A promising story on a novel twist on the Mafia tale, in a particular ferment of American Black subculture, leaves unanswered questions
[I’m trying my best to straddle a “white” sort of mode of discussion with “hipness” to the kind of culture partly reflected in this movie. If I seem like a “white man who can’t dance,” go check out Mitt Romney. A slight edit was done on 9/7/12, between asterisks. Part 2 appears on September 24.]
Main sections of this entry (so you may skip parts as desired):
I. A cop’s focus on a crook: A Martin Buber-type “I in the Thou”?
II. Technical aspects: How this feast was built
III. Frank Lucas: The heart of the matter
IV. Richie Roberts as a hero, and remaining questions
This movie is interesting for a number of reasons, which have to do with its elaborate plot, its production complexity, and a certain atypical quality it has with respect to the work of the director who made it.
Ridley Scott directed this, and it stars as the main character—a Black mafioso-of-sorts named Frank Lucas, in a screenplay based on a true story—Denzel Washington, who—as I only appreciated recently—was a main actor for Scott’s brother Tony, who died on August 19. I did not start this review in light of Tony’s death in any way, but it’s ironic that Tony Scott’s death happens when I was in the midst of preparing this review, because this movie, in a way, embodies an example—a couple, in fact—of how “Life is what happens when you make other plans.” This film’s rather seamy and dense story was shepherded in the preproduction phase by Brian Grazer, head of Imagine Entertainment (the same producer behind Blue Crush [see my August 21 review], A Beautiful Mind [2001], and plenty of other movies that typically aren’t in the dark veins of Mafia or heroin-trade stories). A different director was originally to helm the project, then the studio pulled the project. This almost was a disaster for Grazer. More of the production history will be described below.
I had originally wanted to preface this film with a brief comparison to two other films by esteemed directors, one of which may seem to be odd to compare it to: one was Topaz (1969) by Alfred Hitchcock, his biggest-budget film that is flawed in numerous ways (while he worked on it when old and rather sick), but is still interesting in part because of what the old master could still muster in his later life. Another comparison would have been to The Cotton Club (1984), whose direction started with someone else before being given to Francis Ford Coppola by producer Robert Evans. The Cotton Club also is interesting to consider as a busy film, with a few plot threads, late in a storied director’s career, which has some success despite its unwieldiness—which could roughly be a way to describe American Gangster. But due to constraints, let us go right to the film at hand.
I. A cop’s focus on a crook: A Martin Buber-type “I in the Thou”?
American Gangster is interesting and complicated to discuss, because (1) it is a complexly plotted gangster or Mafia movie one of whose sources of interest is how it was assembled on a photographic and editorial level, while it boasts entrancingly atmospheric production design; and (2) its development was complex, regarding its source story and its start-and-stop production history. The final script that was shot was apparently written with a heavy amount of fictional elements, despite the interesting quality (in broad outline) of the real-life story that inspired it; in fact, the movie has been the subject of strong controversy, including a lawsuit for defamation of Drug Enforcement agents (see the Wikipedia article on the movie, specifically the “Accuracy…” section late in the entry; see also my End note 1).
Yet, as one of its central points of interest, it is about the novel situation of a Black family functioning as a sort of Mafia family running an especially effective heroin smuggling and sales/distribution ring in the New York metropolitan area from about 1969 through about late 1974. (Note: Throughout this entry, as I do elsewhere in my blog, I use the term Black to refer to the race also commonly called African American today. I am not being racist or retrograde; the lower-cased “black” is still widely used today, including by Blacks; and I initial-capitalize the term to distinguish the race from a description. I also use the term echoing the historical fact that “Black” was the preferred term by the early 1970s, when Blacks had an especially accommodated self-respecting perspective in the U.S.
