At the Movies: American Gangster

Ridley Scott’s American Gangster is based on such a remarkable real-life character that it’s amazing the story took so long to get to the big screen. Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, was the second great black crime figure in America, the first being his mentor, the legendary Harlem gangster Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (played by Laurence Fishburne twice, in The Cotton Club and Hoodlum), who died in 1968. Lucas, a country bumpkin from North Carolina who quickly adapted to an urban environment, did his boss one better: he became the first black criminal entrepreneur to beat the Mafia at its own game and become, in effect, a criminal CEO.

Washington plays Lucas with a relish that all great actors, such as Al Pacino in Scarface and Robert DeNiro as Al Capone in The Untouchables, have shown when playing larger-than-life crime lords. The script by Steven Zaillian allows Washington plenty of room to move: Frank is a family man who, like Warren Beatty’s Bugsy Siegel, strives to maintain the outward trappings of middle-class morality in his private life while making a fortune off drugs that ruin and kill thousands. Into his life, as if from a side door, enters a chunky white police officer, Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, who stumbles across a load of cash that leads him to Lucas’s empire.

Much of the film becomes an ingenious back-and-forth between the charming powerhouse gangster and the uncharasmatic but dogged cop. That Crowe can match Washington’s power – after all, he’s the one who played the dynamic bad guy in 3:10 to Yuma – gives American Gangster much of its tension. Of course, the role isn’t written that way, and Crowe’s Richie is slyly underplayed in contrast to Washington’s Lucas. (He’s like Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness in pursuit of DeNiro’s Capone in The Untouchables – that is, if Costner could act.)

Based on a 2000 New York article by Mark Jacobson, American Gangster, more than any other crime film ever made, gets into the nuts and bolts of crime -- how the business is run and how profits are made. In a remarkable scene – I say remarkable because most gangster films seldom take us out of the city in which the story is set – Lucas travels through the jungles of northern Thailand to meet a corrupt Chinese general who controls huge tracts of poppy fields (the bemused general is skeptical, like white American cops and gangsters, that a black man is capable of running such a large enterprise). The bold move enables Frank to eliminate the middlemen in drug trafficking and deliver a superior product into the streets of New York at a lower cost. The film almost strikes a triumphant note when an unusual number of junkies turn up dead.

The only false note in American Gangster is in its handling of the Italian competition, symbolized by Armand Assante as, we presume, the mob’s corporate head. A movie that prides itself on authentic recounting of true crime has no business pretending that in 1970 there was a single head of the New York mafia and that if there was, he wouldn’t have removed Frank Lucas from the scene. Nonetheless, American Gangsterdoes an impressive job of taking in the larger picture while keeping the personal lives of Frank and Richie in focus. (Lucas brings his five brothers into the family business and flourishes, while Roberts’s devotion to his police work tears his marriage apart.)

American Gangster is the rare crime film that is both thoughtful and exciting. It fails in only one way, and it’s one that leaves you feeling more than a little queasy. From Howard Hawks’s original Scarface with Paul Muni through Martin Scorsese’s The Departed last year with Jack Nicholson, we’ve always known that gangsters are more compelling than the cops who chase them. In this film, though, Scott provides such a stage for Washington’s Frank Lucas that he sometimes appears to be the only act in the circus. While American Gangster doesn’t actually endorse his loathsome double talk about crime as black entrepreneurism, it offers no reasonable alternative. Admittedly, this is a tricky issue for directors; it’s so easy to seem preachy and moralistic in gangster films by offering an example of the good brother who became a concert violinist or district attorney. But the cops, except for Richie (whose incorruptibility sometimes borders on the unreal), often seem so small-minded compared to the man they’re trying to catch that it’s hard not to be taken in by Frank’s pitch.

Lucas (whose real-life model is interviewed in an upcoming BET documentary) has the dynamism of a popular motivational speaker without the underlying hint of smarminess; he seems so authentic that you find yourself almost feeling guilty for not rooting harder for the police. When he accuses a rival black mobster (in a vivid cameo by Cuba Gooding, Jr.) of “copyright infringement” in his drug trade, you almost don’t laugh; there would, after all, be lawyers to take up Frank’s case.