City of Men

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

In 2002, a Brazilian film based on actual events called Cidade de Deus (City of God) was released to little fanfare despite a number of critical raves. Miraculously, it landed four out-of-nowhere Oscar nominations, including one for its screenplay by Bráulio Mantovani and one for its director, Fernando Meirelles. Intrigued, I rented it one night and was treated to perhaps the best film of that year: an inventive, harrowing, violent, fascinating, and wildly entertaining film about the frighteningly young members of street gangs overrunning the slum outskirts of Rio de Janeiro in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

The eventual international success of City of God inspired a Brazilian TV series called City of Men which ran for four seasons of about five episodes each. Set in the same world of the “favelas” (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro, the series took place in the present and followed Ace (Douglas Silva) and Wallace (Darlan Cunha), two normal boys trying to grow up surrounded by poverty and gangs of their peers.

Now comes City of Men the movie, which acts as a series finale to the TV show, but also works just as well as a standalone film. (I’ve never seen the series – although I plan to now – and I followed it just fine.) Director Paolo Morelli, who worked regularly on the television show, has crafted a film that has a much more traditional structure than City of God and is also much more optimistic. Those choices are deliberate, and if they don’t make for a film as harrowing or compelling as City of God, I respect the need for a message of hope.

Ace, who turns eighteen at the beginning of the film, has a wife and 2-year-old child named Clayton. About as immature as you’d expect an eighteen-year-old to be, he’s a terrible father, but that he’s raising Clayton at all is a minor miracle. Most kids in the favelas are fatherless, including Wallace, troubled that he never even knew who his father was. (We gather that he was the one to convince Ace to man up and take responsibility for his own son.) When Wallace turns eighteen as well, Ace promises him that if his father is still alive, they’ll hunt him down.

Surrounding this minor drama is a war between rival gangs. Ace and Wallace’s own favela is ruled by Madrugadão (Jonathan Haagensen), but when his right hand man Fasto (Eduardo BR) grows disenfranchised, he defects to a nearby gang which then takes over Madrugadão’s turf. Through plenty of complications, Ace is soon targeted by Fasto’s gang and is forced to side with Madrugadao, who was taken in by another gang. Wallace, after successfully finding his father early on, tries to forge a relationship with him; he remains friends with people connected to both gangs and is able to miraculously remain neutral.

The film hits some familiar but no less legitimate thematic ...