As the film suggests, the Lucas family not only muscled in on heroin territory that had been the province of the Italian Mafia, but the film suggests it eventually dominated the Mafia’s business in this—though this latter point is subject to controversy (as suggested in the “Accuracy…” section of the Wikipedia article on the film). Incidentally, while this film has several stylistic echoes of and outright allusions to the film The French Connection (1971; see my May 24 entry), and while FC’s production style suggests that its time period was about 1970, when it was made, that film’s real-life source was in about 1961, when indeed organized crime seems to have been involved in heroin trade in New York, though the film doesn’t name the Mafia explicitly. Meanwhile, American Gangster is predominantly about the period 1969-75, which it is also meticulous in depicting in a surface way.
It is worth adding that, with all the signs of hipness the film goes to lengths to depict, the changes (during the later 1960s through the 1970s) in style, slang, tastes, and so on, as I recall from my own experience, happened fairly rapidly; it was almost as if broad tastes—a sense of “edge”—changed with just about every one or a few years. When films try to be historically accurate, it isn’t hard to err within this two-decade period. For instance, in Apocalypse Now, whose story from hints in the film takes place in about 1970, characters sometimes use slang terms that were from 1976-77, which always strike me as an anachronism—such as Chef saying to Clean, “Get down…!,” which was very much a 1976 term, and associated with the urban/disco scene, initially. In fact, as I’ll return to, American Gangster reflects a culture that was pretty solidly pre-disco (disco being a more synthetic, highly marketed “esthetic” by the later 1970s, and in a way being very much post–Vietnam War). Maybe people today wouldn’t be so concerned to have this sort of thing historically “in place,” but it does help to be historically precise when rooting the particularly febrile and edgy time in which this film’s story took place.
The “patriarch,” so to speak, of the Lucas family was a strong-willed, intelligent, quite ruthless man named Frank Lucas. If you didn’t know how to read this film, you would think he was being held up as a sort of ambiguous Black “Great Man,” on a par with Malcolm X, or some other colorful figures from Black American history. But make no mistake, this man is a cold criminal, and the film makes a conscientious effort to use him as a sort of “clinical case”—putting it in the “mythological” present tense—of a man who moves up in the Harlem gangster culture to develop a heroin smuggling and selling ring that not only in fact rivals the Italian Mafia but embodies the qualities of a disciplined, efficient, successful business.
Lucas—his heroin ring essentially rising and falling his own personal fate, as any “personality-driven” enterprise would—eventually meets his downfall at the hands of Richie Roberts, a dogged, self-driven New Jersey detective (and later lawyer and prosecutor) who is talented and tenacious in his own right. After he has helped bring down Lucas, Roberts eventually befriends Lucas, after the latter has been released from jail, and even serves as his defense attorney at one point. (This is the film’s story in the “pitch-style present tense.” The facts, in the past tense, as we will later see, seem to dictate that the Richie Roberts of the film is a fictional composite of several real-life professionals, at least in the investigation phase of the story. Roberts’ later involvement with Lucas when he was an attorney seems to have been more just himself, alone, conforming with the character-driven heroics of the story.)
This story ends up as the interesting study of certain types of male personalities that embody extreme concentration in their work and embraced idealisms—though one idealism is a sort of “crime ethos” shaped by business sense—in which an ultra-criminal is “matched” with a resourceful, savvy law-enforcement type who, with his honesty amid an environment of many cops on the take, becomes key to breaking the Lucas case. Further, after about early 1975, according to the film’s story, Lucas has evidently found he has nothing more to gain from being a criminal, and something to gain from being state’s evidence, and thus helps provide information to aid in the prosecution of cops on the take and/or such, according to the real-life Roberts on the DVD, and to a very recent article related to Lucas. Also, later Roberts befriends Lucas as if (I interpret) Lucas has no one else in the world, in power, to stand up for the somehow respectable sort he is than the cop who was so determined to break Lucas’ poisonous crime organization.
