For a certain kind of viewer — raise your hand if you love gritty, operatically scaled gangster melodrama — Seasons 3 and 4 of the Italian drug-gang epic “Gomorrah,” seen in other parts of the world but still missing from North American streaming services, are the Honus Wagner rookie card of television.
(If you haven’t discovered the show yet, the first two seasons are on Netflix in America. We’ll wait.)
Now that you’re back, we have news. “Zerozerozero” (eight episodes Friday on Amazon Prime Video) shares some DNA with “Gomorrah”: It’s also based on a book by the Italian journalist Roberto Saviano, and two of its creators, Stefano Sollima and Leonardo Fasoli, are “Gomorrah” alums. And it is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a decent fix. It’s not the pure stuff, but it will tide you over.
“Zerozerozero” is, like the drug deal it chronicles, an international production, bringing Amazon together with the European networks Sky and Canal Plus. (The title isn’t explained, but presumably refers to the very large sums of money exchanged via banking apps or duffel bags.)
And it reflects its mixed origins in a literal way. “Zerozerozero” is three shows in one: an Italian mafia saga with rocky Calabrian hillsides and generational omertà; a Mexican narco thriller with lavish cartel violence; and, more improbably, an indie-movie-style American family drama and character study. The series toggles among the three stories, which are intimately connected but for the most part told separately, with occasional meetings that are invariably bad news for the characters involved.
The common thread, purchased in Mexico and transported to Italy by an American broker, is a shipping container of jalapeño tins that actually hold cocaine. They’re a familiar but effective narrative and visual device, weary but determined travelers whose progress we root for as they’re hoisted on and off ships and trucked across deserts and mountains.
They’re also mute witness to the travails of their Mexican sellers, Italian buyers and American expediters. In Monterrey a special-forces sergeant (Harold Torres) takes his team of anti-cartel soldiers on a ruthless and bloody venture into the private sector while keeping up his attendance at evangelical church services. In Calabria an aging don (Adriano Chiaramida) hides out in underground bunkers and abandoned farmhouses while dealing with his rebellious grandson (Giuseppe de Domenico).
Caught between, in New Orleans, a father, daughter and son (Gabriel Byrne, Andrea Riseborough and Dane DeHaan) struggle to keep the family shipping brokerage afloat, counting on the tens of millions they stand to make from transporting those jalapeño tins.
And, again improbably, the American story line is the strength of “Zerozerozero” — when it’s onscreen, there’s more to watch than a coolly efficient international crime thriller. Perhaps because they couldn’t fall back as easily on mafia or narco clichés, Sollima and his collaborators came up with a framework for the American family — domineering father, children struggling to prove themselves in the business, sister fiercely protective of brother with degenerative disease — that’s usefully melodramatic and gives Riseborough and DeHaan room to portray a real and subtly moving relationship.
Their scenes, as the sister and brother tend to the shipment through increasingly dangerous and implausible complications on the Atlantic and in Africa, provide emotional and dramatic jolts in what’s otherwise a polished, visually absorbing, highly engineered prestige-TV package. Locations in northern Mexico, southern Italy and the Sahara are photographed in ways that are simultaneously arresting and unsurprising, and the “Gomorrah”-like ambience — violent action depicted with a melancholy austerity of tone and style — is reinforced by the incantatory music of the Scottish band Mogwai.
That kind of package is an impressive thing in its own right, and the Italian sequences have their share of coups, like an opening scene in which the gangster emerges from a cramped, windowless cell into a wild mountain landscape. But “Zerozerozero” also has stretches, especially in the Mexican story line, that serve mostly to fill our expectations of this kind of show, sequences in which the narco-thriller conventions are just there for their own sake. As a globe-spanning attempt to tell a start-to-finish story of the drug trade, “Zerozerozero” evokes Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 film “Traffic” (based on the superior British mini-series “Traffik”), and it shares the movie’s tendency to sacrifice dramatic specificity for the sake of broad-brush platitudes.
It has a saving grace, though, in Riseborough, who overcomes an attention-grabbing hairdo — a two-tone affair resembling an alien warrior’s helmet — and makes human and disarmingly charming what could have been a flat, cartoonish character. Spoiler alert: Her character, unlike many, survives, and the smile that pops onto her face amid the carnage of the show’s final scene is enough to make you hope for a second season.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
