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American Gangster
I’ve finally decided that the gangster film is a genre as unique to American movies as the western or the noir; this might seem obvious to most, but until this entertaining picture, it was a notion that had not yet occurred to me. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of the gangster genre (how can you not be in this post-Sopranos age?)—it’s just that I hadn’t embraced it as belonging almost exclusively to the United States. But to watch the best American mob pictures—Coppola’s The Godfather, Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, and De Palma’s Scarface—is to witness 1) rags-to-riches success stories about immigrants and minorities in the land of opportunity; 2) how these said immigrants and minorities exploited that opportunity for their own criminal agendas that propelled them to wealth, power, corruption, and ultimate downfall (even Meirelles’ Brazilian mob epic City of God had characters decidedly emulating the criminal activity of their North American counterparts). The title card of Ridley Scott’s American Gangster has a long space between the two words (American Gangster), as if they are separate entities sizing each other up, never realizing that they share the same font and number of letters from the alphabet. The history of America is the history of the mob, and vice-versa. American Gangster tells a true story, but it relies less on its factual details than the long-established cinematic archetypes of its genre. It concerns the Manhattan-based gangster Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), the first African American mobster to ever gain the power and prestige of the Italian mafia—often to the traditional mob’s racist chagrin. He achieved his status in the late 60s/early 70s by buying cocaine directly from a Thailand supplier and smuggling shipments back into the U.S. via moles in the military. No one else ever had the audacity to consider this, and according to the film, this is the purest cocaine ever seen in the United States. All Lucas has to do is put a brand name on it, gather his suppliers and investors, including the Italians who recognize his gold mine, and wait for the cash to fill his soon-bulging purse. In a few years, Lucas is the most dangerous man on the east coast, employing primarily family members to deal with his business transactions while living in total luxury and authority—to the point that he can unblinkingly shoot an adversary in the face on a busy street and then walk to the coffee shop on the block over, calmly sit down, and order breakfast. This kind of power can quickly usurp even the clout of even the best of law enforcement. That’s why police detective Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe) makes it his personal obsession to track down the source and the supplier of the drug. The punch-line, of course, is that no one could have guessed that a black man is in charge, and it is a long road and a lot of red herrings later before this discovery. In early scenes, the cocaine kills Roberts’ addicted partner, which provides the cop with the proper motivation: Later, he is assigned a special squad intended to take down the drug racquet from the ground level up. If you don’t know the true story as I didn’t, I’ll leave you to discover the details of this corruption and only reveal what the ads explicitly state: Like any of the good, fictitious undercover cop films of last year (Scorsese’s The Departed, Mann’s Miami Vice), it involves a corrupt officer (Josh Brolin) as the go-between man, accepting bribes and quietly allowing the drug trafficking to continue as long as some of it lines his pockets, all the while establishing himself to Lucas as the one man who can keep cops like Roberts off his scent. Director Scott goes through great pains to reveal the process in which police officers are tempted to accept bribes; he doesn’t excuse them, but he does perhaps sympathize with them. After all, it’s a much smarter economic venture to be a criminal than a cop. The number of police officers in this film who come to this realization and embrace it might surprise you. So there’s the setup—cops vs. criminals, with each story playing out separately until they finally intersect and lead to the inevitable showdown between Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts. True story or not, you’ve seen this movie before—Michael Mann’s Heat had the same buildup between Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino, and so did Scorsese’s The Departed between Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. It is difficult not to think of those films while watching American Gangster, and we anticipate the final showdown between the two brilliant minds on the opposite ends of the moral spectrum. In the meantime, Scott remains true to the genre by establishing scenes that reveal the opposite lifestyles of the two leads: Lucas is married to a beautiful and devoted wife (Lymari Nadal), Roberts is a womanizer going through a messy divorce; the criminal sits down with his large family for a Thanksgiving turkey, the cop makes a turkey sandwich and gets back to work. And then you have the clever paradoxes that we have come to expect in all postmodern gangster films: Lucas isn’t a man without a moral code—he refuses to dress “black” and draw attention to himself, and he legitimately supports his impoverished family; on the other hand, Roberts isn’t exactly ethical so much as he obeys the law—he has a few childhood friends in the mob with whom he still associates, and he’s not beyond screwing his attorney on the upper level of a courthouse while his child-custody proceedings are taking place on the lower floor. The dichotomy between these two men sounds obvious, and I suppose it is, but it is set up with superior skill and acted with furious devotion from the two leads, who play their familiar roles with a freshness that allow us to believe that they haven’t seen Heat and are moving along as if they are personally inventing these clichés along the