You could say, without too much of a stretch, that in opting to stand up for Lucas, Roberts, who is Jewish, applied a sort of ethical approach to Lucas, based on philosopher Martin Buber, “seeing the ‘I’ in the ‘Thou,’”—not that Roberts would have felt there was a criminal element in himself, but that he could see the identifiable man within Lucas—who needed his legal rights defended, at the very least.
The main problem we are left with, in this dense, fancily crafted, provocative movie, is to understand to what extent it is flawed, particularly in its containing fictional elements, which lead us to ask, If the original story was so interesting, and instructive about the wonder of human nature, why was it necessary to add so many fictional elements? (Even in the broad description I just made, I took pains to indicate fiction/myth as opposed to documented fact, and along these lines, I still find the movie a tough puzzle to “crack,” though as a story just to take in with “suspension of disbelief,” it is impressive enough.)
II. Technical aspects: How this feast was built
Elaborate development and preproduction
Let me start with technical discussion, which you can skip over if you feel it would be tedious, but which I think is important for understanding a possible reason (or potentiating conditions) for this film becoming flawed in some key ways.
There were a few principal stewards present early on who stuck with the film later. Primary was Brian Grazer, of Imagine Entertainment, who had passion for the project, as shown in DVD commentary. (References for some claims here will be made with abbrevations within the text; see at the end of this entry for fuller information.) According to the Wikipedia article on the film, his firm and Universal Pictures bought the film rights, in 2000, to “The Return of Superfly,” an article by Mark Jacobson in New York
By 2002 (Wiki), screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who wrote screenplays of such esteemed movies as Schindler’s List (1993; see my July 20 entry) and Gangs of New York (2002), had a 170-page script (originally titled Tru Blu and first drafted in 2000 [DVD]). He showed this in 2002 to director Ridley Scott, who wanted to make two films of it (Wiki). But by 2004, the director attached to the project was Antoine Fuqua, with Denzel Washington attached to play Frank Lucas (Wiki). Benicio del Toro was negotiated with to play Richie Roberts (Wiki).
(How much Nicholas Pileggi, a producer on this film and previously responsible for scripts for Goodfellas [1990] and Casino [1995], was involved in this movie’s script development, I don’t know, but from DVD commentary, he seems to have had strong interest in Lucas since at least the 1990s.)
Fuqua was fired by the studio in October 2004 on the basis of “creative differences” (Wiki), and a new director was looked at; but then the project was canceled in view of time constraints and creative issues (Wiki). The cancellation cost the studio $30 million (Wiki); meanwhile, Grazer was devastated for a while (DVD). Then he sought to revive the project (DVD), by March 2005 (Wiki). Long story short, Ridley Scott was enlisted to direct, by February 2006 (Wiki); his being involved led to Washington
Principal photography started in July 2006 (Wiki); the production schedule, despite the envisioned number of locations, seems to have been truncated overall, one would guess because the studio had spent a lot of money on preproduction already and didn’t want any more time or money wasting. Meanwhile, Scott found the production parameters a little daunting; with 180 locations (DVD, Wiki) and an average of 40-50 setups a day (DVD), he wondered, how do this? (DVD). “Basically, you just get going,” he answered his own question (DVD). He had methods for making his work more efficient (see following subsection).
The Wikipedia article has a good deal more details on the labyrinthine preparation of this film; I tried to stick within an account where the Wikipedia article and DVD making-of material meshed.
The involvement of Grazer, Pileggi, and Scott also would imply artistic and story strength to this film, but how and why a host of fictional elements got incorporated, to the extent they would become apt to stir controversy, is hard to determine. That is, filmmakers will incorporate fictional details to a story “based on a true story” quite often, but in this case, especially when you craft a story with such remarkable elements as an American Black seeking out pure heroin from the source in Indochina, and his having heroin shipped within false bottoms in coffins on Army planes, it would seem to make more sense that this was true rather than fictional. This isn’t simply a matter of avoiding liability to lawsuits for defamation or the like, but of having a story that is “marketable” in good part on the basis of its being “true.” On the other hand, it’s true that in inserting fictional elements, the film’s makers didn’t think about how much would be too much. And meanwhile, what is puzzling to us is, how much really is fictional?
