Stray characters, predictable 'City'

(C+) City of Men is a lower-depths shoot-'em-up about a pair of young Brazilian men who struggle to walk the straight and narrow even though drug-dealing gangs warp their environment. It's like a James Cagney crime melodrama -- say, Angels With Dirty Faces -- done with documentary flavor and refitted for the hivelike hillside slums, or favelas, of contemporary Rio de Janeiro.

Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha) are childhood friends who've grown up without fathers. In the course of the film, Ace struggles to be a young father himself, Wallace locates his ex-convict dad, and both get caught in a gang war that sweeps across the neighborhood of Dead End Hill.

The fatherhood vacuum in the urban underclass is as timeless as it is topical: Fagin filled that void in Dickens' Oliver Twist, and Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) hinged on whether Cagney would use his power as an underworld authority figure to influence the Dead End Kids for good. But City of Men lacks the operatic emotional intensity of Cagney walking his last mile in Angels.

Part of the point is that Ace and Wallace are astoundingly casual about the key relationships in their lives: They can't hold more than one thought in their heads or feeling in their hearts at the same time. When Ace decides to help Wallace find his dad, he simply up and leaves his toddler son on the beach, and when Wallace does find his dad, it takes a single dose of paternal attention to distance Wallace from Ace.

It's difficult to build a sense of urgency around such haphazard characters. They're jumpy adolescents -- not even close to being men -- and they learn their lessons in the most obvious and tendentious manner, as if the movie were a bullets-and-blazes version of an after-school special.

The director, Paulo Morelli, has designed this film as a companion piece to the 2002 hit City of God, a supercharged, wearying piece of sociological fiction; that movie's award-winning director, Fernando Meirelles, is one of this film's producers. (City of Men immediately derives from a TV spinoff of the same name that starred Cunha and Silva, too.) Morelli's intent was to create an individual and dramatic story instead of souped-up social commentary -- an admirable goal because some of us thought City of God was a dehumanized portrait of dehumanization.

So it's doubly disappointing that all the subplots about Ace and Wallace and their fathers intertwine in increasingly predictable ways, and that what you remember from this film are exactly the same kind of visceral back-alley vignettes that characterized the first one. A street lord (played by Jonathan Haagensen) descends from the hillside to the beach less like a rock star with an entourage than a feudal lord with a retinue; when his second-in-command betrays him, they form guerrilla armies who terrorize huge swaths of Rio.

The matter-of-factness of the carnage gets to you but doesn't stay with you. There isn't enough heft to the protagonists. City of Men tries to flesh out the victims of harsh favela life, but too often they register as scurrying figures in a human ant farm.

>>>City of Men (Miramax) Starring Douglas Silva, Darlan Cunha. Directed by Paulo Morelli. Rated R for violent scenes. Time 110 minutes. (In Portuguese, with English subtitles.)

michael.sragow@baltsun.com

Related topic galleries: James Cagney, Gang Activity

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