Alternate Best Supporting Actor 2002: Leandro Firmino in City of God

Leandro Firmino did not receive an Oscar nomination for portraying Li'l Zé in City of God.

City of God is the excellent film that follows the lives of children as they become young men in a slum.

One of the risks City of God takes is that  director Fernando Meirelles used almost entirely a cast of non-professional actors. I'll say this is always a risk, and often times even when it is successful there can be certain sort of traits of such an ensemble. This even in better ones there can be some very obvious off-moments, or more often sort of a lack of risk taking within the performances. City of God is notable then, in that I wouldn't have guessed this cast, other than the child performers I suppose, were non-professional from the start, and even with the child actors I wouldn't have been surprised if they had prior experience. The film lacks any of those qualities within the cast. Now the film is largely an ensemble, the pseudo lead is Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who we see go from a child to an adult trying to make it as a photographer. His story is very much parallel to the more tumultuous action, where he typically is only an observer of the criminal underworld of the slum. Within the underworld there is a vast array of characters we find, some with little vignettes many with more. The one with the strongest perspective being Li'l Zé, who we first meet as an overly ambitious child criminal. A child criminal who cuts his teeth by committing a robbery and even killing/leading to the deaths of sort of the old guard of wannabe hoods. This switching over to his adult life, in turn switching from the child actor Douglas Silva to Leandro Firmino, in a particularly memorable montage of Li'l's coup de grace's on his victims as he ages into the fierce gang leader who will dictate so much of the story going forward. 

Firmino opens with that image of his face already of a performer you wouldn't guess that this is first film. This in the confidence in a sense of portraying the overt psychopathy in the moment of his smile brimming with glee. This portraying L'il as a man who doesn't shoot for the sake of it, he shoots for the love of it. We find L'il quickly making massive expansion as it jumps into the young adult lives of the central characters, where L'il Zé and his more balanced partner Benny (Phellipe Haagensen), have almost completely taken over the slums in terms of the criminal underworld. Firmino's performance again suggests such a strict confidence that is ideal for L'il as we see him as a man in the criminal world. This both in the ease he brings to the threats of violent L'il will so easily dispense with a human life if he decides he needs to or he for the fun of it, but also through the sense of the man as a boss in the criminal underworld. Firmino speaks with that same ease as he commands one thing another. I particularly love his bravado when he acts more like a king than a gangster when letting someone go, or making a particular grandiose declaration. Firmino brings the right bluster in granting the sense of this delusion of grandeur within L'il Zé who believes himself to be more than just a criminal within the slum, but rather this lord of it whose laws must be obeyed. This in a particularly horrifying scene where Li'l orders the shooting and killing of a few child thieves he feels has broken his orders for the slum. Again Firmino's performance creates a chilling quality in the manner in which Li'l so easily speaks his order, but even more so does it as though he is treating the situation like he is punishing a trespasser not ordering the death of a child. Their unopposed reign leads Benny to expand his horizons while L'il stays the same, and here Firmino excels in showing a different side to the man, in his complete failure to thrive outside of the criminal life. This as we see, by Benny's mocking, his first attempt to try to pick up a woman. Firmino is excellent in the moment by bringing a hint of vulnerability as makes these attempts. This in his eyes suggesting a genuine desire but also important hesitation of a man who really doesn't know what to do, but wants to do. When rejected though he doesn't deal with it, or attempt to better himself, we rather see the worst of L'il again. This in Firmino portraying the man falling upon what he knows in violence and again with the needed visceral edge to the sheer cruelty of the man. This again we a zero sense of remorse within his murders of others in his quest that soon becomes a rivalry about his failures with women as it does his actual criminal enterprise. Even in this downward spiral he effective balances the sides of the man, this in the moments of reminded of his inadequacy with find just the humorless killer, however whenever given the change to prop himself up based on his criminal work, we see such joy within Firmino's work. A man portraying this unearned pride in every moment to the point of loving to pose for pictures as though he is an egotistical celebrity rather than a brutal killer. Firmino's work here is one of the greatest successes of the film's risk regarding its casting. You'd never second guess his work here, as he gives a wholly captivating portrayal of tyrant, though a tyrant of a slum.