But let’s move on, as Scott would say.
Scott’s efficient method in assembling scenes, explaining how a complex, busy movie was packaged into “edible form” yet still puts us viewers on our mettle
To understand an important role Ridley Scott played in this film, as a sort of director who, here, was more of a cinematographer and storyboarding/editing “engineer,” let me explain my understanding of the different ways, generally, in which multi-shot scenes can be filmed and then edited into a whole. In this area, Scott deviates (though I would think he’s hardly alone in this among modern directors) from what was once a highly craftmanly way to make mainstream movies, which partly may reflect how he fits in with changing times.
Say you have a scene with actor Tom Cruise talking to actor Alan Cumming at a hotel check-in desk. (I am thinking of a scene relatively late in Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut [1999].) Make it, for illustration purposes, really simple: you have (A) a frontal shot of Cumming, then (B) a side shot of the two men, then (C) a frontal shot of Cumming, then (D) a frontal shot of Cruise, then (E) a side shot of the two men, then, lastly, (F) a frontal shot of Cumming. The way that Stanley Kubrick filmed, representing his craftsmanly nature (and the way some directors still film, though this probably varies with budget for an individual director), he would do multiple takes of each of (A), (B), and so on to (F), each one filmed separately with one camera. (In the real making of the scene, Cumming said that what should have been a simple enough scene with its simple enough shots took an awfully long time with the many takes Kubrick had done. This comment was included in an interview available on YouTube a couple years ago or so.) Now, the editor (and director, if they work together; some directors seem to leave their editors alone with this) assembles what will show up in the film (maybe with specific direction from the director on which takes to use): (A) take 6, (B) take 4, (C) take 9, (D) take 7…and so on. There may be tweaking with a take (for shot (A) or such) replaced by another take at a later editing stage, but this is how a series of takes are selected and edited together to make up a scene.
As an example of how fussy Kubrick could be, in what was apparently the most notorious film he made for this type of practice, The Shining (1980), the scene in which Scatman Crothers (as the hotel cook Dick Hallorann [sp?]) and Danny Lloyd (as Danny Torrance) are talking over ice cream in the kitchen was filmed in the one-shot-setup method, and one particular shot of Crothers—as you can hear from Steadicam inventor/operator Garrett Brown commenting on a recent DVD issue of the film—went to 170+ takes.
Now what Ridley Scott has done with filming is quite different. As he has done for multiple movies, he will have more than one camera set up to capture the different “sides” of a scene. So, for the shots (A) through (F) noted above, he might have three cameras, each capturing the frontal-Cummings, frontal-Cruise, and side-view-of-both shots (of course, the cameras would have to be placed so they don’t film each other). There would also be just a very few takes. So the scene would be assembled from a relatively small number of takes, which had all been filmed within a short timeframe with respect to each other.
As Scott remarks in one of his DVD during-the-movie commentaries (I think for Thelma & Louise), the advantage of this is that it keeps the performances fresher. One would say they would be more spontaneous, looser. Also, if the cameras are hand-held, this would give the whole scene a certain cinema verité quality—not only “fresher” acting but a feel as if you are in on something happening in real life.
For a story like that of American Gangster, with all the street busy-ness and so on, this approach is apropos. Also, it would have been a practical necessity, because, as Scott says during the making-of doc with that film, when there were originally 180 locations, and an expected multiple sides to a scene, in order to fit all the shots/scenes into the production schedule, one had to be efficient. So, as he says at one point, he tries to utilize different angles in certain specific locations to fit “new scenes” into the same general location, to save on expense and eating up time with moving around. And in filming exchanges between people, it also saves on time, money, etc., by having multiple cameras going at once to capture all sides of a scene in minimal time, again with few takes per shot. This helps explain how the film can seem so spontaneous—and how, even with some exchanges, you feel as if two shots—one of one man, another of another—can actually seem from the same take (which they may well have been), since the personal interaction seems so realistically hooked up from either side.
