Urban Thought Collective

CITY OF MEN (R)

MOVIE BIASES:
Love “City of God” and the TV show “City of Men.”

MAJOR PLAYERS:
Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha, Camila Monteiro (all from TV’s “City of Men”), and producer Fernando Meirelles (City of God).

Acerola (Silva) and Wallace (Cunha) are lifelong best friends, having grown up in the hardscrabble Dead End Hill favela (slums) of Rio de Janeiro. How rough is it? So rough, you gotta pack heat just to go to the beach on a warm summer day. On the verge of their eighteenth birthdays, Ace deals with the pressures of teenage fatherhood without a father of his own while Wallace sets out to find the identity of his. The results of their individual endeavors are put in the spin cycle when a gang war explodes in the neighborhood, unexpectedly tearing at the fabric of their manhood, identities, their very friendship itself.

Fans of “City of God,” it is my pleasure to inform you that you will NOT be disappointed. Mining Ace and Wallace’s friendship via flashbacks culled from previous seasons of Sundance Channel’s “City of Men,” its cinematic counterpart basks in a tranquil 45 minutes or so of rich background and insight into favela life for these two fatherless boys-to-men, never once asking us to feel sorry for them or their environment - Dead End Hill is just their squalid but accepted existence; it’s as normal to them as your hometown is to yours. By the end of this stretch of film, you feel like you’ve grown up with these two young men, truly investing in them and their community.

Then all hell breaks loose. The violence is rarely gratuitous, the damage to the people tangible, the emotional fragility of the favela held hostage by a generationally recycling circle of violence feels all the more real. On one side you have Midnight (Jonathan Haagensen), Wallace’s cousin with a juvenile, sinister charisma as the local drug lord; on the other side, Fasto (Eduardo BR), the rebellious, slighted, overly-ambitious second in command.

Against a beautiful juxtaposition of abject poverty and coastal mountainous beauty, the civil war on the Hill is only engulfed in script and spirit by the themes of fatherlessness, loyalty, and friendship. The Elena Soarez script is so poignant and the natural acting of everyone involved so fluidly convincing, it creeps up on you as a potential, bullet-ridden tearjerker toward the end. If it’s not the slowly dawning, historical relevance of Acerola’s father’s death that gets to you, I promise that Wallace’s heartbreaking scene in the third act, rife with paternally absolute disappointment, will. Much in the gritty style of “City of God” and the TV series “City of Men,” director Paulo Morelli (a director on the TV series as well) elegantly captures the everyday life and emotions of the neighborhood, if not in our two boys trying to become - and raise one, in Ace’s case - men.

Admittedly, this subject is a little personal for me. While not having grown up in a Brazilian slum, I have been poor growing up without a father. Born another time, another place ,like a favela for instance, Acerola or Wallace could have been me. It is their touching, life-preserver bond of a friendship that communes with our common humanity; by the end of this movie, I felt like a survivor of a Brazilian gang war myself. Trust that whether it be Acerola’s on-the-job daddy training or Wallace’s reconciliation with his father’s checkered past, this “City of Men” is a city for us all.

@@@@ REELS
(FOUR REELS)
An urban legend/instant classic.

Edwardo Jackson is the author of the novels EVER AFTER and NEVA HAFTA, (Villard/Random House), a writer for The 213 Magazine, and an LA-based screenwriter. Visit his website at www.edwardojackson.com where his new novel I DO? is available NOW.