BEFORE: This WAS originally the slot I was going to use for "The Irishman", which meant that Kathrine Narducci would also have carried over from "The Wizard of Lies" - so it's also a bit funny that this film seems to share some DNA with "The Irishman", both films are decades-spanning crime sagas, and they also share two other actors in addition to De Niro. So I stand by moving up "The Irishman" on the schedule, but really, it would have worked out much the same if I hadn't...the only real difference is that now I'm going to cram 33 films into January instead of 31 - and I guess maybe come November or December I'll finish 2 days earlier now. But hey, more time for Christmas shopping maybe - I find it's best to plan WAY ahead for some things.
Robert De Niro carries over again from "The Wizard of Lies".
THE PLOT: A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan over thirty years later, where he once again must confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.
AFTER: Two more things this film has in common with "The Irishman" - first, both films are much too long. This one runs close to four hours, and that makes it tough to watch, you've got to block out the better part of a day to get through it, or spread it out over two days. I started early (for me) at 11 pm the night before, on a Saturday, to maximize my chances of getting through it without falling asleep. I also had extra Diet Mountain Dew standing by, just in case. And I did make it all the way through (unlike "The Wizard of Lies", which bored me, I kept falling asleep at the halfway point, rewinding, then falling asleep again...) but now I'm wondering if it was completely worth the effort.
The second thing the two films share is that both stories jump around liberally in time, toggling between the present and the past. Too many flashbacks for my taste, but I'm slowly (SLOWLY!) coming to understand the use of this technique to reveal information to the audience in a gradual way, that is, when the technique is properly used, and honestly, quite often, it's not. When you have flashbacks-within-flashblacks, or multiple framing devices like in "The Irishman", things are bound to get confusing very easily. "Once Upon a Time in America" starts and ends with its main character in an opium den in the 1930's, which suggests something about the cyclical nature of time and events, but also possibly implies that everything we've seen in-between is a drug-induced hallucination. That's one interpretation, anyway. (The shadow puppets in the Chinese theater also imply that everything we're seeing is just shadows of events, and that nothing is really real.)
The director, Sergio Leone, actually envisioned a story that was close to six hours long, but by then you're approaching mini-series length, like I think that's about the combined length of "The Godfather" and "The Godfather II". The inability to screen or properly market a film of that length convinced him to trim it down to four hours, only that wasn't good enough for the studio. After the European release, the studio cut out a random (?) hour and a half, and re-edited what remained into chronological order, without telling the director. Since this film was envisioned as one that would skip around in time via flashbacks (and how it pains me to say this...) by putting the shots in linear narrative order, you mess with the director's vision, and what you gain by increasing the audience's understanding, you lose in artistic vision. And I believe (again, it partially pains me to say this) that a director should (almost) always have final cut, because that's what they do - even if they screw up and make a mess of things, that's what they have the right to do. (I say "almost" though, because of the rare instance like Josh Trank with 2015's "Fantastic Four", clearly there you're dealing with a very immature filmmaker and despite the mess the studio released, based on interviews it was much better than what Trank WANTED to release.)
(Interestingly, this all created a contradiction of sorts, where the European cut of "Once Upon a Time in America" was named one of the best films of 1984, and the American cut was reviewed as one of the WORST films of the same year. Any Americans who heard about the film's success at Cannes and rushed out to see the film at their local theater were therefore soundly disappointed, or left scratching their heads. So the film received zero Oscar nominations, and didn't really find an audience until the 229-minute version was released on VHS and DVD.)
Anyway, this is old-school filmmaking, where if you needed to make Robert De Niro look 30 years older, people didn't rely on multi-camera scanning methods and CGI effects, they had to use make-up for him to look old and gray. I know, "The Irishman" used these effects to make him look younger, and to make De Niro look old they just...waited until he was old. If that didn't take 30 years, I'd say it was a cheat. But I think they did use SOME make-up to make him look older in "The Irishman", for the framing scenes where he was telling his story - but I think a lot of that was De Niro just being old.
By the same token, they had to make the Lower East Side of Manhattan look like it did in the 1930's - again, I think they used a lot of practical effects because back in 1984 they couldn't just take their footage to an effects house and digitally change it to match old photographs from the 1930's, they had to paint buildings and hang up a lot of laundry and maybe use a filter to make the film tone look all sepia-like - it was a lot of work, that's all I'm saying. Not to mention blocking off the set so no modern cars would drive through it during the shoot. But if you think about Manhattan neighborhoods, maybe some of them hadn't changed all that much over five decades, and the Lower East Side might have been one of those. This would have been pre-gentrification and before all the hipsters took over the L.E.S. and starting running artisanal cheese shops and tattoo parlors and bike shops.
(The bar scene in which the teen gangsters accepts their money for torching the newstand, and then chooses a drunk to rob, was shot in McSorley's Ale House on 7th St., which was a frequent hang-out for NYU students back in the late 1980's, when I went to college there. I guarantee you that in 1984, nobody who ran that bar had done one thing to change, upgrade or improve the place since at least the 1930's.)