This explains how the busy script could be articulated into filming that captured what precision in the acting it could, and include a certain spontaneity. Then the main challenge, or hope, was that the acting, speaking, was effective enough, and the plot was clearly enough conveyed, that the rapidly moving through scenes and situations that the movie does could be “apprehended” well enough by the viewer that his attention could be kept on the story. I have to say that it took multiple viewings for me to really appreciate a fair amount of what was going on.
Grazer’s praise for Scott, indirectly explaining the visual brio employed to convey the dense story
Brian Grazer was impressed with Scott’s ability to translate into visual form the complex script, with its production challenges. “Ridley captures dimensionality,” Grazer notes (DVD); presumably this means a sense of spatial relations (to flesh out a location) as well as the interrelations of characters (for their dramatic purposes) in their moving in space. This sort of thing is certainly to be noted intuitively in the film by viewers; perhaps it represents a triumph of getting the dense material on the script into more accessible form, in Grazer’s view.
Scott, for his part, sums up that on a given production day, “[We have] 45 minutes to set up, [we] use several cameras, [do] two to three takes, and move on” (DVD).
Scott “has a large ability to graph large chunks” of the material and “get us in that world. I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Grazer (DVD).
Josh Brolin, who plays the seamy, payoff-prone New York Detective Trupo, says that Scott “is manic in a way that’s not destructive,” and he’s very collaborative (DVD).
Grazer: Scott “gave propulsion, force to a narrative that is spread out…[with] multiple viewpoints” (DVD).
In short, Scott’s being workmanlike (and being creative secondary to this) helped get the fancy script into a coherent enough—if still complex—visually mediated story, and this shows how the film is visually sumptuous—with the intricate atmosphere suiting the sense of “old infrastructure infected by seedy goings-on,” which is something seen in the more Spartan French Connection.
There were 47 days of shooting (DVD) before the production crew went to Thailand
Music/“color” puts us into a time
A few notes on style and cultural bearings. The costumes, art direction, and much of the music are evocative of the early 1970s. I think this provides an esthetic patina to the film that helps convey the story: even while the Vietnam War still raged and provided attention-snaring news on TV, the Harlem streets could have the humid, seedy texture that seem a perfect fog to shroud nefarious goings-on like a concerted drug trade and cops doing shakedowns.
I remember a lot of the Black music of that time, and in a way I am fond of it in retrospect—some was prominent enough on the old WABC radio, with its high wattage (50,000 watts?) making it heard over several states, and its “canned” mono/reverbed sound and gimmicks and the edgy wit of its DJs, especially Dan Ingram. It may seem a little hard for young readers to understand now, but in the early 1970s, while average people’s tastes did diverge between categories (still fairly recognizable today) like pop, “album-oriented rock” (which became a radio format by about 1975), soul and funk, country and western, and so on, the mainstream media still channeled the bulk of different styles of music along a relatively small number of “conduits.” And because the New York
Various Black groups in the early ’70s became familiar on the radio. A select few include the musical group the Isley Brothers (which had started by the early 1960s, and which early on included Jimi Hendrix), which had hits in the early 1970s, and Isaac Hayes (e.g., “Shaft”). Stevie Wonder with his concept albums including such “dramatizing” songs like “Living for the City” were almost classic soundtracks of the cultural time. A little later, the Ohio Players, a funk group that had started by the early 1960s, had a couple hits by 1975 (which is slightly after this film’s period), “Fire” and “Love Rollercoaster,” the latter of which was a funk vamp (it sounds good in stereo, I think) that hinted at the disco to come very shortly.
Not only does this film include Sam & Dave’s relatively innocuous “Hold On! I’m Coming,” but it offers momentary fun with stuff that seems more attuned primarily to Black tastes: the more funk-like stuff seems reminiscent of James Brown and, perhaps, the more arty jazz of Miles Davis, as in his Bitches Brew. (A later piece of club music in the film sounds a bit like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” which didn’t come out until 1977.)
