I may have dosed off for a few minutes while watching the hammerhead Brazilian police drama Elite Squad. Listening to all that screaming and cursing and the sound of gunshots--it was just so much like being at home in my bed in the Bronx. A scandalous success in its native Brazil, Elite Squad is the latest post-City of God potboiler that depicts Rio de Janeiro as being just like Miami Vice except with fewer washed-up rock stars. Based on a book about Rio's special forces outfit known as BOPE, the movie is narrated by squad Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura), the hardest of hard men, who is looking for someone tough enough to replace him so that he retire and stop placing his life on the line and raise a proper family with his pregnant wife. Moura thinks there may be potential in a couple of young recruits, who also happen to be bestest buddies: Neto (Caio Junqueira), who seems tough and trigger-happy enough but is maybe just a teensy bit too Cro-Magnon to be trusted with large arsenals of weapons at his disposal, and Matias (Andre' Ramiro), who wears glasses and is smart and stuff, but may be too evolved to keep the savages in line. How to choose!? Faced with this head-scratcher, Moura addresses it the only way a real man can: he yells at everybody who comes within a mile of his office until you expect his throat to hemorrage. Then he takes to the training field to figure out which recruits have what it takes, by the time-tested method of yelling at them. Then, having used his famous leather lungs to keep Rio from cracking apart, he goes home to enjoy a relaxed evening of yelling at his wife. We must remain ever vigilant.
Elite Squad is the first nondocumentary film directed by Jose' Padilha, who made the great Bus 174, and coming from him, it's a shock. That movie used a hostage situation that was covered on Brazilian TV for an amazing, multi-level view of Rio society, and it had a great deal of sympathetic understanding for confused, poverty-stricken young men who resort to the gun. Elite Squad is made from deep inside the viewpoint of the kind of paranoid, killer cop who sees everyone who's not in uniform as a potential threat to his life. Its take on policing the Rio slums and discos is, the drug dealers are too heavily armed to be kept in line by regular means, and all the regular cops are on the take anyway, so blah-blah-blah and let God sort it out. (Roberto Pimental, the former BOPA captain who co-wrote the book on which the movie is based and had a hand in the screenplay, has been quoted as saying that the movie that came closest to capturing his experiences as a policeman is Black Hawk Down.) Padilha has indicated that he thought he was making an expose' about reprehensible behavior among violent cops, and there are times when the captain's narration and behavior are so puerile that it would be very reassuring to think that the filmmakers included them as evidence that their hero is a psychotic asshole. (He brags about the "Elite Squad"'s logo--a skewered skull that a fourteen-year-old would think was rad--and tortures the recruits with abusive games and taunts that would make R. Lee Ermey consider staging an intervention.) The script that Pahilha and Pimental came up with was reshaped and polished by Braulio Mantovani, and Padilha may not have recognized the degree to which Mantovani, the writer of City of God, gave it the structure and devices of a conventional righteous-cop revenge thriller, with the cops doing horrible, omni-destructive things only after the bad guys have made it clear that they're such total monsters that it'll take the worst of which the cops are capable to bring them down. The whiff of mixed motives behind the camera gives Elite Squad whatever fascination it has, but the commercial success it's already enjoyed, and any great success it ultimately has in this country, probably comes down to how much of the audience is happy to take its supercop characters' vicious self-righteousness as real heroism.
