MICHAEL JEWELL
It’s not an excuse. This simple, throwaway line addressing drug traffickers in Rio De Janeiro in Jose Padilha’s film “Elite Squad” haunts me as I leave the theater. The Brazilian film industry has done well by turning its eye inward in recent years, and few may escape being judged against the gold standard of Fernando Meirelles’ 2002 masterpiece “City of God,” which gave sharp focus to the lives of the desperately poor in Rio’s shanty-town favelas.
I can pretend to very little understanding of life in these slums, eternally struggling to make ends meet in the tangled network of corrupt city officials and vicious drug dealers with a death-grip on their territory. Pat answers will not do, and in societies dealing with the level of inequality and economic turmoil that Rio does, placing people in hard and fast moral categories takes a back seat to placing food on the table. Yet simple answers are exactly what Padilha’s film traffics in.
“Elite Squad” borrows heavily from the style and subject matter of Meirelles’ “City,” but the, lyrical, sometimes even tender hard-knocks portrait of the city’s youth has been inverted into a grim, adrenaline pumped pot-boiler that chooses the BOPE, a superbly trained force of black-clad counter-drug enforcers as its subject. Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) leads a squadron of the only police ruthless and disciplined enough to strike fear into the hearts of the favelas’ overlords. BOPE are efficient, incorruptible and not above using “creative” methods to achieve their ends, and Nascimento’s meat and potatoes prose-narration provides the film with its muscular moral compass: war on the city’s baser elements in all of their forms. Nascimento doesn’t concern himself with the complexities that engender the parasitic relationship between the police and the dealers. As we later learn, the capacity for nuance does not fit the psychological profile of the ideal BOPE, and like it or not, they do their job extremely well.
The tone of the adrenaline-pumping action movie is a perfect match for the “Elite Squad”’s single-minded purpose of getting the bad guys, but in the trail of other films that inspire understanding, if not compassion, it’s hard to justify setting another meaty Hollywood-style action romp with a comfy moral binary against the established complex ambiguity of the slums. What is left is a surplus of villains and nobody to root for, especially not the heroes. The dealers are obviously scum, the idealistic students are too naïve and self-centered to understand that they prop up the drug lords with their attempts to help the poor, the police are impossibly corrupt and the BOPE enforcers are torturers. All the fist-pumping Portuguese heavy metal in the world can’t get me behind their use of beatings, terrorizing and most disturbingly, suffocation with plastic bags of their targets. I live in a post-Patriot Act America, and pardon my sensitivity about these interrogation techniques.
Despite his intense moral drive, Nascimento feels the psychological strain of the constant daily violence as well as the anxiety of possibly leaving his newborn son fatherless and he searches for a replacement. The month-long campaign to clean up the streets in advance of a Papal visit provides him an opportunity in Matias (Andre Ramiro), a booksmart introvert who has worked hard to overcome prejudice and Neto (Caio Junquiera) his impulsive childhood friend. When they join the police, they are pitted immediately at odds with the tangled web of police corruption. When there are ill-suited and uncomfortable with working within the system to achieve their goals, the “Elite Squad” provides them with an opportunity to fulfill their idealistic impulses. Nascimento grooms the two of them to play up their strengths (Matias’ brains and Neto’s heart) and reduce their liabilities like the former’s educated girlfriend and the latter’s rash impulses. By the end of the Pope’s visit to Rio, he has manipulated them into the perfect candidates to fight his battles as he sheds the black cloak of the BOPE to raise a family. He recognizes the futility of his war and quickly fills his shoes with younger blood.
The bullets fly and make an alarming mess in scenes of violence that punctuate the simmering psychological hotpot in Matias in the film’s final scene. Instead of uncovering a sympathetic understanding of Rio’s situation, “Elite Squad” steps backwards and transforms a law student into a killer. I have the luxury of imagining a stable society when BOPE can stand back and examine themselves and to say “there’s no excuse,” but in Rio, things are more complicated than that. And I don’t have the answers.
