ooking back, 2002 was the year of the gangster movie. The last few months have brought us no fewer than four different films dealing with gangs or the criminal underworld, all of them bidding for critical praise and Oscar glory. Spike Lee’s 25th Hour saw Edward Norton’s drug dealer pondering the wreckage of his life as he prepares to spend seven brutal years in prison. Most prominently, Martin Scorsese finally unveiled his long-awaited project on the 19th century gangs of New York, dubbed (get ready for a surprise) Gangs of New York. Even last summer brought forth Sam Mendes’ American Beauty follow-up, the beautifully filmed but thematically slight Road to Perdition. And slipping under the radar, the Brazilian film City of God examines the poverty-stricken circumstances that breed gang life and anarchic violence in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.


Why the sudden plethora of gangster films? To be perfectly honest, sheer coincidence has a lot to do with it. Apart from Westerns, gang movies are the oldest tradition in Hollywood, and directors constantly try to reinvent the genre, to varying degrees of success. But it is worth pointing out how several of these new films seem to capture aspects of the new, post-Sept. 11 zeitgeist. The new world of mass terror and religious fundamentalism raises issues of violence, morality, and tribalism, issues that gangster movies are uniquely situated to address. Indeed, both The Godfather and Goodfellas, the two archetypes for modern gangster movies, feature the explosions of tribalistic violence and their consequences as central themes.


As a pure gangster movie, the film that fits most easily into this now classic model is Fernando Meirelles’ City of God. Dispensing with the existential questions posed by 25th Hour and Road to Perdition, and shrugging off stylized, formal exploration of tribal loyalty that Scorsese unveils in Gangs of New York, City of God goes straight for the jugular, choosing to address the social context in which gang life flourishes. It succeeds brilliantly, and announces Meirelles as a major new force in modern filmmaking.


From the very beginning, City of God plunges the audience into a blood-soaked urban hell and never lets up. The film’s title refers to the housing projects constructed on the outskirts of Rio, neglected slums marked by crushing poverty and near-total anarchy, a combination not known for leading to low crime rates. Petty crime and casual violence are commonplace—in one early scene, a man reacts to his wife’s infidelity by beating her senseless with a shovel, then burying her alive. The neighbors titter disapprovingly.


City of God takes place over three decades, encompassing the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. The central narrator is Rocket, a young boy who grows into early adulthood over the course of the film. Rocket functions as the audience’s surrogate, a witness to gang life but not immersed in it. Rocket harbors dreams of becoming a photographer, and indeed the film is based partially on the experiences of the real life Brazilian photographer Wilson Rodrigues, who grew up in the City of God and felt compelled to tell its tale.


Rocket watches his friends grow up and fall into lives of crime, particularly the psychotic L’il Ze, a charismatic and ruthlessly violent thug who becomes the city’s most feared hoodlum by the age of 18. L’il Ze carries on a simmering feud with rival gang leader Carrot, a feud that explodes into all-out gang warfare when L’il Ze rapes the girlfriend of Knockout Ned, a former soldier who vows revenge and joins Carrot’s gang. Knockout Ned’s vow not to kill innocent people in this war quickly becomes a sick joke, as the two gangs unleash waves of indiscriminate violence against each other (and any unfortunates who happen to get in the way) on the streets of Rio. Rocket, meanwhile, decides to use his access to both sides of the gang war to advance his journalism career, photographing the delighted “soldiers” for cover shots in the local paper.


Although the plot is a compelling one, it serves primarily as a vehicle through which Fernando Meirelles conducts a sociological examination. If nothing else, City of God is a profoundly political film. Using handheld cameras throughout the film, Meirelles chooses to shoot the story in the style of a documentary, illustrating how a culture of poverty and extreme lawlessness leads inexorably to human tragedy on a mass scale. City of God contains some of the most powerfully disturbing images that this reviewer has ever seen in a film. The camera never flinches as nine-year old children gun each other down with impunity, often laughing with preadolescent glee. In one extraordinary and gut-wrenching scene, L’il Ze metes out punishment on “The Runts,” a group of small children who are disturbing his control of the city by carrying out unauthorized petty robberies. In an unbroken camera shot, L’il Ze corners two of the children, shooting one of them in the foot and watching him shriek in agony, and putting a bullet through the other one’s head.


But do not make the mistake of thinking of City of God as grim, depressing realism, or the gangland version of Schindler’s List. In truth, City of God is a wildly entertaining film. The sheer energy of the movie is never less than compelling. Meirelles pulls out every filmmaking trick in the book, utilizing freeze-frames, montage, flashback, quick-cutting, and even strobe lights. The characters are fascinating and the script is at times incredibly witty. The film’s parts are played not by professional actors, but by residents of the real City of God who rehearsed for the movie but improvised a large portion of the dialogue. The result is a movie that throbs with a vitality reminiscent of other thematically disturbing but compulsively watchable films like Goodfellas and Pulp Fiction.


The comparison of City of God to Goodfellas is actually quite apt. While the child violence that occurs in the Brazilian film is shocking and deeply uncomfortable, in a sense it only advances the themes of Goodfellas one step further. The Scorsese film, after all, depicted a bunch of gangsters who at heart were deeply immature hotheads, prone to sudden explosions of senseless violence and swaggering assertions of authority over those who were weaker. L’il Ze is not substantially different from Joe Pesci’s Tommy DeVito, merely a few years younger. Meirelles takes the childish element of the Goodfellas gangsters and makes it explicit, reflecting the more anarchic, and thus unrestrained and unsupervised, slums of Rio de Janeiro.


Combining a highly relevant sociopolitical statement with a filmmaking style that is alive with energy and daring, City of God is destined to become a modern classic. It is, quite simply, one of the most brilliant movies of this or any other year.