Nov 16 2007
Say hello to my little friend: Scarface part II
AMERICAN GANGSTER (18) ***
DIRECTED BY: RIDLEY SCOTT
STARRING: DENZEL WASHINGTON, RUSSELL CROWE, CHIWETEL EJIOFOR, JOSH BROLIN
Denzel Washington gives a typically electrifying performance as Frank Lucas
ON THE DVD of Brian De Palma’s ultra-trashy Cuban gangster epic Scarface is a documentary acknowledging its odd status as “a hip-hop classic”. Over the years, and apparently without irony, America’s biggest rap stars have embraced the rise and fall of drug monster Tony Montana as a “how to” guide to making it big and living it large on the streets of America. It’s one of the film’s stranger legacies, but this fictional icon’s reign as the “ultimate ghetto superhero” may be about to come to an end if the seductive portrait of real-life New York crime lord Frank Lucas served up in American Gangster anything to go by.
Already dubbed the “black Scarface” (there’s even a tie-in hip-hop “concept” album by Jay Z), Ridley Scott’s latest offering doesn’t dwell on the devastation wrought by this cold-blooded killer’s decision to flood Harlem with heroin in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead it focuses on his status as a ruthless entrepreneur who managed to build up an empire that rivalled the Mafia. A criminal he may have been, but he was also a businessman - and one who was able to get away with so much for so long because nobody believed a black man had the smarts to pull off all that he accomplished.
Played by Denzel Washington, Lucas, almost by default, can’t help but come across as a charismatic and endearing figure. The film’s first scene introduces us to Frank as he pours petrol on a man, sets him on fire and puts a bullet in his skull at point-blank range, but Scott wants us to like him so Washington - in a typically electrifying performance - turns on the charm, showing him to be a calm, controlled man who is fiercely loyal to his family, his mother, his wife and his business. The fact that his business is heroin, or that his success in sourcing it directly from Vietnam depends on a pathological level of cunning, is deliberately presented as being of little consequence. All he’s really doing, after all, is getting his hands on the cookie jar. He’s not interested in Martin Luther King’s dream, he’s interested the American Dream of unfettered wealth that he sees being embraced by everyone from white CEOs to Mafia big-wigs to dirty cops.
To ram this point home, Scott and his blue-chip screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List) tell Lucas’s story in tandem with the cop-turned-lawyer who eventually brought him down: Richie Roberts. Played by Russell Crowe with understated vulnerability, Richie seems to be the last honest cop in the New York/New Jersey area. Incorruptible to a fault, he makes his colleagues nervous but he’s no white-clad Serpico figure - his honesty on the job is offset by dishonesty in his personal life. When we meet him, his adulterous ways have ended his marriage and landed him in the middle of a messy custody battle for his son, something the film rather too obviously uses to provide Crowe with a meatier character arc to chew on.
The film is structured in such a way that the pair never meet until the end, which ensures the acting fireworks that come from pairing Washington up with Crowe go off with a bigger bang. Like Heat before it, it works because both actors manage to encapsulate that mutual respect-contempt dynamic that comes from spending so long locked in a game of cat-and-rat. Unlike Heat, their individual story strands don’t mesh together as effectively over the lengthy running time. The pace never exactly flags, but the action is too predictable for you to be able to immerse yourself wholly in the story.
The characters surrounding the leads also conform too easily to the stereotypes of the genre. From the moment Frank’s extended family turns up, it’s just a matter of guessing which of his undisciplined brothers is going to catalyse his downfall. It’s a shame too that no-one thought to furnish Frank’s wife, a Puerto Rican beauty queen played by Lymari Nadal, or his mother (played by veteran actress Ruby Dee) with any material that would allow us to understand how these women justified living off the profits of the drug trade, the moral blind spot required to do something like this instead being left disappointingly unexplored.
But that’s the big problem with the film: there’s just no life surrounding Washington and Crowe’s powerhouse performances. Sure, Scott has crafted a handsome picture, even toning down some of his trademark visual excesses to better reflect the rundown nature of New York in the early 1970s. But he has none of the brio of Scorsese, or the authority of Michael Mann. Despite the fresh racial perspective the story offers, the film never seems fresh; everything looks like it was taken from another film. The soundtrack, too, is little more than an iPod shuffle mix of famous soul classics from the period, tunes that have been used in the same way in countless other movies (Scott even deploys Bobby Womack’s title track from the 1972 blaxploitation classic Across 110th Street in a desperate effort to add energy to a montage scene).
For a film about someone whose success was dependant on going to the source and not diluting his product, it’s ironic that Scott hasn’t done the same. The title suggested a definitive American story; it should have been more than the black Scarface.
Say hello to my little friend: Scarface part II - Scotsman.com - Fri 16 Nov 2007 - Last updated: 16-Nov-07 00:55 GMT - http://living.scotsman.com/film.cfm?id=1809552007
