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.