newcritics

New York City in the early 1970s was a grim and pitiless place–filthy on its surface, venal and corrupt at its core. Riven by poverty and racial strife, it was a town that pushed its inhabitants to the wall–either you were a hustler or a mark, a hipster in the know or a rube so square you weren’t even aware that everyone else had their hands in your pockets. It was a town that was bankrupt both in its pocketbook and in its soul, depicted in movies–even those written by New Yorkers who loved the place, like Neil Simon’s The Out of Towners–as a place that ate up and spat out victims hapless enough to stumble too close to its jaws.

American Gangster–an epic-length movie based on the real life rise and fall of Harlem heroin king Frank Lucas– is designed as a star vehicle for two Academy Award winners (Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe), but it is early 1970s New York that steals the show.

Its not unusual for the scenery and the setting to overwhelm the action in a Ridley Scott film. In fact its almost a trademark for the director, an UK artschool grad trained as a designer in the early 1960s. Critics and fans can debate the dramatic virtues of movies like Alien, Blade Runner, or Gladiator, but in each case the visual design dazzled.

“Dazzling” is the wrong adjective for American Gangster’s New York, which has been blanched of color and flattened in terms of focal depth by cinematographer Harris Savides. Unforgiving, even undead, would sum it up better. But for those who remember New York in the early 1970s it will be sickeningly familiar.

In a great interview with ComingSoon.Net, Scott remembered his early years shooting commercials in New York:

I used to walk the streets of New York then because I have a very good eye and I had to invest in a really great camera with a fifty-millimeter lens and I spent days and days in Harlem, inside the Bowery and a lot of stuff on Coney Island, and so I got the smell of New York at that point. Then I started doing commercials very successfully and would come into New York at least once a month right through the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s so I knew New York really well. Who dressed what, how they dressed. That’s why you get that very reined-in view, because if people do a film about the ’60s and ’70s they think it’s all like the Beatles. It’s not like that. There wasn’t that kind of money on the streets. So there were only the high-end elitists groups who might have been gangsters or might have been moneyed people, who would be able to dress like that. People would have the same suit for twenty years. It was much shabbier, so I reined it back and made it shabbier. I think that’s what feels so real about it. Harlem was really, really shabby, beautiful brownstones falling apart.

Certainly he captured that spirit spectacularly here, with a daunting, record-setting 180 location shoots throughout the five boroughs, tightly packing each frame with 1970s style NYC decrepitude.

The movie tells parallel tales. The first is Lucas’ (Denzel)–a former driver and bodyguard for a one time crime lord, who rose to the top of the organized crime food chain by cornering the Harlem heroin market, an acheivement attained by boldly disintermediating thetrade: cutting deals directly with producers in Vietnam, smuggling pure H into the states in US military aircraft thanks to extravagant pay offs of US military personnel.

The second story is that of Richie Roberts (Crowe)–a sad sack divorcee and loser, and, what seems like the only honest cop in New York–who gets a second chance in life as part of a new Federal drug task force operating out of New Jersey.

Scott obviously has enormous ambitions for the film which deliberately addresses big social themes—racial profiling (no one but Roberts believes that a black man could possibly have leapfrogged the Italian mob in the drug trade), official corruption (Roberts’ police career is destroyed because he turns in, instead of stealing, a million dollars in unmarked bills he confiscates from a bookie), and market capitalism at its most ruthless.

The deliberateness of Scott’s thematic ambitions lives right on the surface of the film, leaving its handling of characters and their actions with a bit of a pro forma feel. Despite its ambition and craft, American Gangster is not The Godfather or even Brian De Palma’s Scarface. The movie also falls back on cheesey formal techniques typical of period films with social messages–TVs abound in the background of the action injecting background in the form of Oval Office speeches by Nixon and news reports of the Vietnam War and drug use among soldiers.

Your reaction to the self-conscious evocation of period cinema–most especially Serpico, The French Connection, Superfly, Across 110th Street and, of course, The Godfather (”they’re animals anyway, let them loose their souls”)–will depend on whether or not you are charmed by such nostalgia. I was, but like New York in the 1970s, those movies that helped form my personal aesthetic.

In the end American Gangster, which has received mixed reviews, plays more like a documdrama than a great movie, little plumbing the depths and development of its characters but lovingling caressing its social themes. It’s good. Rarely does a film of nearly three hours zoom by so liquidly. And although it seems somehow less than, or at least no greater than the sum of its parts, American Gangster is worth the price of admission, particularly if, like me, you have a soft spot in your heart for New York’s darkest age when heroin was king and lady luck was queen.