Snuffing and huffing

Snuffing and huffing

Rocket contemplates his ticket out of the ‘hood in “City of God.”

People
familiar with the work of Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles, who crafted
the offbeat comedy Maids, might be
floored by his latest big-screen effort. City of God is every bit as violent
as Narc, just as gritty as Amores Perros, and nearly as relentless
as Moulin Rouge. But Meirelles’s
picture one-ups those others because it’s based on a true story.

            Being dropped into Rio de Janeiro’s
Cidade de Deus housing project is no less intense than what we’ve experienced
in Bloody Sunday or Black Hawk Down. We begin in the late
’60s, when the housing project was relatively new, yet had already succumbed to
violent behavior begat by drug use and trade. The focus of the early section of
God is on a group of boys called The
Tender Trio, and from there, the film follows the lives of two of the Trio over
the next few decades.

            Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues) has a
bad-ass older brother, but, after quickly learning a life of crime isn’t for
him, Rocket decides to pursue an interest in photography. Lil’ Zé (Leandro
Firmino da Hora), on the other hand, is rotten to the core and envisions a time
when he controls Cidade like some kind of Brazilian Bill the Butcher. Zé
certainly isn’t the only hard character in God.
Most of them make Hollywood’s gun-toting, hip gangsta wannabes look like the
cast of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood.

            It’s one thing to make a
two-plus-hour, non-linear film with dozens of characters (each one memorable)
that covers nearly 30 years, but it takes a very special filmmaker to do that
and, by injecting a little humor in between horrifyingly violent scenes of kids
killing kids, flash enough style to warrant comparison to Tarantino, Alejandro
González Iñárritu, Paul Thomas Anderson, (a pre-Swept Away) Guy Ritchie, and, of course, Martin Scorsese. Meirelles
throws everything at the screen but the kitchen sink, using a split-screen, a
very likable voiceover, and editing the likes of which I’ve never seen. If the
first five minutes of God don’t suck
you in, it’s time to scoop out your eyes and get new ones.

            More than once, cinematographer
César Charlone shows us the carnage of a battle from overhead (a la the
crescendo of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver),
giving us The Big Guy’s perspective of life in the slums. And we get a
different, harder-hitting point of view when the closing credits roll,
revealing photos of the real-life people on which these characters were based.

On
paper, Love Liza seemed like it would be a sure thing come Oscar time.
The Academy has recently fallen all over itself to acknowledge a bunch of
first-time feature-film directors (see Todd Field, Spike Jonze, Sam Mendes,
Kenneth Lonergan, Stephen Daldry, etc.) like Liza‘s Todd Louiso. And Gordy Hoffman’s script, which won the Waldo
Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, follows in the
massive footsteps of Memento and You Can Count on Me, which both went on
to receive multiple Oscar nominations. The film’s star — incredibly talented
local-boy-turned-indie-superstar Philip Seymour Hoffman — usually appears in
critically lauded ensemble pictures, but the closer he gets to being a leading
man, the more he’s praised (Flawless won him a Golden Satellite Award and a Screen Actors Guild nomination).

            In practice, Liza seems like anything but an Oscar contender — which is not a
knock against the quality of the film. It’s dark. No, make that very dark. It offers little background
about its protagonist. There is no character arc. Its ending is ambiguous. It’s
about suicide. It’s about mourning. It’s about addiction. And it’s about
huffing gas fumes.

            Hoffman, who once again channels
Daniel Clowes’ mouth-breathing loser Dan Pussey, plays Wilson Joel, a web
designer whose wife, Liza, recently offed herself with what we can only assume
was little or no warning. We see Wilson stumbling through what used to be his
life and trying to avoid everyone intent on helping him (each offers support,
but has ulterior motives that aren’t initially clear). We see him sleeping on
the floor or in his car, because he can’t bear to use the bed, and, like
Wilson, we can practically feel the hairs on our neck stand up when he
discovers Liza’s suicide letter while reaching for a pillow, because the
kitchen floor is just too damn hard.

            After an attack of inappropriate
laughter at work, Wilson is sent on a mandatory vacation, which leads him into
the wacky world of radio-controlled cars, boats, and planes. And why not? The
guy down at the gas station is starting to get suspicious about Wilson buying
one gallon of gas at a time, but the people at the hobby shop will sell him as
much Tetra-5 as he needs. In the meantime, while on the run from his mother-in-law
(Kathy Bates), an amorous coworker (Sarah Koskoff), and his past, Wilson
befriends the weasel-like Denny (Jack Kehler), forming an unlikely R/C-based
friendship.

            If you replace the gas huffing with
booze or drug addiction, Liza would
probably be a slightly more accessible film (like, say, Leaving Las Vegas), which I think is a disturbing commentary on how
society accepts alcoholism and pill-popping as just another part of the
American experience. Hoffman one-ups Nic Cage’s Ben Sanderson performance-wise,
which is impressive enough, but he also has to carry this entire film on his
back. There’s no Elisabeth Shue-type sidekick here as he huffs himself into
next week.

            Jim O’Rourke provides an
appropriately erratic score, while Louiso’s direction is fairly low-key and
unobtrusive, allowing Hoffman to work his magic.

Interested
in raw, unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com), or
listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.

This article appears in Mar 12-18, 2003.