American Gangster

Two lead actors + great supporting cast + overly long running time = questionably truthful biopic

I am sure that we have all seen the very cooly-edited trailer for American Gangster; it has been showing forever, it seems. I liked the stylization that it employed, and it sold me on the movie. To be truthful, the actors did too, so I was eager (though not jumping up and down) to see this bio-pic.

Overall, I liked the narrative, even though I felt the movie was longer than it needed to be. It must be hard with a bio-pic to decide what to explore on-screen. There is a lot that makes up a life, particularly one such as Frank Lucas'. They skim over his troubled past by dropping bread crumbs such as a family heirloom of a bureau being confiscated when he was 5 years old, and another very tragic incident involving an older cousin. There are no mawkish montages of childhood difficulty that the main character must overcome, which is good, and these small glimpses are enough to help inform us about what helped to 'make the man'. I don't, however, think that they should have skimmed over the fact that Frank Lucas has"fathered 7 children, as far as he knows". I read this on the ridiculously short entry on Wikipedia (yes, I know that I did not go to the original source on this, but frankly this person is not worth the effort).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lucas_%28drug_lord%29

What I take from those words is that Frank Lucas sowed more oats than the movie implied. It never touched on his fidelity to his wife, or any of the 15 years he spent as his mentor's driver/bodyguard. There is only so much that can be brought to life on screen, and I think that the writers did a good job of covering ground, but keeping the action rolling along. Overall though, the movie felt more like a fictional story than a real one. Perhaps I feel this way because the 'rise and fall' story of a violent man, particularly a gangster, is nothing new, and this one is (for the most part) true. Reflecting on it now, it also seems a bit uninteresting.

The movie left me feeling conflicted the next day about how to reconcile Denzel's smooth and contained portrayal of a man who was most assuredly a monster. Granted, if Frank Lucas hadn't been there to provide the drugs, someone else would have (there is always 'some one else' waiting in the wings). Those people may not have been nearly so interesting, and may not have been as successful (yes, I know that there is an inherent oxymoron in that statement). The hardest thing for me is that I didn't despise Washington's Lucas at the end of the movie. Sure, he got a measure of justice, but I didn't hate his character. In a small way, I admired his ingenuity; using the war in Vietnam to facilitate keeping his costs down and his product moving--that was pretty clever. On the other hand, he must have been an supremely violent man to have stayed on top at all, as evidenced by his willingness to shoot competitors in the head on the street, etc. The movie shows us that he had his own brand of ethics, which may or may not have been true; I enjoyed watching how gravely serious Denzel was while placing a coaster under a sweating glass on an end table. His character was a smooth, sophisticated operator, and almost a joy to watch.
I looked Frank Lucas up on Wikipedia because the math for him being sentenced to jail at the end of the movie for 15 years and getting out in 1991 didn't compute for me. After looking online in the most cursory of ways, I found out that he was convicted of new drug charges after being released the first time. Obviously, the guy was not reformed at all. I value Wikipedia for presenting lists of the ways that movies diverge from their book-origins; why can't there be one for Lucas; obviously this movie takes a ton of liberties. I can overlook a few, but I think there are many in this case.
I really did like those last few seconds of the last scene, where Lucas is released from jail and looks as if he is grimly realizing that his world no longer matches how the outside world has moved on. My Significant pointed out that the final scene looks much 'dirtier' than the rest of the film, and he is right (although I hardly know how this is true, given the time spent in slums and apartments of junkies with festering needle wounds in the rest of the film). That last scene is a grim punctuation mark at the end of a film.

Which leads me to the question 'what was the mission here?' It could be that the filmmakers were attempting to package Lucas' story as a cautionary tale, showing in a(n only slightly) negative light how attractive the life of crime was to the younger and more innocent nephew who gives up his life-long dream of being a pitcher for a major league team to traffic drugs. There are kernels of this in the movie, but if there are moments of anti-drug/thug-life messages, there are also a lot of moments that glorify the pro-gangster aspects of this person's life. I think this explains my reluctance to commit to approving or disapproving of the character, and ultimately of the film.
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