American Gangster

The cinematic version of the Great American Novel may just be the gangster film. Ever since Edward G and Jimmy Cagney ripped up the screen in the early Thirties, the biggest and best mob movies have managed to create a robust artistic reputation for themselves; of the 450 films currently residing in the US National Film Library’s list of works deemed to exhibit “cultural, historical, or aesthetic” significance, you can’t move for a Godfather, or a Goodfellas, a Scarface or a Public Enemy.

The gangster flick is a heavy hitter, and it manages to do this because at its best it transcends the simple movie form and transforms itself, like the best Westerns, into parable. As an example, it’s impossible, once seen, to forget the opening of The Godfather; out of the blackness, before the camera pulls out to show you Don Corleone’s inner sanctum, you hear those immortal first lines:

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I believe in America. America has made my fortune.

Or, after that grisly first scene in Goodfellas, the image stop-frames, Henry Hill looks up and tells you:

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As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.

Well, off you go then, dear audience; you’re there (aren’t you? I am), applying all the symbolism and thematic gubbins you could possibly wish for to these grand, elegiac dramas. It’s bold brushstroke stuff, it’s Shakespearean, it’s immense. These films do it all for you; they’re so generous with what they provide, just look at the character arc of Michael in The Godfather, for instance, from war hero to soulless fratricide, staring out at the end of Part 2, across the grey cold stretches of Lake Tahoe, a man haunted by the Fates.

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster aspires to such lofty heights. This is over-confidence at best, and hubris at worst, but it is what it most assuredly does. Based on the New York magazine article The Return of Superfly, it takes as its subject the real-life heroin drug lord Frank Lucas (famously, the man who smuggled drugs from Vietnam into the US via the caskets of returning dead GIs) and his subsequent capture at the hands of squeaky clean Detective Richie Roberts.

Just the title, American Gangster, implies the epic, the poetic, the fabled, a re-imagining of the American Dream. Or something. We are reaching here, even before we get to the white on black iconography of the posters, the two A list stars, the A list director, etc. etc., for something truly great. American Gangster wants to be initiated into the pantheon. It thinks it’s a great a film.

So, is it?

Before I answer that, it’s worth noting that the movie went through many guises in development and was at one point touted – God save us – to be a Brian De Palma project called Tru Blue. Finally, Scott landed it (it had been offered to him first, but he was otherwise engaged) – after Training Day’s Antoine Fuqua flirted with it also – and Scott dragged Russell Crowe on board. The bold AG title didn’t surface until around 2004, but it seems that once this had been suggested, it was a balls out focussed attempt to create something special.

And, for the most part this is a bloody good film indeed. It starts off confusingly, unfortunately; Lucas (Denzel Washington) and Roberts (Crowe) don’t meet until the end of the film, and in fact the cops aren’t fingering Lucas for any misdemeanours until well into the second half of the film. Up to that point we’re quite correctly more interested in fleshing out their respective characters and the reasons for their actions, but it seems a little meandering and not at all well-defined. Still, there’s some fascinating stuff in here (one brilliant scene where Lucas, against his better judgement wears a pimp-alicious chinchilla fur coat, goes to a boxing match, shakes Mohammed Ali’s hand and, for sticking his head above the parapet, gets noticed by the feds; Roberts, dragging his partner out of trouble, sees that he’s OK and then sticks by his principles and dumps him at the first whiff of corruption) and Crowe in particular earns his crust with a really very well observed study of a man keeping his shit together, while all around are taking backhanders. Washington, on the other side of the plot, seems less comfortable in his role, and never quite sets alight with the ferocity and threat-fuelled energy that he explored with, say, Training Day (perhaps he would have preferred Fuqua to stay at the helm?). There is one jump-back-in-the-seat killing on the street that makes you alive to the possibility of a major, thunderous performance, but it gutters, and fades. At the end, however, when Crowe tracks him down, and arrests him outside the Lucas family church, Washington infuriatingly shoots him a look of such weary disdain and contempt you’re ready for Show Time, but when we cut back, it’s died on his face, and the flame gutters again.

