American Gangster, The Movie
new respectability for the gangster genre?
2007-11-02
By dream hampton

Perhaps you, too, feared the film would be as flat as its trailer. Let's get this out of the way up top, it is. American Gangster promised to bring respectability to what has become a dominant hood genre, the tale of the drug dealer. With Oscar winning actor, the dazzling Denzel Washington, in the lead, and Oscar winning Ridley Scott, teaming up with his Gladiator, also Oscar winning co-lead Russell Crowe, the film was to redeem that embarrassing ghetto classic, New Jack City, by giving the hustler a serious, Hollywood treatment.

Based on an absolutely thrilling profile of Harlem-based heroine dealer Frank Lucas by New York magazine scribe Marc Jacobson (he recently penned an equally compelling piece on convicted Malcolm X assassin Khalil Islam who was released from prison this year), the screenplay for American Gangster barely compares to the article. In Jacobson's hands, Frank Lucas is compelling and repulsive, rough around the edges, combatant and evasive. A broke, old man remembering a time when he made what in today's money would be nearly a billion dollars smuggling high grade smack to New York inside the coffins of GI corpses headed home from Vietnam. Denzel, of course, renders him sexy and elegant as if it were his own image he were worried about protecting. Lucas' rage never had a chance against Washington's debonair. The actor dutifully approaches his career as he was given a mandate to single handedly restore dignity to the Black man. Which is fine if you approach said career as an audition for an NAACP Image award. But Lucas should have been as nasty as he comes off in Jacobson's article; a shortsighted hustler whose money disappeared as quickly as it was made. Even the scenes that are meant to reveal Lucas' dark side---the broad daylight execution of a rival dealer, or the nasty way his actual product seeps than oozes from open scabbed flesh are treated by Scott more like montages from a music video with Washington a more dapper stand in for an MC.

In another lifetime Ridley Scott dedicated unflinching shots to an alien being birthed from the chest cavity of a man in Aliens. In American Gangster, glossy cutaways and music-driven vignettes, are meant to communicate the ugliness that is poverty plus proliferation of drugs and guns. Which is too bad. We don't need Scott to handle addicts and dealers delicately, any inner city resident who has lived through a drug crises, be it 60s heroine or 80s crack, knows how putrid, bloody and horrific it all is. Hip-hop has exhaustively examined the glamour and gore of all the trade's crevices, and to greater effect.

Crowe's highly moral, undeterred cop ends up being little more than the film's necessary main white character who justifies the film's big budget. His character neither pushes the narrative nor complicates the dynamic between the police and Harlem's underworld. The “Dirty 30,” as Central Harlem's 30th Precinct were known for decades, are mere backdrop to Richie Roberts’ vigilance and due diligence. The deals Frank Lucas makes to save himself a life in prison are merely alluded to at the film's end, when its suggested that Lucas actually turned in cops, not fellow criminals, thus abiding by an omerta-style street code. Nice try.

Because Hollywood scripts unfailingly abide by The Hero's Journey, Lucas must, like every drug dealing criminal on film before him, fail. The difference between Ray Liotta's character's demise in Goodfellas and Washington's in American Gangster is the ride. We watch Liotta melt in the former, his inner demons rendering his eyes, literally, red. In Washington's hands, Lucas barely breaks a sweat, even in the Vietcong controlled jungle. Which again, is nice for a men's fragrance commercial, not so much in this cautionary tale.

Jay-Z found the film more inspiring than me. It pushed him from the boardroom to the studio to lie down, in three weeks, what might be his best album since The Blueprint. He rhymes “I’m more Frank Lucas than Ludacris” then distinguishes himself from the real-life hustler with “But I ain't no snitch.” Jay-Z has made a career of exploring the interior of the outlaw's life, the psychodrama of his life choices. Like the article, the album inspired by American Gangster is better than the film itself.

American Gangster made me long for the cinematic tour de force through the hood that was Menace to Society, where bullet wounds are given the gory treatment they deserve and Larenz Tate's O Dog is exciting when he stalks South Central with reckless abandon. It also made me miss the great actor I remember Denzel being. So I netflixed Cry Freedom and watched Washington disappear into Steve Biko completely. Jay's American Gangster made me long for one last film about hustlers: One where the hero is smart enough to end up neither dead or in jail, but on Forbes's most watched list and on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

dream hampton is an author, filmmaker and critic. She writes about culture and music and is a new contributor to EbonyJet.com

Denzel Washington photo courtesy of Universal Pictures and Frank Lucas photo courtesy of EBONY Magazine