Saturday,
November 03,
"American Gangster" vs "Sopranos" -- Style vs
Slob
The
ANNOTICO Report
I
say this half in jest. Why do the Blacks in "American Gangster" get a
handsome, trim, dapper, well spoken gangster with style portrayed by Denzel
Washington, and in the "Sopranos" we get balding, pot bellied slob,
stuffing food in his face, monosylabic grunting,
and neanderthal James Gondolfi?
American
Gangster: Seductive Crime
Time
Magazine
By
Richard Schickel
Friday,
Nov. 02, 2007
The ruling clichi in writing about crime bosses - "the
gangster as tragic hero" - was coined in 1948 by Robert Warshow, an extremely intelligent cultural critic,...Warshow held that the classic movie mobsters (Little
Caesar, The Public Enemy) were, in their essence, classic Americans forced
by their status as the sons of immigrants to seek success and status outside
the law, even though their style and motives were not so very different from
the robber barons who found their riches in more respectable industries.
The difference
between the gangsters and, say, John D. Rockefeller, was that their methods of eliminating the competition was, shall we say,
somewhat more strenuous, and that ultimately they paid a deadly price for their
depredations.
It has been 59
years since Warshow wrote, and ...that studies of the
modern criminal have not advanced very much in that time. As evidence we might
consider Ridley Scott's American Gangster, which
is based on the true story of a drug lord named Frank Lucas, who in the
1970s cornered the
In
Thus, perhaps
ironically, American Gangster, Steve
represents an improvement on gangster myth. In truth, crime kingpins tend to
lead long lives, interrupted by a little jail time (Frank's life sentence was
commuted to 15 years). It is also improved by the fact that Crowe's bumptious
character comes to enjoy the man's company, even becoming his attorney when he
leaves law enforcement. It's the old Dostoyevskian
bit about cop and crook being brothers under the skin. In the film, the only
truly loathsome villain is a crooked cop, Detective Trupo,
played with wonderful brutality by Josh Brolin, who
encourages us to think that the only real crime is to interrupt the smooth
flow of criminal entrepreneurship.
Warshow observed that the classic
gangster dramas punished their protagonists not so much for their unlawful
activities, but because they dared to succeed. He implied that we may
seemingly worship success in this country, but that we also deplore and envy it -
since most of us never attain it. But that was then, and this is now. Our love
affair with wealth and fame is now untrammeled by doubts. It is our big good
thing, and eventually Crowe's character, like the rest of us, must surrender to
its cheerful demands. That makes American Gangster, which is rather
leisurely paced but richly detailed in the way it pursues the minutiae of
conspicuous criminality as well as consumption, a more disturbing movie than
its makers may have intended. I don't think it attains the Godfather level - it lacks dark passion and grand-scale
irony - but it is an intelligent, well-made and seductive movie.
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