American Gangster
Directed by Ridley Scott
Frank Lucas, the title character of American Gangster, is a precise and controlled man. A Harlem kingpin in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Lucas (Denzel Washington) dresses formally in quiet suits and ties, adheres to a rigorous schedule, provides stable employment for his family, is a hero in his neighborhood for providing community services, and lives with his mother. Lucas has become the most successful heroin dealer in New York, and is entirely invisible to the authorities. They are wedded to the idea that organized crime is the exclusive province of Italians, and that any black crook must be in the Mafia’s employ.
Lucas prizes his low profile. He upbraids one of his brothers for tricking himself out like a pimp at a Harlem nightclub because a successful and powerful man does not need to stand out. One night, and only one night, Lucas fails to heed his own advice. He has just proposed to his girlfriend, Miss Puerto Rico, and she has presented him with a $50,000 chinchilla coat and hat to wear to the championship boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier.
Because of his showy gear and ringside seats, Lucas captures the attention of two police officers working in the area of drug enforcement. One is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a Newark cop whose private life is as sloppy as Lucas’s is disciplined but who won’t take an illicit cent. The other is Trupo (Josh Brolin), a demonically dirty New York City cop who follows Lucas’s limousine after his wedding, pulls it over and demands $10,000 a week in payoffs. Lucas arrives at his home, goes to his closet, and in front of his stricken wife, throws the chinchilla coat into the fire. His moment of flashy behavior has numbered his own days, and he knows it. But it won’t be Trupo who brings Lucas down.
Beautifully detailed and masterfully acted, American Gangster is a thrilling throwback to the grungy, grimy, morally ambiguous New York crime movies of the 1970s, when revelations of police corruption seemed to offer some explanation for the city’s rapid decline into a state of nature: The good guys are working for the bad guys. The visually meticulous Ridley Scott–whose credits include Alien, Blade Runner, and Gladiator–has long seemed the polar opposite of fast-working street-level directors like Sidney Lumet, whose Serpico and Prince of the City are the clear antecedents for American Gangster‘s portrait of cops gone bad and the good cops who suffer because of the corruption of their colleagues.
Scott, whose last two films were the execrable Kingdom of Heaven and the unwatchable A Good Year, has found new life at the age of 70 by looking to the looser and more down-to-earth work of Lumet and others. The movie that seems to have had the most influence on Scott and screenwriter Steven Zaillian is an uncompromisingly tough and ugly B-picture from 1972 called Across 110th Street, whose classic theme song by Bobby Womack makes a welcome appearance on American Gangster‘s soundtrack. In Across 110th Street, vicious cops led by Anthony Quinn, and soft Mafia scions led by Tony Franciosa, find themselves being challenged and superseded by a surging black underworld they cannot penetrate or control.
That is the same story Scott and Zaillian tell in American Gangster, which is a fictionalized portrait of an actual American gangster–a man named Frank Lucas who was, indeed, an importer and distributor of an exceptionally potent form of heroin. Lucas was decades younger at the time than Denzel Washington is now, and the real Lucas was exactly the kind of flamboyant player the Lucas of American Gangster so detests. But Washington, in collaboration with Scott and Zaillian, has come up with such an interesting character here that it hardly matters.
Washington’s steely strength is beautifully complemented by the soft-spoken doggedness of Russell Crowe, himself fresh from committing hair-trigger acts of violence in 3:10 to Yuma as brutal as the ones we see here from Frank Lucas. Crowe does another of his peerless vanishing acts into the part of a working-class Jewish boy from New Jersey who isn’t entirely sure why he is incorruptible.
American Gangster is, at times, muddled and overstuffed. There are so many speaking parts filled by so many actors wearing so much 1970s facial hair that it is nearly impossible to keep track of just who anybody is. It is never made clear what anti-drug agency Crowe’s Richie Roberts is working for–and in the movie’s concluding scenes, Roberts suddenly transforms from a police detective into a district attorney without any explanation ever being given of the change in his circumstances.
And it was unwise for the creative team here to give Washington a couple of moments that are little more than plagiarized versions of bits in the two Godfather movies–as when Lucas suddenly flares up and screams about someone “shooting at my wife” in a patent replica of Michael Corleone’s “in my home, in my bedroom, where my wife sleeps and my children come and play with their toys” rant in The Godfather: Part II. American Gangster is a very, very good movie, but it is in every way an inferior stepchild to the two greatest American gangster movies, which also happen to be the two greatest American movies and, what’s more, the two greatest movies from any nation, ever.
Still, American Gangster pulses with life. It doesn’t have a boring or tedious moment during its two-and-a-half hours, and when you’re not watching Denzel Washington, you’re watching Russell Crowe. You can’t, in all honesty, ask for much more from a movie.
John Podhoretz is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
