American Gangster

I find myself really fascinated by paired movies. You had the rat movies -- Ratatouille and Flushed Away, the penguin movies -- Surf's Up and Happy Feet, the escape from the zoo movies -- Madagascar and that other one. And now you have the gangster movies -- Public Enemies and American Gangster. True, they came out far apart, but structurally and thematically they are really similar.

Both movies start with introductions to the nemeses. In Public Enemies, they were John Dillinger and Melvin Purvis. In American Gangster, Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts. Both movies switch back and forth between the "good guy" and the "bad guy," and, at least in Public Enemies, it is occasionally hard to know which is which. In American Gangster, there is no such ambiguity until the end, when I became really lost and disappointed in the film.

John Dillinger is portrayed as a Robin Hood. Frank Lucas is initially portrayed this way, as a black entrepreneur who steals the drug business from corrupt police. But he starts out the movie pouring gasoline on a bound man and then lighting it with the match from his cigar. You know immediately that this is not a nice man. Whenever there is an image of gentlemanly behavior, it is countered by an equally powerful image of brutality. You see him holding his mother in one moment; you see him banging his brother's head so hard against a window that the window shatters in another. You see him gazing adoringly at his wife; then you see him throw the gift she bought him into the fireplace. He is brutal for show. Johnny Depp's John Dillinger kills, at least ostensibly, in self defense.

The corrupt cop played by Josh Brolin is an interesting counterbalance to both Roberts and Lucas. He is like a combination of the two of them. He is also a combination of the bully cop that slaps around Billie Frechette in the other film and Melvin Purvis, mostly in that they share the same fate.

Where Public Enemies is shot in an unorthodox, often disconcerting style, American Gangster is completely straightforward. There is also no subtlety of language in the script. We are told repeatedly, explicitly what everyone is about. When Ruby Dee, who plays Mrs. Lucas, berates her son, there is nothing unsaid between them. In the scene where Eva, Lucas's wife, tells the corrupt cop her husband will kill him, she has some of Billie's fire, but it is lost in the simplicity of her dialogue. I just kept thinking, at every turn, this was done in the other film, and it was done better.

The biggest disappointment for me in this movie was the ending. Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington are two of the heaviest hitters in Hollywood, and their scenes together should have been on fire. But Denzel should have taken every one of them. Crowe plays a loser cop with little self-control, as evidenced by his affairs and the loss of custody of his son. Denzel plays a man who raised himself from a mere driver to someone who controlled the Mafia's access to drugs. Maybe it really happened this way, but when Frank Lucas does what Richie Roberts asks him to do, my suspension of disbelief became decidedly unwilling. And when he asks for holy water as his celebratory drink, as if that would cleanse him of the poison he unleashed on the people of Harlem and elsewhere, I wished it had been earlier in the movie so I could have turned it off in disgust.

I have been told by someone in the industry that paired movies are a fluke, a coincidence, an accident. All I can say is, it was a happy accident for American Gangster that it came out before Public Enemies so it would not stand so sadly in juxtaposition to a much better film.

Public Enemies

To be honest, I was in the mood for a comedy. I had been camping in my apartment for a week with only an air mattress and a too-short bar stool for furniture, and I had one DVD for my DVD player. The multiplex across the street had all the new comedies, but they all started at the wrong time, so we ended up seeing Public Enemies. And I'm really glad.

I love Johnny Depp. I have honestly never seen him in a bad role, and some of his performances are in my top five overall -- and that puts him in the same league as Laurence Olivier and Cary Grant. He was particularly good in this part, not because John Dillinger matches Depp's own bad-boy image, but because the actor was so understated in his portrayal. I found myself not thinking about Johnny Depp as John Dillinger but about John Dillinger himself.

I do not know how accurate this depiction is of the infamous bank robber or of his nemesis, Agent Purvis, but from the beginning I knew which one I would be rooting for. And you don't root for him because he's so charming. You root for him because he lives by a code, and over time, the police lose sight of theirs.

Odysseus of Greek myth, when viewed objectively, did not have a lot of character. He held himself in higher esteem than anyone else, and he took needless risks with his own life and the lives of his men. He betrayed his wife with more than one woman, and he was content to leave her languishing while he continued on his adventures. When he finally gets his vengeance on the suitors, he traps them like rats and kills everyone, regardless of their crimes against him. Yet he is considered a hero.

John Dillinger, as portrayed in Public Enemies, has a big ego, but he cares about his men, and he will do anything for the woman he loves. He also knows his enemies, and he punishes only them. He was a criminal. He does kill people, including police officers who were simply doing their jobs, but he makes every effort to minimize the risk to everyone, including police. In the end, he is betrayed not by strangers, suitors intent on plundering what he had, but by friends who want to protect what they have themselves. He is just an obstacle to be overcome, both by the FBI, who are supposed to be about taking care of the public, and by his fellow criminals, with whom the FBI are in bed.

After reading excerpts from Dr. Philip Zimbardo's book The Lucifer Effect, I was struck by how effectively that concept is conveyed in this film. The idea of the Lucifer Effect is that any person, when put in a position of absolute power and authority over someone else who is powerless, can become -- for want of a better word -- evil. There is also the concept, from James Gilligan's book On Violence, that all violence comes from shame and our desire to avoid that emotion. When one of the agents, who is doing a particularly lackluster job of monitoring Billie Frechette, manages to lose her, he is shamed. Then he gets the opportunity to interrogate her, and he is brutal. He forces her to soil herself, beats her with his hand and whatever else he can reach, and he has to be forcefully restrained by one of the agents from Texas so he won't potentially kill her in his rage. The lead agent in the case, Purvis, also loses sight of his mission and he ends up killing an innocent woman who has the bad luck to be leaving a lodge just as the federal agents are moving in.

The camera work in the film matches the subject matter. It is intimate, jarring, and intense. The director focuses in on Purvis's hands, on Depp's face as it's smashed into the concrete. This is a huge, noisy, violent film but it draws in the viewer as if he were a part of the action. The message seems to be that you cannot judge people by a landscape drawn in broad strokes. If you can get close and see the way people are with each other, you can really understand that bad guys aren't all bad and good guys aren't all good.