American Gangster, director Ridley Scott’s first stab at a gangster drama since the late ’80s, has all the ingredients necessary for a successful Hollywood movie. The (based-on-a-true) story is straightforward and confident. The acting and cinematography are deliberate and pleasing. The film features gratuitous drug use, violence, blood, nudity and detective work.
But something is missing. Scott must have noticed this, because he tried hard to fill the void by dumping in every spice on the shelf. The result is that instead of a complete, well-rounded picture, the lengthy film is enveloped in a cluttered cloud of information that demands sifting and dilution (in other words, audience participation).
American Gangster is based on the true story of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), Harlem’s top heroin dealer in the early 1970s, and Richie Roberts (Russel Crowe), the man who put Lucas in prison. The film first runs Roberts’ and Lucas’ lives in parallel, and then slowly arcs them toward each other until — well, you can guess how it goes.
Scott’s thirst for explanation oppresses the senses in American Gangster. He works relentlessly to explain the ins and outs of the drug trafficking industry and the historical, political and social contexts of the time period.
Scott puts the bulk of his efforts into developing his two main characters, Lucas and Roberts, but this preoccupation slows the film to a crawl. Roberts isn’t even aware of Lucas’s existence until an hour and a half into a film which is only (!) two and a half hours to begin with. American Gangster is less a manly story of cops and organized robbers than it is an exhaustive investigation into the lives of two men. The problem with this kind of probing is where to draw the line between relevant information and definite excess, a distinction with which Scott seems to have difficulty.
Crowe showcases his talent for acting — and his possibly more skilled ear for accents — as Richie Roberts, but Crowe’s performance does not illuminate his character’s true nature — that gets taken care of by the snippets Scott shows of Roberts’ law classes, his gold Star of David necklace and custody battles with his ex-wife. Each of these lines could be developed into something more germane, but Scott doesn’t run with any of them. He just serves up an array of red herrings in a story that has no mystery.
Scott treats Lucas no differently. Washington has played so many hearts of gold that the devil in him may have been downsized years ago. Scott plays up that strength by creating a loveable gangster, one the audience would applaud (and in the theater, it did). American Gangster’s Lucas murders men brutally, yet casually. But he goes to church every Sunday. He hands out food to the poor of Harlem. He loves his mother (played by the august Ruby Dee, the only supporting cast member worth mentioning). He’s not driven by greed. If I didn’t know better, I’d question the man’s drug-lord potential. Luckily, the real Lucas was a guy who got by on his ability to be liked by everyone. But the film gives us too many warm, fuzzy feelings, including an unnecessary segment jarringly tacked onto the end about Lucas’ work with the police.
Scott had an opportunity to play with a slice of history that would require little revision to make it captivating. But smother a film with too many details, and viewers suffer from information overload.