And that’s the tale of the movie; so many super scenes are dovetailed into sections where the energy just vanishes. A long period of introspection in the middle act nearly kills the impetus of the story line completely, and a trip to Vietnam (where Lucas sets up his brazen deal) could have been electric, but is almost laughably brief. It’s an attempt to keep the final moments of the search for key evidence that bit more tense, but it could have been so much more than it is.

Ultimately, Scott does what he’s always done, which is provide us with a fabulous-looking universe where all his characters make sense in the positions they hold. But the dialogue he puts in their mouths just falls short of what it ought to be. You look at the Lucas character and you want him to provide, if not a moral compass, then at least an erudite slant on one. He seems to be forever saying “this is America and we…” something something something, as if that will suffice to provide with a clear and unique voice. He’s a compulsive man, a powerful character within the world that Scott’s presented, but as a cipher he’s shallow and not at all exceptional. Throughout, you’re reminded of all those fantastic crime movies of the 70s (Serpico, the Godfathers, French Connection – which is actually name-checked rather subtly – Mean Streets, Dog Day Afternoon, and so on), but you end up wanting to go away and watch them again. I liked it, I liked it a lot, but now I’m itching to see Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle chucking his Pontiac around under the El, and I’m not sure I’ll be so keen to see this in the same way in 36 years. American Gangster is a title that should embrace everything we might want in discussing race (as a black man, Lucas is patronised by the ‘orthodox’ crime families and rises to a status above them); duty; pride; patriotism; and so on, and so on. In the end, it becomes, simply, a damn good cops and robbers movie.

30 Days of Night

30 Days of Night continues Hollywood’s current fascination with several trends.

First, there is the apparent preoccupation with graphic novels as source material. Hollywood has been mining this particular seam for some time now, most explicitly in recent times with the near-frame-by-frame adaptation of Frank Miller’s 300. 30 Days of Night began life as a three issue miniseries of horror comics, written by Steve Niles and illustrated by Ben Templesmith. The series takes place in Barrow, Alaska, a town so far north that during the winter the sun vanishes for 30 days.

Bravo. It’s a killer premise, for in this month the tiny town is besieged by a group of vampires intent on round-the-clock mayhem. I’ve always been impressed by simple conceits of the “why didn’t I think of that” variety, and here it works very well. Not having seen the comic series, I can’t vouch for whether any visual threads were lifted for the movie (although, of course), but it all begins sure enough with bold, epic strokes, vast whited-out landscapes that urge you to think about the isolation. The few people, black specks against the white, who appear are there for a purpose (two or three times you hear the residents say “we live here for a reason, right?”) and they’re summarily sketched out in these opening scenes. Most significantly, there’s Eben Oleson, the town Sheriff; his estranged wife, Stella; his brother, Jake; his deputy, Billy; and a handful of other townsfolk, battening down the hatches for winter. In many cases it could be seen as a rather Western dynamic. Under the shadowy gloom of the disappearing sun, and the bleak nothingness around them, they make preparation for the tough days to come.

And then a sudden, intense, extreme close-up of a mysterious traveller, again, an image that must have come from the page. Dumped on an icy shore he looks back at a gruesome ship, a huge shadowy behemoth floating out in the mist. With no equipment or food he trudges across this immense landscape and finds the town. From this enigmatic beginning you’re hooked. No Clint Eastwood hero this, however; the stranger kills the town’s husky population and trashes its helicopter, cuts the ‘phone lines and generally destroys outside world contact. When he’s caught he simply tells the sheriff and his family that “they will come”.

From that moment the film’s action escalates at an alarming rate and you worry that it will fatally shoot its bolt, so suddenly do the vampires (and the knowledge of what they are) arrive. No need to worry on that score. After a quite extraordinary reveal scene, full of chaotic brutality where gallons and gallons of blood are spilt on the previously pristine white streets, a long and excruciating siege takes hold of Barrow. The townies not caught outside as the monsters arrive are holed up in attics and cubbyholes, shops and apartments, and thus begins a deadly game of cat and mouse.

And that’s a standoff set to last a month, so we’ll leave the Barrovians for a moment and return to some broader concerns.

