Past Programs
Drug Use and Abuse - 2008
American Gangster
10/01/2008
American Gangster is a film which aches to be the great American metaphor. Since the gangster film took over from the Western as the movies' foundation myth, some very big boys indeed have found it a convenient fable.
Coppola with Godfather, Scorsese with Goodfellas, Da Palma and Pacino with Scarface, Michael Mann with Heat, the Coen Brothers with Miller's Crossing.
And the greatest of them all: Sergio Leone with Once Upon a Time in America. All of these films take place in a mythical landscape. We could call it Yellowstone, or Monument Valley, but let's just call it testosterone gulch.
Ridley Scott has taken Steve Zaillian's screenplay about the rise and rise and ultimate fall of Frank Lucas—who rose in the 70s to become Harlem's heroin drug lord, beating the Italo-American mafia at their own game—and cast it as one great big metaphor for badass American capitalism.
And he has cast Mr Gravitas himself, Denzel Washington, as Frank Lucas, the farm boy from Carolina who became a sober-suited, button-down businessman, a multimillionaire with multiple offshore bank accounts, a man given to lecturing his associates on such things as branding and customer loyalty. The brand was Blue Magic, 95 per cent pure heroin which the businessman imported directly from its source in Thailand...via Vietnam.
Zaillian and Scott also try to make it a parable about racism. Neither the US attorney's office, nor the Italo-American good old boys at first take Lucas seriously. Because he's black. They think he must be working for someone else.
The one who brings him down is a rumpled, obsessive cop called Richie Roberts, a man with a train wreck of a personal life, and habits which really annoy his colleagues...the biggest being his refusal to take kickbacks. It all comes to a head when Richie turns in a million dollars in unmarked bills he finds busting a gambling racketeer. Nobody much around the station will talk to him, so he quits to study law until he's hauled in to head up a special anti-drugs detail.
Russell Crowe, grievously miscast as a romantic hero by his good friend Ridley Scott in A Good Year—and nobody, not even Ridley should photograph the flying chock wedge from the rear because it does nothing for those little sloping shoulders—Russell Crowe here does fine work.
Much better work than Washington, in fact, whose special brand of moral gravitas sits uncomfortably in the role. It does not ignite the righteousness Washington can deliver.
To ram home a point, Scott and Zaillin set Bumpy Johnson's homily about the old loyalty code which once served the made men inside the sterility of a new style franchise store. Whatever happened to good old fashioned service? Where is the place for the corner shop, for values of service and loyalty? For the honest entrepreneur? Lucas sets out to become his own boss—a fact, the film will repeatedly advise us, which makes him very difficult to catch. Who'd a thunk it? A black entrepreneur?
This is not the first parable filmed in Testosterone Gulch which defers the confrontation between hero and anti-hero until damn near the end. Michael Mann did that with de Niro and Pacino in Heat.
But having a narrative running on two parallel tracks that finally curve to intersect only near the end makes for a film which has an intrinsic problem mustering dramatic tension. Zaillin and Scott try to compensate in various ways: there are the shots settling the context of the period, Nixon lying on the television while bombing Vietnam, the phoney peace talks, the bodies coming home. It all falls short of a convincing metaphor. Nor do the sideways forays into the men's family lives help much. Time and again we are set up with the introduction of a new character—Lucas's wooing of a beauty queen, Miss Puerto Rica, is an example—only to have this contribute little to the story. In the end, craft skills, dazzling as Scott's are, don't help. It has a very nifty ending but at two hours thirty-seven minutes American Gangster is grossly inflated and, as a great American metaphor, it fizzles. It would have been much better if they'd just made a movie.
