"American Gangster" (2007) - Movie Review

Ridley Scott’s “American Gangster” looks compressed even with the whopping two hours and forty minutes of finely detailed crafty crime/drama film. I would have liked some more climatic turmoil of emotions with Frank’s (Denzel Washington) personal life that is with his wife Eva (Lymari Nadal) as that of other side of the coin in the movie Detective Ritchie’s (Russell Crowe). Yet the film is as classy, closely arranged and quite meticulously constructed film for an epic art on gangster/cop movies.

Year around late sixties and Frank Lucas takes control of the Harlem by Manhattan from his late boss; he looks at an avenue for doing a business of his own. A business as a pyramid IBO says as his own, only difference is the Lucas’ material of distribution is heroin. The rise of the Lucas business is shown as any other gangster saga would do. The film’s balance lies in not giving the punching lines as one would expect to. With strong performers and stars as Washington and Crowe, they do not compromise on it. I guess that’s how a good actor plays their part. They stick to their channels and focus on the character they have been given.

Frank’s gesture of acute and sharp anger to rattle the members in a room encounters an unknown dimension of indifference when the same comes facing Ritchie across the table. He sees some one different from the people he has seen all his life. An honesty and lucidity rarely visible in his line of trade and mostly in cops at that point of time, where Frank Serpico took the stands in 1971. Hence Frank knows what he is dealing with. The two counter pointing characters come face to face in the final ten to twenty minutes but the screen split till that time makes them stand on the same scale. The editing works its charms when their lives are shown in parallels. Ritchie fighting for custody of his child and Frank dealing with his big family of brothers and cousins.

The film is not as detailed as “JFK” would go and not as violent or thematic as any gangster picture would lie on. Instead there is a combination of both in a nature of stealth and expose it aims upon for its content. I was not able to care for both the characters. Frank looks like pretty much content till the date he got into the hands of law while Ritchie is surviving on his acknowledgement of his honesty and well being. While he knows it cannot be expected much from his cop circle, he begins to expect the deserving nature in the ongoing case of custody. The punctuating significance of that is flashed in front of him when he hears something so terrible and so true from his wife Laurie (Carlo Gugino) to rethink who he really is. Self-righteous is a subconscious succumbing of admiring yourself too much to be lost in it, forever.

Frank is a mystical stature as Washington gives us. He is calm, calculative and viciously deadly when it comes to sitting on the wrong side of his table. He is a routine man. We know that even before the team of Ritchie narrates his daily time table. He is neatly dressed and lays low. He lies really low. He calls up his brother Huey (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who begins to mimic the flashy Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.) to say that loudness draws unnecessary attention, especially tricky for his business. He breaks his own rule not able to deny the flashy coat his wife gets him. He gets the attention. This is the one mistake he never wanted to commit.

There is something so peculiar and ironical about the lives of cops and gangster. In most of the gangster movies, the motivation for consistent progress in their field is to enrich their family. It also forms a weak point too. For cops portrayed over the screen, they have a bad marriage or relationship with their counterpart. Struggling hard to keep up with the “normal” family life they and their better halves seek. Still both of them fall short and hit hard on the floor. Their jobs defeat their purpose, I guess but without that they seem to have no purpose.

In the widespread movie of drama and crime, Scott chooses three to four acupuncture points to lift the material from the line of normalcy of goodness to greatness. To do that he needed the supporting characters as less stardom as possible and challenge the main characters with authoritative and convincing balance of expressions and confrontations. It comes through the role of Mama Lucas (Ruby Dee), Laurie and of course Washington and Crowe. But to assemble them into the order and place to create those moments, that took Ridley Scott to put it good. I was not able to care much for Frank or Ritchie, as they seem to want one another but I admired Ritchie for his honesty and Frank for accepting who he really is. “American Gangster” is not about two people learning about one another (which would have been great for the shortened three minute friendship between them to venture into a new film of itself) but two people learning about themselves that they pretty much ought to have expected as eventuality.