After i saw it on Saturday, i got to thinking about "American Gangster" and racial representation in movies.
While I thoroughly enjoy gangster films and liked seeing Denzel on screen, I was left a bit cold by the movie in a way i couldn't put my finger on.
At first, I thought it was the color palette of the film. Everything was desaturated, making it hard to watch, but that reason rang false. I have seen plenty of other films with that bottom of a murky lake cinematographic scheme.
Then I thought it was the characters - I didn't care about Frank Lucas (gangster) or Richie Roberts (cop)but that again was hollow. I thought the cool business school model that Denzel portrayed was initially, an extremely fresh big screen take on the black hood stereotype - (a forebearer of The Wire's Stringer Bell?)
and that Russell's honest cop was enough fodder for his own cop corruption in the 1970's movie (knock off Serpico).
So,in hindsight,the characters were plenty interesting. I realized it was a matter of there not being enough room in the movie for the two main characters.
In every other gangster movie i have ever seen (with the exception of "Donnie Brasco" where the main character is an undercover FBI agent posing as a gangster), law enforcement plays little to no role in the main story of the criminal. See "Casino", "Scarface", "Carlito's Way", "GoodFellas", "The
Godfather", etc. for evidence.
To be sure, law enforcement hovers around the edges of the gangster narrative as a threat/consequence but they are rarely given more than a few minutes in the third act, in which their presence hammers home how outside of the loop of society the villain protagonists are.
AG screen time - the cops are as constant in the close ups and narrative weave as the criminals they are sworn to catch.
You wouldn't have a literal personification of Death (with scythe and hood)getting half the closeups in a movie about terminal cancer/war etc. because the presence of such an entity is a given.
The criminal protagonist is in a Horatio Alger mode in all the aforementioned pictures; a ruthless self made man who started from the gutter and rose through the ranks via naked ambition, calculation and violence.
That is the meat of the story in all gangster pictures that have "worked". These are the steps that it follows;
1) backstory - concerning the humble beginnings of the protagonist, the forces against him, his subsequent bucking of trends
2) introduction to the big city and a mentor from the underworld
3) taking on the mantle of the mentor (either through natural causes or calculated demise of teacher)
4) the seemingly insurmountable troubles besetting the protagonist
5) the inventive ways in which he goes about solving his problem
6) a montage of undreamed of success follows
7) the position on top of the mountain is great but lonely...the protagonist needs someone to share it with
This is the end of the rise of the protagonist - there is usually the introduction of a jealous rival, a beautiful female or hubristic greed on the part of the main character at this point
the decline happens here.
8) As human emotion enters the picture, the guard drops on the smooth running facade that the protagonist had maintained throughout his rise - weakness is shown to be a possibility
9) The empire grows too large to manage, so successful that it flaunts itself and cannot imagine failure, believes itself truly above the law - this is when the mistakes happen because the employees are getting sloppy largely because the boss is busy in love.
10) The authorities, unseen until now, are aware of the giant beneath their noses by the sloppiness of the employees and begin to marshal their forces.
11) the love goes south, the jealous rival starts flexing his muscle or the greed outreaches the protagonist - any which way, the fall is imminent and only then is law enforcement introduced as the clean up squad.
12) the end.....that is the classic gangster film.
The classic cop film follows a similar rubric.
1) The protagonist is a hard scrabble salt of the earth fellow with strong values.
2) He takes a job that can put those values to work in a straigtforward way
3)Because of ambition, intelligence and something in his past, he is thrust into the big city
4)He has to fend for himself. He discovers he is not like other cops.
5) They embody none of the values he thought they would. They mock him in fact.
6) He is smart and will not bend to peer pressure.
7) He makes enemies by being forthright.
8) He is ostracized and his life is threatened by these co workers.
9) He seeks higher education.
10) His relationships fracture because of dedication to his craft. His work is his life.
11) He sets his sights on the unattainable, he achieves it in the course of the movie and is vindicated when the status quo is overturned and he is recognized for his values which were right all along.
My problem with the feel of the film is that it is trying to be Serpico and Scarface at the same time.
Russell Crowe should have been in his remake of Serpico.
Denzel Washington should have remained in his remake of Scarface.
Two different movies, the twain should have never met.
I felt like the filmmaker didn't trust the audience enough to see the rise of a black druglord even if he was portrayed by Denzel without the counterpoint of a dogged white detective story,
which muddled the force of both blows.
It is as if the Frank Lucas story on it's own wasn't interesting enought to hold our attention and needed to be propped up with the divorce preceedings and ethical dilemmas of Det. Richie
Roberts.
I just read the source material for the movie which was a New York magazine article in which a journalist rode around with the real Frank Lucas and listened to him recount his life.
Lucas started off seeing his cousin's head get blown off by the KKK for eyeballing a white girl in North Carolina, he ran away from home, got stuck in a chain gang, left the chain gang and became a truck driver, slept with the bosses daughter, got caught, knocked the boss out and burned the bosses building to the ground after robbing him, took a train to NYC and started robbing hustlers in Harlem, got taken under Bumpy Johnson's wing as his driver, being a driver also meant he was a bodyguard,Bumpy Johnson dies, Harlem is up for grabs, Lucas decides to excise the middleman after holing up in a hotel room in Puerto Rico for weeks (sort of a vision quest), Goes to Thailand and the Golden Triangle, first black men most of the opium producers have ever seen, gets heroin for pennies on the dollar, epic firefight on the way back to Bangkok, loses half his product, flies a fellow country boy out to make false bottoms for coffins, ships heroin back in a Henry Kissinger convoy, floods the streets, starts his own familial gang called the Country Boys, owns office buildings in Detroit, swathes of Puerto Rico and numerous businesses and holdings in New York, bankrolls an unreleased blaxploitation film that he has a role in and eventually is tripped up by trying to attain a jet plane - his colleagues have gotten out while the getting is good but he is greedy/overextended and is caught. In the end, he rats out his colleagues and half the crooked cops in the city, he does jail time, threatens to kill his lawyer in prison, goes broke, gets released early for cooperation and finally relates all this to a reporter from a glossy monthly magazine at age 70.
This is the article as i read it and I think that the film would have been much better if it kept this format. The actual Frank Lucas talking to a reporter and having flashbacks to his glory days where he would be portrayed by Denzel Washington.
You have a rise and a fall there, adversity and luxury - and that's what the screenwriting books tell me movies should be about...
tell me what you think