The worst thing that resulted from the long running time, though, is probably the fact that the film starts with a number of enigmatic flash-forwards - the opium dream that Noodles has features a prominent ringing phone, for example, and then there's a quick cut-away to James Woods, and something about a car crash with three dead bodies being sent to the morgue. What does it all mean? Well, by the time the film got around to some solid answers, honestly, I had forgotten the questions. I had to stop, pause the film and force myself to think back to the opening sequence. OK, clearly someone was going for "arty" here but it's very easy to bypass "arty" sometimes and end up in "hopelessly enigmatic" territory.
To discuss the film further, I really need to divulge some specifics, so here comes a rare SPOILER ALERT for a 36-year-old film. If you've never had the occasion to watch this film since 1984, and hey, I feel you because I avoided it myself, then please go no further, because there are some plot points and twists I want to discuss. I mean, sure, if you've got 4 hours to spare watch the film, but if you're planning to do that in the future, stop reading now.
OK, so Noodles loves Deborah, he takes her out on a very extravagant date, pays for a restaurant that's closed for the season to re-open JUST so they can have a fabulous dinner together, and then Noodles proposes to Deborah, but when she says no because she wants a career in Hollywood, he rapes her in the car? I'm not following the logic here, even if he's very upset over her turning him down, there's no justification for this rape. Even if I allow the fact that this is taking place in 1933, and men have antiquated attitudes about women's rights, AND even with the understanding that he raped a woman during an earlier robbery and that woman kind of seemed to enjoy it, there's still no justification for rape. Noodles is a violent person, Noodles made a mistake, it still seems like Noodles somehow thought that if he raped her, she would change her mind? There's no scenario here that works, a man just doesn't rape a woman if he cares about her, it's not part of the formula. Noodles may be a gangster, but he's not a sociopath - that's Max, he's the crazy one. This is a very difficult part of the film to understand.
Then Noodles visits Deborah 35 years later and it raises more questions - they're civil to each other, so I guess they're just not going to talk about the rape? Again, it was 1933, it was a different time, and we always view the past through the lens of the present, but it still doesn't track for me. Rape wasn't allowable in 1933, not in 1984, and not today. Plus there's this NITPICK POINT: Noodles ages 35 years between the times he sees Deborah, but she doesn't? How does she still look like she's 20 years old?
Tangential to this is another non-logical point - why would a man who faked his own death then rise to a prominent position in the government, which could lead to someone checking out his background? Wouldn't someone with his checkered past, looking for a fresh start, prefer some kind of job that would offer him more anonymity? Then, assuming all of this made sense, which it doesn't, why would the answer to the problem of his past possibly being exposed be to hire his old friend to kill him? How is THAT a good solution for all parties involved? OK, great, nobody's going to find out that he used to be a gangster, but he'd be dead, so is that supposed to be an improvement?
There's also much debate also over the next best solution to the problem, which is to (apparently) commit suicide by jumping into a passing garbage truck, one that has the equivalent of a wood chipping in the back. This is likewise enigmatic - like, did he really jump IN or did he jump on to the far side of the truck (garbage trucks usually have hand-holds and foot-holds so sanitation engineers can hang on the side. For me, the answer is quite obvious, because even a man intentionally commiting suicide by garbage truck would probably scream in pain as the auger tore him to pieces. No screams, therefore no suicide.
But again, it's possible that this whole film is some kind of drug-induced vision, so not everything necessarily has to make sense. That's a double-edged sword though, because it forgives some mistakes but also messes with the story's overall relevance. Still, it's a huge, ambitious story and clearly a lot of work went into it, even if it doesn't all add up properly in the end.
Also starring James Woods (last seen in "Riding in Cars with Boys"), Elizabeth McGovern (last een in "The Commuter"), Treat Williams (last seen in "127 Hours"), Tuesday Weld (last seen in "The Cincinnati Kid"), Burt Young (last seen in "Betsy's Wedding"), Joe Pesci (last seen in "The Irishman"), Paul Herman (ditto), Danny Aiello (last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), William Forsythe (last seen in "88 Minutes"), James Hayden, Darianne Fluegel (last seen in "Pet Sematary II"), Larry Rapp, Dutch Miller, Robert Harper, Richard Bright (last seen in "The Sugarland Express"), Gerard Murphy (last seen in "Night and the City"), Amy Ryder, Angelo Florio, Scott Tiler, Rusty Jacobs, Jennifer Connelly (last seen in "Higher Learning"), Brian Bloom, Adrian Curran, Mike Monetti, Noah Moazezi, James Russo (last seen in "Black Mass"), Arnon Milchan, Marcia Jean Kurtz (last seen in "If Beale Street Could Talk"), Estelle Harris (last heard in "Toy Story 4"), Richard Foronji (last seen in "Repo Man"), Julie Cohen, Mario Brega.
RATING: 6 out of 10 babies in the maternity ward
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