way. I’m making American Gangster sound like a predictable film, and it is. But it is also utterly alive and vibrant, always compelling in its two storylines and well-acted by its ensemble cast of cops and criminals. Scott tells a story that never overreaches; he celebrates the mobster archetypes by reminding us that these films are successful because their formula works when they are accomplished by skillful filmmakers. Yes, we know that Frank Lucas is going to start in poverty, quickly rise to fortune and fame, and finally plummet again as he loses his family first and then his fortune. We know that Roberts is going to eventually catch him, but not before his own personal life falls apart as he works in opposition to his superiors. There are moments where, if we stepped back from the film and watched it with a more critical eye, we could probably predict the dialogue of such scenes before they emerge from the actors’ mouths—particularly in the sequences between Lucas and his mother (Ruby Dee) and Roberts and his ex-wife (Carla Gugino). But the acting is good enough, not to mention the rhythm of Scott’s direction, that we are absorbed despite our familiarity with the material. And because we are living in a post-Goodfellas age, we also recognize Scott’s strategy of ironically playing songs of the era that seem to work perpendicularly to the scenes of violence and depravity that we behold. These ingredients are all part of the mobster genre these days; they were fresh when Scorsese invented them (who knew that “Gimme Shelter” would because such a mob standard?), they are now the norm. Scott does not make them seem tired, but comfortably familiar. It’s a pleasant memory—particularly when the film utilizes “Amazing Grace,” a hymn so familiar that it’s kind of a miracle that Scott features it in such an offbeat manner, using its presence to both inform the proceedings and satirically critique them. I’ve barely mentioned the actors, perhaps because they so comfortably embody their proverbial roles. Washington plays Lucas as the kind of man who is always strategizing, even when he’s sleeping. He takes his mother to church every Sunday, and then can affectionately say to his bungling brother, “If you weren’t blood, I’d blow your brains out,” and mean it. Washington has always been unparalleled at playing straight-faced, all-American men with dark undercurrents informing their actions, not unlike James Stewart’s work with Hitchcock. As the obsessed Roberts, Russell Crowe is subtle and nuanced; he has played this sort of dogged, messy role before in films like L.A. Confidential and Master and Commander, and he repeats his success here. The third lead, Josh Brolin as the corrupt Detective Trupo, practically steals the show in a powerhouse performance of anger and greed: Watch his introductory scene with Crowe and note how Brolin sucks the potentially campy atmosphere out of the air in their heated exchange and replaces it with cold, calculated verbal abuse. And familiar character actors like Ruby Dee, Armand Assante (as a mob boss apparently modeled after Vito Corleone), Cuba Gooding, Jr., Joe Morton, John Hawkes Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Ted Levine lend their support in roles that could have easily turned into an obligatory “Spot the Celebrity” game, but instead are controlled, absorbing performances. While watching American Gangster, I kept asking myself two questions: 1) Does this add anything to the genre that hasn’t already been established in previous gangster films? The answer is tricky—certainly that an African American mobster becomes the most powerful crime-lord to be operating on the Italians’ turf is startling, but the movie does not explore this development beyond its superficial implications. It is more concerned with retelling established conventions with vigor and energy, of a man who gains the whole world and forfeits his soul. 2) Does it matter whether or not this film is conventional? That answer is clear—no, it doesn’t matter, because it is completely, totally, and unapologetically entertaining. A heartbreaking scene that has already been greatly discussed reinforces my point: As Lucas eats his holiday meal with his family, Scott crosscuts to junkies overdosing on his cocaine, undermining what Lucas believes is his right to wealth and prosperity. Now then: I can watch this scene and choose to be distracted that it recycles the infamous baptism/bloodbath sequence from The Godfather, or I can recognize the homage and accept it as bold filmmaking that might not be original, but is still utterly effective. I choose the latter, because Scott has allowed me to recognize that the gangster film is a developing American mythology that must consistently reinforce its standards in order to successfully engrain them into our collective psyche. And finally: It is a tribute to Scott’s direction, Steven Zaillian’s writing, and the two lead actors that when the inevitable battle of wits occurs between Lucas and Roberts for which the film has been preparing us for over two hours, we are too riveted to continue to make comparisons to the aforementioned mobster films. This scene is a revelation, in which two men who have relentlessly pursued each other throughout the picture finally sit down over a cup of coffee and realize that they kind of like each other, and that they can be friendly without necessarily compromising their respective ideals. I suppose that describing this scene on paper makes it sound recycled, but while watching, we find ourselves no longer considering the archetypes and instead simply observing two intelligent men engaged in a hearty, daring conversation. Cast: Universal Pictures presents a film by Imagine Entertainment. Directed by Ridley Scott. Written by Steven Zaillian, from the article by Mark Jacobson. Rated R for violence/gore, sexuality/nudity, drug use, and language. Running time: 157 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: November 2, 2007. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
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