Review: American Gangster

HEROIN MATERIAL

The drug scene of 1970s New York forms the backdrop of an okayish crime drama.

FEB 29, 2008 – EARLY ON IN AMERICAN GANGSTER, DIRECTOR RIDLEY SCOTT attempts to distinguish his cop-versus-druglord story from the numerous, earlier cop-versus-druglord stories by making a stab at an overarching moral dimension. Walking past his Harlem neighbourhood, an old-time mobster – a black mobster, an anomaly in the New York run by the Italian mafia (which, come to think of it, could have become the aspect that set Scott’s film apart from its predecessors, except that he shows little interest in contrasting these crime subcultures) – bemoans the economic state of America of the late 1960s, where malls and discount stores are rapidly cutting out the middlemen and putting Americans out of work. Soon after, Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) becomes the reigning druglord of Harlem by taking America’s cue – he procures drugs directly from Southeast Asia, thus cutting out the middlemen – but the sly joke of the film is that he does not end up putting Americans out of work. If anything, he’s doing more than most people in helping put food on the tables of his underprivileged (and a few overprivileged) brothers.

As Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe, playing the narcotics cop who finally brings Lucas down) marvels – upon fully comprehending the near-corporate network that Lucas has established – “Stop bringing dope into this country and 100,000 people are going to be out of a job.” And having laid down this (not exactly new) premise of capitalism and crime being but two sides of the same coin, Scott pushes it as hard as he can. Lucas brands his heroin “Blue Magic” and he boasts that he sells a product that’s better than the competition’s, but at half the price. And when a rival (played by Cuba Gooding Jr. in a characteristically explosive cameo) buys 100%-pure merchandise from Lucas and dilutes it and peddles it on the street, an outraged Lucas accuses him of “trademark infringement.” There’s that pride of ownership in Lucas. He may be killing people with what he does – or at least nudging them towards making nothing of their lives – but he’s doing so with a product he’s proud of. Had this been a legitimate concern, there’s little doubt Lucas would have gone public with an IPO.

But subtexts, however rich and unique and fascinating, can only take you so far in terms of a propulsive narrative. For that, you need characters – people – and not the generic constructs in American Gangster, who drag it down from what it could have been (remarkable) to what it ends up being (merely respectable). But to be fair to Scott, I don’t see what he could have done, based as his film is on true-life incidents (and, therefore, true-life people). Besides, just as every love story has a boy and a girl and an obstacle to overcome, every crime drama has its own roster of conventions to be ticked off – like the fact that Lucas and Roberts, here, are (what else?) polar opposites, and not just because they reside on the extremes of the moral continuum. Lucas is the kind of cold-blooded killer who sets a man on fire and makes sure the job is finished by pumping him full of lead, while Roberts stumbles upon nearly one million in drug money and conscientiously turns it in. Lucas lords over a loving extended family, while Roberts isn’t just divorced but faced with the prospect of his ex-wife and child relocating to Las Vegas. Lucas is a self-made man, while Roberts, in order to get ahead, has to jump through Establishment hoops (like giving the bar exam). And so on and on – and yet, they may not be all that different. If Lucas is dishonest in all the readily apparent ways, Roberts – for all his professional uprightness – has cheated on his family by reneging on his unspoken contract to always be there for them.

The problem, then, is the predictability of these characters – reminding you so much of the protagonist-antagonist dynamic from Heat – along with the inevitability of the screenplay, which unfurls like one long connect-the-dots exercise: the honest cop of Serpico stumbles upon the drug money of The French Connection while on the tail of an ethnic mob family out of The Godfather (right down to a replay of the Michael-Fredo fraternal liplock)… With this director and these charismatic stars, you expected more than just proficient professionalism – but then again, there are worse reasons to put yourself through a movie, and at least through his running time, Scott keeps you gripped. A major chunk of his film is a fairly absorbing, how-things-worked portrait of the period, and just as you’re beginning to zone out under the weight of all that nitty-gritty – as if taking a cue from the Corleone cry: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” – the film pulls you back in with a sharply entertaining final stretch. That’s probably because it’s only in the end that Washington and Crowe burst through the lead casing of their generic characters and become a vital screen presence, largely – I think – because of the opportunity of playing off one another. Maybe our Bollywood multistarrers are on to something when they throw together all their big names – oftentimes in the same scene – before setting the stove to boil.

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Posted in: Cinema: English