If I sound a little naïve here, I don’t know all this music as well as others would; but the fact I know it as much as I do at all shows how Black culture suffused a wider “popular” consciousness in the early ’70s more than it, arguably, has done since. Suffice it to say that the music roots the film in a historical period that today’s racists might find a “suitably ugly hallmark,” but to me the music takes us back, with a sense of some fond reminiscence, to a milieu, in all its purple glory, that had as much evocative color as it consorted with social turmoil and occasional disreputable matters (e.g., crime on the streets).
From a purer standpoint, it could be said that the period represented the height of the jazz influence on the wider arrays of pop music—jazz being a root of both the most edgy rock of the time and of the Black genres. That is, not only was specifically Black music enjoy a certain ferment and popularity in those days, but even rock music arguably had its most floridly visceral and artistic developments—such as, for one measure, the most energetic jazz-like drumming among—just in Englishmen—Keith Moon, Ginger Baker, John Bonham, and Mitch Mitchell.
Note: Jay-Z, the rap artist, wrote a concept album based on this film, according to the Wikipedia article on the film. He seems to have been so entranced by it that he felt moved to make a set of musical “back stories” for different scenes. That’s interesting, because I felt challenged to come “esthetically to terms with” the film in what seems generally the same way, and I don’t think I would if I didn’t remember the urban-arising culture from the early ’70s reflected in the music I could hear on WABC; and I and Jay-Z share about as much in common, culturally, as Donny Osmond and Al Sharpton. On the other hand, I think it’s imperative, or at least enlightening, for whites in this country to know how to enjoy Black music.
Now to the source of more ambiguity and controversy surrounding the film.
III. Frank Lucas: The heart of the matter
[This section isn't meant to sound as self-righteous as it might seem at times.]
All this technical discussion reflects this it is interesting to see how a movie of such scope, complexity, achievement, and flaws came into being, especially with the big names involved. A key reason for its being thrust into production was the money already spent on preproduction under its first envisioned director; the studio understandably could have felt that with as much preparation and expense as had been incurred, why not move ahead, even though the shooting schedule would be a bit rushed.
What makes the flaws a big problem primarily lies with the character and history of Frank Lucas. First, on his character.
The story the film lays out is interesting enough: amid a sprawling, grim situation, there is some unexpected admirable character traits at work in the muck—though the positive character efforts lie with Richie Roberts (while we remember the fictional elements to his character, as I noted earlier) for the vast bulk of the film, and appear in Lucas only late. But let’s be clear what Lucas’ story is: he is not of the more modern gang type of the Crips and the Bloods, or the more style-oriented rap/gangsta subculture in the U.S. today. Neither is he a sort of Malcolm X, though apparently New York Times critic Manohla Dargis felt that he was positioned as a sort of “[B]lack resistance” figure (Wiki). He is, as various commentators on the DVD say (and as the Roberts character spells out in the film), a sort of mob boss with his mob family working under him—like (I interpret) the fictional Corleone family, or the real-life Gambino family. But Lucas and his family are Black, working in Harlem and elsewhere in the New York
So while Frank Lucas, especially as portrayed in the self-possessed, classy performance by Denzel Washington, seems a magnetic, capable leader, he is a crime leader. The stark paradox of his “business” is conveyed in standard mob-film ways—such as in cross-cutting of the type we see in all three of the Godfather films between some solemn middle-class activity like a baby’s christening and some obviously appalling mob rubouts and such. Frank can charm his fiancee yet in an interposed shot we can glimpse his (memory of a) coldhearted killing of a competitor.
