"Gomorrah" in Brookline

There’s not much good about being unemployed, but my current state of joblessness did reintroduce me to a singular sensation and a long-forgotten experience: the weekday matinee.

Last Friday, while an ever-shrinking percentage of the American workforce went about their jobs, grimly hanging on, I took in a one o’clock show of “Gomorrah” at the Coolidge, entering the theater on a chill, sunny day during the endless month of March. (You know the rhyme: 30 days has September, April, June, and November/ All the rest have 31 except for blah, blah, blah. Well, that may be true in other parts of the world, but in New England I’m pretty sure March has about 62 days at least.)

Like most working people, my movie-going has been long limited to nighttime, specifically weekend nights, and I had pretty much forgotten how startling and sweet the transition can be from the harsh light of day to the comforting dark of the movie house. It was quite pleasurable not to have to wait for my popcorn, to be the first served. It was also a kick to see all the young moms arriving with their strollers and infants for the Coolidge’s “Box Office Babies” program. (The movie this afternoon was “The Reader” which, I must say, I didn’t think appropriate for tots.)

Inside, it was lovely to spread out in the theater, coat and hat tossed on an adjoining chair, feet up on the rail in front of the first row in the Coolidge’s second floor viewing room which, by the way, is architected to focus one’s attention on the big screen in a manner reminiscent of a screening room, only much larger. And then, suddenly, I was in Naples watching drugs peddled on the streets by little kids, fat guys in shorts and soccer shirts shooting each other in the head, toxic wastes getting dumped, and every other manner of murder and mayhem being committed in a post-industrial concrete wasteland hollowed out by the crimes of the Comorrah, the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia. As a corrective to the romantic view of the Mafia propagated by “The Godfather” movies (which I love, but not, of course, ‘Godfather III’) and, to a lesser extent “The Sopranos,” this is great stuff. It adds a “dis” to organized crime in both senses of the prefix. No honor among these thieves.

Then it’s over and I’m out of the warm darkness and into—surprise, surprise—the still-cold, still-bright afternoon light. How odd. How disorienting. It’s a bit like being born: bewildering and, in my current frame of mind, a little sad. Movies frequently mark the end of a day. After a matinee, there’s some afternoon and a whole evening left. (I fight the sadness by dropping into Starbucks for a caffeine java jolt.)

Anyway, as long as I’m out of work, it’s probably something I’ll do again. Maybe I’ll see you there. Whattaya think?