Based on the New York Magazine article “The Return of Superfly” by Marc Jacobson, American Gangster (Ridley Scott, 2007) has the same essential tonality that has made films like Heat and Goodfellas a vital part of the American film Lexicon over the last two decades. The film clocks in at just under 3 hours, taking the necessary time to develop a set of complex characters, setting, and motivations. It’s an action film about people, wherein the action is used minimally, and with good cause. Kirk Honeycutt of Reuters, hits the nail right on the head, “Director Ridley Scott takes on these familiar subjects, themes and characters with a keen eye for the social fabric, false assumptions, suffocating corruption and vivid personalities that make such a story worth retelling.” There are times, especially in the first hour and a half where the audience is kind of being led by the hand through a labyrinth, that is to say there are slow points wherein you don’t really know what the point of what you’re watching is. Another editor at the table might have cut some extra fat and tightened things up a bit.
Speaking of editing, I would think that in a make up department of 25 and a costume department of 25, on top of the five editors, SOMEONE would notice the high visibility of RZA’s Wu-Tang tattoo. I could read it. You’re telling me no one caught that going into shooting? No one thought, wow, we could really re-shoot two seens of RZA nodding to ensure continuity? Now, yes, maybe I’m just being a snob, but it’s a rookie detail. I mean, they managed to cover up all of Angelina Jolie’s tattoos in Tombraider, and I don’t even know that director’s name. Come on Ridley Scott, you’ve been nominated for 3 Oscars and you’re on the AFI top 100 list. You’re going to leave yourself open to criticism by some hack former student filmmaker like me? Lame. Also, I have a hard time with the suspension of disbelief required to believe that Common is TI’s dad.
All of my griping aside, I did finish the film with the same kind of clench fisted enthusiasm that I get from a well crafted episode of the West Wing or Sports Night or a Different World (anyone familiar with my level of Aaron Sorkin worship or my extreme teleplay dorkiness would recognize the compliment). There are rich layers of plot, character, and social commentary woven throughout this story that only occasionally fall prey to well trodden blacksplotation stereotypes. Very few of the family and cop team characters are fleshed out, and I get the distinct impression that there is a lot of untapped potential in the huge supporting cast, which includes Children of Men and Talk to Me’s Chiewetel Ejiofor, Armand Assante, RZA, Common, TI, Cuba Gooding, Jr., Ruby Dee, Idris Elba (who hands in a memorable performance, despite being dead by hour 2), and newcomer Lymari Nadal as Lucas’ wife Eva, who does a lot with very few lines, and has an understated charm that wins you over. She also delivers one of a small handful of lines in the film that punctuates the social climate of the time and place when, referring to another kingpin’s wife she remarks, snidely “She looks at us like we’re the help.”
Here’s where I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the movie. A knee jerk reaction I have to the very common “good guy” white “bad guy” black dynamic that goes back to John Wayne era film and is only accentuated by the film’s negative space ad campaign is a bit of queasiness. However, there are two things that make me rebound from the nausea, (1) It’s based on a true story and (2) Scott does not rely on the “good guy” “bad guy” model. Similar to HBO’s “The Wire,” filmgoers get a more complex view of the entire investigation, including intimately relating to both Lucas (Washington) and Roberts (Crowe) as characters. Similar to the dynamic in Michael Mann’s Heat, by the end of the film, you don’t want either of them to go down. Scott does not leave you without an antagonist however, and a persistent theme in the film is the corruption of the NYPD’s narcotics unit, highlighted by Detective Trupo (Josh Brolin) who is one of the only characters in the film that you want to see taken down.
