Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Gangster
vs. Geek
(American Gangster, 11/12/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
On
a certain level, the qualification American gangster sounds about
as necessary as "French chef" or "English bobby."
In fact, the vaguely antique word "gangster" has become nothing
more than an honorific these days—anything can be "gangster"
(or "gangsta") if it's radical, uncompromising, cool. The
crimes traditionally associated with gangsters, such as intimidation,
protection rackets, drug trafficking, contract killing, etc., have been
completely detached from the term. Nobody will be making a movie called
"American Racketeer" anytime soon.
So the attitude of Ridley Scott's
new gangsta flick toward its antihero, real-life Harlem drug kingpin
Frank Lucas, is right there in the title. With Denzel Washington in
the lead, it's also in the casting, for Washington has that rare quality
of being appealing no matter what character he plays. Throw in Russell
Crowe as his tireless cop nemesis, and the movie is either 1) a can't-miss
hit, or 2) a victim of the impossibly high expectations it generates
for itself.
Fortunately, American Gangster
is more along the lines of #1. Slick, authentic-seeming, and involving
as hell, it represents a welcome return to form for director Scott (Alien
, Blade Runner, Gladiator) , whose two most recent efforts (2006's
A Good Year and 2005's Kingdom of Heaven) came as distinct
disappointments. Gangster has been compared with the best of
Martin Scorsese's mafia opuses, such as Goodfellas and Casino,
but it's really more in the tradition of Sidney Lumet's '70's-era law-and-order
flicks (e.g. Prince of the City, Serpico). This is perhaps the
biggest surprise of all, because Scott is seen as the epitome of visual
stylists, while Lumet is thematically consistent but not exactly known
as a cinematic visionary. With the right inspiration, it seems that
Scott is more than able to put away the pyrotechnics and tell an engrossing
story.
Washington's easy-in-his-skin charisma
is like success itself: it covers a multitude of sins. Steve Zaillian's
script wants to construe Frank Lucas as some kind of racial pioneer,
the first black gangster to best the Mafia at its own game. The real
Lucas, however, was perhaps as detestible a figure in organized crime
as ever lived. By getting his heroin straight from southeast Asia during
the height of the Vietnam War, he was able to make obscene amounts of
money by selling unadulterated heroin at rock bottom prices. (One hesitates
to think of the number of poor suckers who overdosed on his product.)
Adding insult to injury, Lucas used connections in the US military to
smuggle his smack home in the caskets of dead GIs, essentially turning
the country's honored dead into mules.
With anybody else playing the lead
the theme of pusher-as-pioneer would be obnoxious. Washington makes
it work through old-fashioned star power, bringing with him an aura
of integrity and charm that can't all be credited to Zaillian's script.
It's not an iconic performance, to be sure—it has nowhere near
the volcanic power of Al Pacino's Scarface. But when Lucas gets
up from his restaurant table, shoots a rival in the head on a Harlem
street, then calmly returns to his lunch, it must be admitted that he
is truly "gangsta".
As hero detective Richie Roberts,
Russell Crowe has to work harder for his props. The pudgy, socially
inept Roberts was a misfit—clearly too intelligent for his job,
with a weakness for doing virtuous things that amounted to a vice. Crowe
disappears into the role as far as his outsized presence allows. My
wife, who has previously admired Crowe both as a leather-clad gladiator
and as a crazy mathematician, thought he looked "unappealing"
here. For a star aiming for accomplishment instead of just celebrity,
that's high praise indeed.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog