January 16, 2002 [City of God]

City of God made me hunt up Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina de Jesus, published in English in 1962.  My paperback copy is brittle and brown at the edges, with mysterious notes I'd made years ago: sentences underlined, with numbers written in the margins--#1, #2, #3, nothing higher. What had I found?  Where was Carolina's diary taking me back then?  She herself was going nowhere: Carolina lived in a favela of Sao Paulo, poor as only former colonists can be: Without looking it up, I can still remember her noting that she could tell whether rice or macaroni was fashionable because when scavenging for food she'd find one or the other in the trash.  She was a mother, and sharp and tough, and she knew how to express herself--but she was as lost as Tom Kromer tramping through the Great Depression in the U.S. in Waiting for Nothing--except she had to stay put and feed her children.  But the two are still neighbors: He ends his book ready to settle for three hots and a flop, day after day, while the last entry in Carolina's diary reads, "I got up at 5 and went to get water."

The wild boys of Rio in City of God are also stuck--although the movie gives them light and jangled energy and endless escape-route alleys and, as the bad guy says in Robocop, "Guns, guns, so many guns."  It's shot--so to speak--with humor and excitement--cocaine-fueled, eventually, with bodies piling up while the kid who just wants to take photographs scrambles over the growing heap like one smart cat, slipping out from under just in time.  Everyone wants to compare this to Goodfellas--me, too.  But the romance of being a gangster in City of God is a kid's hard-on, sudden and unreasonable and too quick on the draw.  The older they get, the more these boys slow down, easy targets for up-and-comers.

I don't see Carolina--she's back at her tin shack, boiling water and scrounging for a little sugar.  The movie, meanwhile, just wants at least one lost boy to grow up and get out--while new kids on the block figure out better ways to cut out the middleman--and their friends and their friends' friends and their families and anyone else--OK, just like Henry Hill's NYC goodfellas, but without the good seats at the Copa.