I respect Scott’s portrayal of the complexity of Lucas’ operation, showing both the good he does for the people of Harlem and the obvious death and destruction that his heroin sales cause those same people. Further, by very intricately weaving the police role in continuing this cycle, and citing the government’s role as accomplice, Scott is able to explore some of the root causes of drug trafficking and racketeering and paint in the shades of grey that make this story so compelling, even before buttressing it with dialogue from Lucas and Roberts. After being ordered to stop searching for the cocaine in military coffins by officials from the federal government, Roberts says, like epiphany, something along the lines of “I don’t think they want this to end. Too many people would be out of a job. Lawyers, cops, parole officers, prison staff.” Ding, ding ding. Give that man a cookie. Similar to Eva’s line about being considered the help, every so often screenwriter Steven Zaillian throws you one to catch up. Just in case you didn’t realize what we’ve been talking about for the last two hours, it’s not just drug dealers that profit from drugs. Like a little aside right in the diegesis. Crowe gets another of these lines later in the film when he and Washington finally share screen time (again, think Mann’s Heat) and he points out what we’ve been watching all along, that Lucas’ success was based largely in part to the fact that no one on the law side gave him enough credit to think that a Black man could be at the top of the food chain. Crowe as Roberts says something along the lines of “You represent progress to them. A Black businessman like yourself. They don’t want to see you succeed.” Of course, Trupo and the other Special Investigations men were perfectly happy to see him succeed (and see hundreds die in poverty) while they were getting a cut off of the top.
This scene is sort of Zaillian and Scott’s closing arguments of their thesis. Washington as Lucas delivers a brief monologue about his earliest encounters with police, watching his 12 year old cousin shot in the head outside his childhood home. Again, in case you weren’t with us earlier, we’ve been discussing how the corruption of our system has lead to the death and destruction of our people, and how they engage us as accomplice. Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
There’s so much going on in this film, it’s hard to fit it all in, which may have been part of the problem mid-way through the film. Scott and Zaillian make a silent commitment early on in the film to not graze over things, and at times the film does suffer for that. It’s nothing, however, if not rich with material for discussion and exploration. Much in the way that we’re beginning to see more and more films about Vietnam and the Gulf War because of the current war, given the climate in many of our communities around drugs, violence, and the horrific acceptance by the dominant ideology that young men of color die young, this film is telling a story about the ’70s, but it’s also telling a story about right now. It is a war film, and not just in that yes, many of us have grown up in war zones right here in the US urban landscape, but also because without the war, Lucas may not have been able to build his empire, lacking both opportunity and possibly motive and clientèle. Similarly, the same film made about right now would be a war film. Not just because the 50 plus young men and women that have been killed in Boston this year are casualties of a war in our streets but because serious cuts to funding in this community have been direct catalyzing causes of many aspects of that war. But I digress… Washington addresses this in part in an interview with Prairie Miller of NewsBlaze:
“Now, Frank was notorious for smuggling drugs out of Nam during the war, in the body bags of the dead soldiers coming back. Do you think that has an extra resonance now, with the dead soldiers coming back in coffins from Iraq?
DW: Actually, we don’t see that now. The government makes sure that we don’t see the bodies coming back home. So that’s one difference between these two wars. We did see it in Viet Nam, but for some reason we’re not allowed to see it in this democracy now.
Do you think there’s anything lower than smuggling drugs in soldiers’ coffins?
DW: Yeah, you can start a war in the first place! But you know, Frank got the idea to do that, not just from watching the dead come home, but watching so many come home as drug addicts. You know, because they were trying to ease the pain of the experience of being in Viet Nam. So it wasn’t just something off the top of his head.”
In another interview in the same source with Kam Williams, this one with Russell Crowe, the two address a couple of interesting topics:
Where does American Gangster fit in the pantheon of New York City mob sagas such as Naked City, The Godfather and Goodfellas?
DW: Well, I can say, for one, that among the movies you mentioned, there’s no black people in any of them. So, the situation may basically be the same, but this is a Harlem story. I guess it is to a degree a genre. There are certain things that are similar about those kinds of films, but this one in particular deals with a guy from uptown.
I would add that the film, because of its focus on Frank Lucas’s empire, addresses the rampant racism in Mafia culture, and even hits a little bit on the institutionalized dynamic to that racism within the larger US culture. I could go in to the inherent connections between the braggadocio often associated with Black male culture within the context of Hip Hop and especially “gangsta rap,” and the culture of the Mafia, which, loosely translated means “swagger, boldness or bravado.” However, thats like a whole other essay, and this has gone on long enough. I will say that, as pointed out by Kevin Powell in Byron Hurt’s “Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes” that men in places of financial or governmental power are able to assert their masculinity through those channels. For populations that have not always had means to do this, men have historically found other ways to channel this standard of masculinity. Gangster culture, as much as the boastfulness associated with Hip Hop are channels through which people have found ways to assert this power. Upon arriving in this country, Italians, especially southern Italians and Sicilians encountered hostility and a lack of the financial opportunity that they had envisioned. As a result, during the late 19th century, the Mafia, or Cosa Nostra, began operating their protective services and illegal operations in the US, in places with a large Italian immigrant base. Despite facing many of the same social issues, many different disenfranchised communities have been institutionally pitted against one another in order to ensure the current balance of power. Many other have tread this topic much more eloquently than me, and I would recommend “Are Italians White?” (Guglielmo and Salerno) as a good starting point.