Now we know (not to trivialize the matter) that in more normal psychological contexts, men can have a way of “compartmentalizing” their areas of life in order to keep competent amid dissonant demands on them (Robert S. Weiss, Staying the Course: The Emotional and Social Lives of Men Who Do Well at Work [New York: The Free Press, 1990]). But in a Mafia leader’s case, this “compartmentalization” is taken to an extreme; his murderous behavior in some settings is walled off from his being a gentlemanly paterfamilias at home. We can’t help but regard such a character in awe, while not in admiration. We may ask, can he be redeemed? This is one challenge posed by Frank, very much similar to a (fictional) Vito or Michael Corleone, as would have been by a (real-life) John Gotti.
No doubt Frank Lucas, as Denzel Washington reflects on him, had—and still has, as he is alive—an unusual strength of personality. Washington
When, on the DVD, we hear the real Lucas speak, we have cause to ask a central question about him. He (wheelchair bound, and seeming in his seventies) has a Southern Black accent, and shows no advanced education; he elides his words, with a little dose of Black idiom and pacing, cramming his words together. He requires you to listen hard to get what’s he saying, though it turns out to be a compact amalgam of fairly regular-guy conceptualization and business-smarts analysis. The central question is, how did a man this smart get to be so bad? If he was going to lead his plentiful brothers and cousins, all of more average intelligence, into a sort of family business, why not into a legitimate business? Were social and economic conditions in the late 1960s so bad for Blacks that he felt he had no other choice?
It’s remarkable that, for a business model (according to the film), he set something up that was more efficient for cutting out middlemen, which both ensured him more profit and ensured—as would be peculiar to the heroin trade—a purer product (with fewer middle-men meaning fewer chances to cut the product down). One net result, that addicts who bought his product were all the more likely to be hooked, had a twofold consequence: (1) assuring him steady (and an increasing number of) customers and (2) wreaking havoc through the damage and occasional death-dealing of addiction. This was like a nightmare version of a sort of business linking entrepreneurial zeal (even the near-foolhardy courage to [allegedly] travel to *the Golden Triangle [historically straddling Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam]* during the Vietnam War to track down a supply of heroin from the source) to a distribution system that was all the more effective for working in the front-ready infrastructure and “center of the world” cache of New York City and its nearby urban areas. A similar business today that could “hide in near-plain sight” and have such panache might be a Ponzi scheme being operated under the color of a portentous association with New York
Lucas’ rise—and paying periodic tribute to his mentor, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, a sort of debonair Harlem gangster who was (arguably) less lethal than Lucas would turn out to be—seems like a somewhat banal version of how other notorious leaders arise, like Stalin rising on the back of the legacy of Lenin. It almost seems a self-parody that Johnson, in an opening scene, muses on the increasing soullessness of U.S. business, which Lucas presumably “imbibes at his knee”—when we later see what kind of business Lucas starts up.
That Lucas had a sense of destiny, and a way of marshalling his personal resources—though also a potential for sociopathy—is seen in an interesting personal-history fact mentioned in the DVD commentary, and not in the film, which latter tends not to look too much at Lucas’ “inner” personality other than in his operating as a businessman and discreet family man. Lucas had a point at which he engaged in a sort of mental exercise (whether once or more often, is not said)—which Washington calls “backtracking”—where he removed distractions from his life, apparently holed up in a dark, empty room, and arrived at appreciating what was essential to him, including the teachings of Bumpy Johnson. It sounds, if I may invoke musty philosophy, like a exercise of “Cartesian reductionism”—that if, following Rene Descartes, putting doubt in everything you had understood or put faith in as true, arrived at what you could understand as irreducibly, self-evidently true (“I think, therefore I am”) and building up on that footing to a true understanding of aspects of the world and man’s place in it. (You’d have to take a philosophy course to understand what this is, if you don’t.) As Lucas himself says, after you have removed the distractions, “if you really, really think about” what is important, you can do anything.