Second among the themes that 30 Days of Night highlights is the prevailing enthusiasm for ultra violence on the screen. Much has been written elsewhere about the film’s most intense scenes, especially a beheading that, with the advances in seamless special effects, actually does appear to be someone being decapitated. Like, for real. I mean, genuinely. Furthermore, he’s slumped against a wall and being attacked with an axe, so as you can imagine, it’s not a clean kill; his assailant has to make a few swipe to get it right. Plus, to make it even worse, if that’s possible, he does this because the guy is screaming and alerting the vamps to their position, so it’s an attempt to keep him quiet, not because he’s a bad guy. Yes, as you’ve probably worked out, it’s unbelievably gruesome. Example two, a little girl – admittedly, vampirised – is hacked to pieces. Example three, a woman is taunted and killed in leery stages by a gang of the creatures, resembling a mouse being toyed with by cats, all the time being watched by the terrified hiders in their bolt-holes. Example four, a man…no, no, I’ll stop there.

As you can see, this is a fierce film. Indeed, it’s one of the most brutal, unsympathetic things I’ve seen in a long time, but oddly it doesn’t have the same affect on the senses that dreadful Torture Porn pap like Saw or Hostel or Captive manages. In Hostel, particularly, the grim litany of abuse is trooped across the screen to such flaccid effect, that the only result was to render the audience disinterested or bored or to shut them out. In 30 Days the cruelty is a very specific attempt to show that these monsters are ‘other’; they’re not us. It also emphasises just how desperate the survivors’ position has become. Bizarrely, then, I have to say, as horrific as all this sounds, it’s not in the least bit gratuitous.

And third, Josh Hartnett. Why?

Oh, that’s a little unfair, I guess I just don’t get him, nor Tinsel Town’s fascination with him. He was laughable in The Black Dahlia, cringeworthy in Sin City and should have sunk, aptly, with the USS California in Pearl Harbor. But no, he’s here, and holding up the heavy end of the cast list. In fairness he doesn’t do a bad job, even though his pathetic attempts at bum-fluff whiskerage suggest a man trapped in moderate discomfort for 30 hours and not 30 days. There is one moment when he says something that is supposedly ominous, and it fails completely, but mostly he’s there to look like a man presented with a situation that’s beyond him, and I guess he’s had plenty of practice at that.

No, ultimately, it’s probably wise that Josh doesn’t go in for any studious thespian acrobatics, because that niche is taken up by Danny Huston, who plays Marlow, the leader of the vampires. If there’s a more terrifying presence on cinema screens this year, I’d be amazed; if there’s a more genre-defining vampiric turn in film, I haven’t seen it. He is wonderfully unnerving, infused with an alarming energy and alien passion. Templesmith’s creations on the page were described as being like a great white shark stuffed into human skin, heads sharply arrowed and focussed, cut-out holes for eyes, the balls of which glisten black. Huston oozes an animalistic menace and authority, he speaks an ugly, spikey, unknown patois, within which the only recognisable words – during that appalling toying scene – are ‘no God’. Meaning, of course, that here, now, there is no God other than him. He’s extraordinary.

There’s a tantalising hint of back story here that fascinates; the vamps want to destroy everything about the town because they don’t want the outside world to know of their existence. Marlow tells his horde that for centuries they’ve worked to develop a mythology that humans can easily dismiss, so that they can hide when necessary, but when they do emerge they have to make sure they leave undetected. There’s a lot in that, unknown stories, all weighing down on his shoulders. With that chilling ‘no God’ message, with the responsibility of his species, his awful bone-white pallor, and his ferocious unknowability, there’s even an anti-Messianic quality to Marlow. Astonishing then, to think that this pure monster is played by the man who was Nigel, the Art czar, holed up in Battersea Power Station in Children of Men. Clearly a man of considerable ability.

Unfortunately, there are certain elements of the movie that don’t come across quite so powerfully as Huston’s performance. There are themes that aren’t explored, a few irritating plot holes that could have received a bit more exposition, a leap from ‘Day 7′ to ‘Day 18′ that is very jarring, and a brief moment of predictability that does no-one any favours. I suppose you could counteract that with an out-of-the blue sacrifice, a real and tangible sense of dread (and cold), and the fact that the cute doggies get it. Horribly, and with no faffing about. But these things do threaten to derail what is otherwise a brilliantly effective thrill-ride.

Now the clocks have gone back and it’s getting darker every day, just be glad when the sun comes up the next morning, and that Danny Huston is safely tucked away in the city of the angels.