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Robert De Niro and James Woods are gangsters in Sergio Leone's sprawling indulgent masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America |
Director: Sergio Leone
Cast: Robert De Niro (Noodles), James Woods (Max), Elizabeth
McGovern (Deborah), Joe Pesci (Frankie), Burt Young (Joe), Tuesday Weld
(Carol), Treat Williams (Jimmy O’Donnell), Danny Aiello (Police Chief Aiello),
Richard Bright (Chicken Joe), James Hayden (Patsy), William Forsythe (Cockeye),
Darlanne Fluegel (Eve), Scott Tiler (Young Noodles), Rusty Jacobs (Young Max),
Jennifer Connelly (Young Deborah)
It had been thirteen years since Leone had made a film.
During this time he turned down The
Godfather in favour of his own dream of filming Harry Grey’s novel The Hoods. The final film, Once Upon a Time in America, seems destined
to live in the shadow of The Godfather,
from its settings and many of its themes through to its graphic design and
cast. It’s a challenging, over-indulgent, sometimes difficult film that,
never-the-less has its own sense of hypnotic power to it.
Told in a partly non-linear style, it opens with Noodles
(Robert De Niro) a Jewish gangster on the run from thugs in 1930s New York days
after the fall of prohibition. With his friends and his girl dead and his money
stolen, Noodles flees the city – returning only in 1968 after a mysterious
summons suggests his past is not as buried as he thought. Within this, the film
weaves an intricate series of flashbacks that fill in the story of Noodles and
his friend Max (James Woods) turning their teenage gang of hoodlums into an
effective crew, muscling in on the money that can be made from prohibition.
Carrying the story from 1918 all the way back to 1968, we discover why Noodles
was on the run, what the money was, where it’s gone and who or what summoned
him back to life.
Leone originally envisioned the film as a two-part epic: two
films of three hours length. His original cut was almost ten hours long, cut
down to six and then finally to just over four. This cut was released to
critical acclaim at Cannes – but was still too long for the producers,
concerned about making their money in America. To the fury of the cast (James
Woods continues to be vocal about the butchering of the film), and the
heartbreak of Leone, the film was cut again to just over 2 hours before its
release in the States – a move that rendered it nearly incomprehensible and led
to reviews that labelled it one of the worst of the year. Only with the much
late release of the European cut (and work continues to restore something
closer to Leone’s six hour cut) did the film find acclaim.
But you can see why the producers worried. Leone was never a
director who felt the need to get where he was going quickly. As his films
became ever more dominated by his love for artful compositions, meditative
longeurs and drawing the tension out for as long as possible, so their running
times ballooned. Leone matched this with a yearning to tell a story that was to
be nothing less than to be about “America” – or at least, give a symbolic
weight and depth to the Americana he loved. The film is overflowing with the
feel of Old Hollywood gangster films and classic imagery of the immigrant
experience in Manhattan. It’s like a brilliant coffee-table album bought to
life and covered with blood.
So Once Upon a Time in
America is slow, lethargic even, film that takes its time to build up a picture
of an immigrant community drawn together through bonds of culture and shared
past that are nearly impossible to express – but fractured by the greed and
capitalism of the American Dream, temptation to make an even bigger killing
leading to old loyalties being sacrificed. Leone juggles some big ideas here,
and if the film never quite comes to grips with any of them as it charts the
fractured relationship of Max and Noodles, from brothers-in-arms to Max’s ambition,
pride and own private frustrations leading to betrayal it’s never less than strangely
engrossing.
In many ways this is a hugely indulgent film, but it is also
remarkable for how restrained and elegiac it is. The razzamatazz of some of
Leone’s Westerns are mixing entirely in a film here that takes a golden age
romantic view of the past – and its lost opportunities and loyalties – and is
particularly fascinated with the coming-of-age of young men. The film is
nothing less than an old man making a ruminative journey through the past (both
Leone and Noodles in his memories), looking back at a life time of bad choices
and lost chances. It all makes for one of cinema’s greatest mood pieces ever,
with faultless period reconstruction, but also a piece that for all its focus
on personal lives at cornerstones of histories, makes its characters seem
strangely impersonal.
