuff for eyes & ears, less for hearts & brains.
So 'Cidade de Deus' is a film that looks very good. But for me to agree with IMDb placing it among the top 20 ever made (we're talking higher than 'Citizen Kane', 'Apocalypse Now' & 'The Seventh Seal'), the director's ability to convey the depth of human beings should at least be equal to his flair for technical tricks & brilliance. This is truly far from the case here. I rate it 5/10 for the cinematography & editing and for showing a small piece of a harsh reality without blinders, but for me it felt more like an ordinary action movie than an epic masterpiece.