86. City of God

City of God (2003)
Directed by Fernando Meirelles

City of God is Slumdog Millionaire with the guts and courage to be true to its story. While it contains all the vibrancy and urgency of life that people loved in Slumdog, City of God is faithful to the reality of the hard (godless) situations you find in slums, or in this case the favellas. Instead of throwing in a ‘feel good’ plotline about destiny (without squaring it with the destitution that so many are forced to live in), City of God pulls the viewer into the favella (the Brazilian version of the slum) and requires them to confront the evil, the moral decay, and the struggle to survive that characterize it. This is not a feel good film.

After the first time I watched City of God, I actually fell into a depression that I didn't shake off for nearly three days. I could not believe that the film was based on a true story and that this could really happen in people’s lives. The ability for this film to convey the hopeless and endless circles of poverty and violence is not only powerful, but also dangerous. I caution those who enter into this film, it will challenge you. There are no easy answers here, no trite conclusions, and it’s all the more impactful for that.


I’m going to end this commentary here (even though I haven’t given a plotline or anything) because I think you get the picture of how I feel about it. I wouldn’t want to do without this film because it is a constant reminder about what people will do to survive, how decisions to do the wrong thing can lead to real moral decay, and how hopeless some situations can truly be. It’s a wake-up call to the idealistic, and a punch in the stomach to those with lofty ideas of a blind force of fate and destiny. Perhaps that exists in other places, but not in the City of God.

Slumdog Millionaire Review

Overall Grade: B

The film that the critics and audiences alike are raving about this year is Slumdog Millionaire, and indeed it is a good film. Directed by Danny Boyle, Slumdog is a feel-good story about a boy from the slums of Mumbai triumphing over the odds and finding his life-long love.

It’s an interesting and involving story that’s made better by the director’s choices to film the story on location with a dynamic camera and a dynamic eye for color. The story is also helped by a clever decision to use the “who wants to be a millionaire” portion of the story to give us the platform to jump into the flashbacks of our main characters life. Each flashback is purposeful in that it gives us insight into how our main character was able to answer each question from his life experience.

I really enjoyed the early parts of the film and felt like I could really settle in with the film and walk out truly satisfied. However, as the film began to lengthen, it unfortunately begins to thin as well. While the excellent first half of the film begins to ask interesting questions about life, “Do we all have a destiny?”, “Will we be rewarded if we stick to the truth and goodness?”, “Should we persevere in the things we want?”; the second half of the film failed to investigate those questions with any depth. By the end of the film, while I enjoyed the story, I felt conflicted about several of the messages the film ended with. Was it destiny or was it sheer determination that led him to winning out in love?

The film seems to present both (which are inherently contradictory) without offering an explanation. At odds is also the overall tone of the film for me. It seems as though the film wants to be a gritty, this is how bad the poverty is, City of God kinda film; but its general idealism, romanticism, and belief that good people are destined for happiness (or at least our main character), is at odds with the reality of the situation in Mumbai.

Slumdog Millionaire is a good film, and is quite enjoyable as a great story well told. Unfortunately, I found any messages in the film to be superficial at best and contradictory at worst. Slumdog Miollionaire is a good film, just don’t think about it too much.