Part of that lies in Leone’s clear love for the film’s long
second act (nearly a third of its runtime), which charts the young Jewish
hoodlums teenage lives in 1918 New York – their meeting, the first scores,
their rivalries and clashes with other gangs, their loss of virginity. For all
its overextended backstory, the section of the film hums with love and an
elegiac romance. It’s the richest part of the film. There is a beauty in beats
of the watching the boys encounter everything from first crime to first love –
and easy as it is to mock a good 3-4 minutes watching one of them eat a cake
that was intended as an offer in exchange for a first sexual experience with
the local floozy, moments like that have an innocence and a beauty to them that
Leone really captures.
It’s a shame that it’s the back-end of the film that suffers
– and its plot and narrative drive. It feels like Leone fought to keep the
beauty of this early section and sacrificed drive and narrative later in the
film. The fracturing of the relationship between Max and Noodles is less clear,
and their adult characters never quite come into focus. Perhaps there isn’t
quite room for actors in the long sequences of wordless silence and atmosphere,
punctuated by bursts of shocking violence, in Leone’s world. Certainly the cut
doesn’t help, with most of the supporting cast (Joe Pesci, Treat Williams, Burt
Young, Danny Aiello) reduced to little more than one scene each, their storylines
– particularly a crucial Teamsters plot – barely making any sense.
Max’s growing distance from Noodles is perhaps rooted in
everything from his ambition being frustrated by Noodles small-time viewpoints,
perhaps even in suggestions of a frustrated homosexual love for the defiantly
straight Noodles. James Woods does very well to piece to together a suggestion
of deep psychological unease and confusion in a character who remains
unknowable, a man to whom loyalty is everything until it isn’t.
As Noodles Robert De Niro anchors the film with one of his
quietest, most reflective performances. Noodles is a deeply flawed, low-key,
humble character who carries in him a capacity for self-destructive and vicious
violence. Leone’s film suggests Noodles is perhaps troubled by feelings and
longings he can’t begin to understand or appreciate. He is a romantic
character, deeply infatuated with both Max and his childhood sweetheart
Deborah, but unable to express or communicate his feelings until it is far too
late, a man traumatised by emotional connection.
Not that this excuses Noodles for his actions, particularly
towards women. If there is one troubling aspect of the film it is its attitude
towards women. There are two prominent women in the film, both of whom are
raped. One of them, Carol, is a shrewish temptress, who deliberately provokes
Noodles to rape her and is then shown enjoying it. The second rape, this time
of Deborah, comes from Noodles after a romantic date where he has finally done
everything right. While Leone shoots the scene with an almost unwatchable
grimness – Elizabeth McGovern’s screams and distress make for very hard viewing
– the film still asks us to feel not only for her pain, but also (perhaps more
so) Noodles regret. Further when they encounter each other late in life,
Deborah matches him in sadness at chances lost – an unlikely reaction you feel
for someone who has suffered as traumatic experience as she has.
But then to Leone perhaps this is part of the corruption of
America – or rather the vileness of gangsters. The gangsters are a grotesque
bunch in this film, killing without compunction, torturing, stealing, using
violence as second nature. Loyalty is barely skin deep and arrogance abounds.
There is no romantic sense of family behind it all – perhaps the thing Leone
rejected most from The Godfather –
just a series of people on the make and on the take.
But for all its faults and over extended length the film is
increasingly hypnotic and engrossing, Leone’s understanding of mood being near
faultless. While the ideas are perhaps not quite pulled into sharp focus in the
film – and leave the audience having to do a lot of supposition – it still
works over time. And the film has so many astonishing merits – from its
awe-inspiring shooting and production to the sublime score from Ennio Morricone
that gives the film even more of a poetic depth – it more than merits its
existence.
And of course there is the cheeky sense Leone throws in that
some – or indeed all – of what we are seeing may not even have happened. The
film opens and closes with Noodles in an opium den, stoned out of his mind, in
the 1930s. In the opening he lies there, haunted by the sound of a ringing
phone (the memory of the phone call he made betraying Max), and we see him
arrive at the film’s end taking his first puff and lying back with a grin. Is
the film’s off-kilter 1968 even real? Or just an opium den dream? Is the past –
and the film’s disjointed narrative flying back and forth – just a stoned man
lost in his own fantasies? Who knows? What we do know is that Leone’s indulgent
epic is a flawed but genuine masterpiece – and the opium fantasy angle may just
be the perfect cover for the fact more than half the film is on the cutting
room floor of history.
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