KW: Why do you think there’s outrage over rappers making gangsta videos but not over actors making gangsta movies which glorify the same lifestyle?
DW: There’s a difference. This is one movie, not the only movie. In 2005, I did Julius Caesar. Not knocking rappers, but I can do both. So, whenever any rapper’s ready to do Shakespeare, I’ll be there.
RC: Wait, I think that what the question’s trying to get at is actually something pretty cool. He’s saying that when a guy sings a song about his life as a gangster on a record, people get down on him. But you and me, we make a movie about us in that same world, and we get praised for it from a creative point of view.
DW: Yeah, well some rappers who have made gangster albums have gotten praised for it, too. Some real good ones. America’s Most Wanted is still one of my favorite albums.
RC: Is it the criminality that people are getting upset with now about the music, where you’re literally singing the praises of gun worship, as opposed to a movie that plays out in front of you and a story that’s being told showing something that actually happened?
DW: And that these are the consequences.
This is particularly interesting to me given the heavy Hip Hop influence on the context of the film (Jay-Z’s upcoming release, and co-starring roles from RZA, TI, and Common). Also, as someone who is perpetually having to get into conversations with people who assume that all Hip Hop music is “gangta rap” and further that all “gangsta rap” is the same, it’s always nice to see someone draw out the fact that just because someone is talking about guns and drugs doesn’t mean that they are glorifying here. I read an interview recently with Kanye West in which he was asked about the violence in Hip Hop music, and its effect on young people. His reply was something along the lines of comparing it to Shakespeare and other poetry, and that kids understand that it’s fiction. First of all, I would like to disabuse the College Dropout of the notion that it is fiction at all. Yes, there are certainly people in the rap game who are making money off a dishonest image of themselves. But fiction? There’s no fiction in finding weapons in vacant lots that are the only places to play all summer, no fiction in bullet holes in bedroom walls, no fiction in me bringing home a crack pipe I found on the street when I was 7 and asking my mother how you blow bubbles with it. The difference is certainly in how we talk about these things, and the context that people are getting with which to navigate those conversations.
Much like a lot of “gangsta rap,” American Gangster is an exploration of the cause and effect of the drugs and violence that were and are a fact of life for most urban environments. CAUSE and EFFECT. What is missing is not in the medium or the message of these music and film constructs, but in the tools that we as a people are given to navigate the media and the messages within them. If we as a nation had a comprehensive system through which we trained people to be able to critically evaluate the things that they see on a daily basis, than many of the perceived dangers of violence in media that imitates life would be a moot point. Effectively, they could be taken as critique, and not glorification, because people would have the resources to evaluate the critique and come to their own conclusions. A major principle of media literacy, is that people bring their own experience to the reading of any media that they take in. Unfortunately, in many cases, people are not given the tools to ask the basic questions about how and why messages are created, and often media that imitates life also serves to create an ongoing cycle in which it than influences life and perpetuates the negativity that it explores.
We, as a people need to harness the power of media to create dialogue and explore these cause and effect relationships. How many kids that pick up Jay-Z’s album on Tuesday will even know what “Iran-Contra” is, let alone what he means when he says that he ran contraband that Reagan and Oliver North sponsored? Still, we need to acknowledge the social and political importance of lyrics like these that do provide a context of conversation. Keep pushing, and maybe US History classes will start to provide kids (and adults, don’t think we’re all up on this stuff either) with a real education to become leaders. One last quote:
DW: He was a man without a formal education, a man who at the age of six witnessed his cousin get murdered by sociopaths in uniforms. That shaped his life. From a very young age, he began to steal. He was on the wrong side of the tracks, but he was a brilliant student, and he became a master at the business that he was in. It’s a dirty business and he’s definitely a criminal who was responsible for the deaths of many people. I don’t just want to say he was a product of his environment, but as Russell said, had he gotten a formal education and had different influences, I think he still would have been a leader, but he’d have gone in a different direction.
Well put, well put.
