American Gangster (***1/2)

The seemingly generic title of this drama actually reflects a central fact about its subject, one Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington). This was not, as you might imagine, his race, though he was a black man who came of age during the civil rights movement. No, it’s that Lucas’s would be a quintessential American success story had his success not been based around illegal activities. Lucas had been the driver for his predecessor, a mentor of sorts, but by applying a time-tested principal—buy low, sell high—he was able to expand considerably and came to dominate New York City’s heroin trade in the early 1970s.

Racial issues do play a part in the movie, but around the edges. When Lucas wants to expand, he finds it helpful to have a white partner in the South. On the other hand, having a black-run organization, involving his younger brother (Chewetel Ejiofor) and other family members, seems to have kept him under the government’s radar for a long while. This brings us to the other primary character in the movie, the New Jersey police detective played by Russell Crowe. Despite the title, the movie is more or less equally about the gangster and the man trying to bring him down. Crowe, reuniting with his Gladiator/Good Year director, Ridley Scott, has the more intriguing character in some ways, since Lucas never really changes throughout the movie. Tapped to lead a narcotics squad while also finishing law, the detective operates among shady characters while trying to remain honest. He also has an ex-wife and a young son. Though we don’t learn much about his past, Crowe’s performance and accent betray both a working-class background and the desire to transcend it.

Steve Zaillian’s reliably intelligent script is built more around its two main personalities than its time and place. In this way it is different from Gangs of New York, the Martin Scorcese movie Zaillian wrote, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, both sweeping epics. Nor is it like Goodfellas, which dwelt much more on the brutality of gangsters. As the first scene of the movie makes quite clear, Lucas was perfectly willing to deal out violence when it was useful, which is perhaps the other American thing about this story. But the suggestion is that Lucas did this, like most everything he did, with cool logic, only when necessary to make a point.

The same could be said about the movie, in fact. Compared to Scorcese’s gangster movies it’s sedate, and there is really only one action sequence of any consequence. But the storytelling is clear and tight, covering a fair span of time without feeling like it’s skipping ahead too much or becoming confusing. While I didn’t feel like I was watching something completely original, as with Godfather or Goodfellas, to be a notch below those is not bad.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07