AMERICAN GANGSTER (R) ****

 

Directed by Ridley Scott. 160 minutes.

Starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Cuba Gooding Jr., Josh Brolin, Carla Gugino, Armand Assante, Ruby Dee, John Hawkes, RZA, Norman Reedus, Clarence Williams III, Common and T.I. Released by Universal Pictures.

 

Ridley Scott’s epic American Gangster opens on a cold, snowy New York day in 1968 as underling Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III) enter a hardware store, Bumpy lecturing his driver and enforcer on the problems of then modern day America. “The middle man has been cut out,” he says. “Where there once was a grocery store, there now is a supermarket and where there once was a candy store, there’s now a McDonald’s.” Lucas will pick and choose from his boss’ philosophy to create his own business model – one which would be admirable and awe inspiring if it did not prey upon the vulnerable and destroy an untold number of lives. Lucas is as charismatic as any other recent anti-hero and, in American Gangster, Scott has crafted a modern gangster classic that ranks up there with the best crime films of the past few years, a list that would include The Departed, Eastern Promises and A History of Violence.

 

But Lucas is only half of the film’s equation – the other half belongs to Richie Roberts, a professionally honest man who lives a semi-decadent personal life and has gained the scorn of the Newark police department by turning in $900,000 from a bust, rather than keeping some of it for the boys. Roberts will eventually lead the narcotics and undercover squad that takes down Lucas’ empire – this is no secret, so don’t accuse me of giving away the film – but when we first see him, he is struggling to give money to his ex-wife to support their child and is in the process of taking the state’s bar exam. Because of his honesty, Roberts is hand-picked to tackle the growing drug problem in the Jersey-New York area, which causes him to bump heads with junkies, criminals and, even worse, other cops, including a particularly nasty one named Trupo, played with menace by Josh Brolin.

 

The film follows pretty familiar terrain for a gangster picture, but still has its own personality and never remains any less than riveting. The supporting cast is phenomenal – Brolin; Cuba Gooding Jr. as infamous Harlem drug lord Nicky Barnes; John Hawkes, of Me and You and Everyone We Know, as Roberts’ partner; Ruby Dee as Frank’s mother; Armand Assante, giving it his best in a few years as New York mob figurehead Dominic Cattano; and Chiwetel Ejiofor, an actor who I continue to like more and more, as Frank’s most trusted brother, Huey. Washington is excellent as Lucas, bringing the right mixture of mythical figure, making us like him despite the horrible things he does, and frightening killer, shooting a man in plain daylight and setting another on fire. Crowe is a show stealer in a number of his scenes, and his character provides an interesting juxtaposition to Washington’s Frank. While Lucas is a violent criminal in his profession who puts family first, Roberts is the morally professional cop with a seriously screwed up personal life. I love the scene where a child services representative shows up at the wrong time to his house.

 

The film plays like – it’s a bad pun, sue me – gangbusters and really never lets up. But the film is not all exposition and, in fact, has a lot to say about race, capitalism and corporate America. Most of these themes are subtly placed and do not beat you over the head. The film is bookmarked by them, actually. The opening sequence between Bumpy and Lucas in a hardware store, which Bumpy accuses of lacking in customer service and a further example of excluding the middle man, sets the tone for the film. An excellent number of sequences between Roberts and Lucas toward the end of the film conclude it on a similar note.

 

Scott is an endlessly talented director and here he flourishes with the details. For the record, 1970s New York is recreated so well that it looks as if a documentary crew were plopped down in Harlem and just told to shoot. The details of Lucas’ operation are so finely constructed that I was not surprised to read that Lucas himself was on the set of the film for much of its shoot. Like most of the best gangster films, American Gangster is about more than what it appears to be about on the surface. It is a chronicle of that always revered self made American man, the idea of capitalism and the free market turned on its head, the cultural traits that we as a nation failed to inherit and the new ones we created to replace them. Toward the film’s end, we find out exactly how Frank ships heroin into the United States without getting caught. Throughout the movie, images of the Vietnam War flicker in the background. The two are intrinsically linked. Lucas, like other some corporations, including the U.S. itself, becomes a mass marketer of death. This is riveting film and one that is, yes, uniquely American.