This sounds like a mystical episode for a man who had felt bereft of any source of value in his life after Bumpy died—rather like a cultist whose leader is suddenly gone. What Lucas arrived at resolving to do with his life (with his heroin business) seems like a sociopath’s choice, of course. But we end up seeing a portrait of a man, through the film’s labyrinthine intrigue and evocative sultry environs in the societally-stressed early 1970s, about whom we again must ask, If he could end up being great, why not doing something healthy and supportive of his community? The fact that, as Pileggi notes in DVD commentary, Lucas ends up being an adherent of American business ideals in a certain purist way, and we can add that this is something of an ironic comment on American society, similar to The Godfather, when Michael and Kay are talking in a coming-to-terms manner, and she says that senators and the like don’t have people killed as Michael’s father does, and Michael says, “Now who’s being naïve?” If American business practice is so holy, can’t a hardened crook “redeem” himself by embracing it too? No, we say; American business practice is a tool, and any tool can be used to bad ends. We must ask, What value does it serve to enable a good life?
IV. Richie Roberts as a hero, and remaining questions
It is in the form of Richie Roberts that the redemptive character-element of the movie (or the angel aiming toward resolution, so to speak) slowly drills its way along. In his story braided with Lucas’, this cop whose ostracism from corrupt law enforcement organizations—peers being on the take and thus seeming like an analogue of the crooked Mafia that Lucas sets up—leaves Roberts (with his honorable interest in serving the law, complete with sneaked-in law school on his off-hours) to be the cop in one of the best positions, and most motivated, to track down whoever is at the heart of the lethal heroin ring he has been tasked with investigating, that heart turning out to be Lucas. Roberts’ former police partner has been killed after becoming addicted to “Blue Magic,” Lucas’ brand-named potent heroin; this presumably further steels Roberts’ resolve to get to the bottom of the havoc Lucas is wreaking.
Though Roberts has family life that is messy, with a bitter child-custody battle, and suggests him to be a sort of Popeye Doyle, far and away married to his work (the Wikipedia article suggests that the real Roberts objected to this fictionalized element, because he never had children; see also End note 2), Roberts’ seriousness makes him the key “Lucas-seeking missile” that brings Lucas to account. (The amount of private-life foibles and messing around attributed to Roberts in the film seems a little overdone. Once, there is a even chance for unexpected comedy: when he appears to be having sex with his female attorney in a kitchen, she says, “F**k me like a lawyer, not a cop”—and we viewers can ask, Is that the only choice she has?)
The larger story is a parable of sorts about two (arguable) geniuses whose roles in life potentiate their eventually becoming entwined: a genius of a ruthless Black mafioso and a cop with messy personal life whose tough adherence to his honest professional perspective makes him the hero of this story.
This film became quite complex for me to discuss; I don’t quite know why, other than it turned out to be seductive esthetically, promising and admirable thematically, and with potential for some allusions to real-life issues. But the last qualm we have—and it’s big—is how far this film strays from reality, and whether it was necessary for the story to contain so much fiction. And on that, I don’t have a good answer.
Here is where the history of Frank Lucas, not his character alone, raises controversy, and that is outside the film’s story and its integrity and value as a genre work of art. It could be said that the real Lucas provides some solid enough footing for a story of the somewhat embellished type that was made; but when the story makes some allegations about some serious matters concerning law-enforcement entities or the Army, we are in a more “political” area in which fact-finding becomes important, but (to me, so far) is a hard area to work with.
The Wikipedia articles on the film and on Frank Lucas seem to contain identical material on the controversy surrounding this film’s story, as if some Wikipedia contributor(s) made a thorough effort to try to set the record straight. Despite the staunch comments in the lawsuit-related and controversy-reflective material, I am left with a question about so broad an issue as what percentage of the film is fiction? Fifty percent? More? If so much, why make the film? Or, at least, why market it originally—as apparently was done—as if it was based (not just “loosely based on” or “inspired by”) on a true story?
The original Lucas story might have been interesting simply for its not only being novel but true, offering lessons about human nature to that extent. But why tart it up so much? OK, the Richie Roberts family stuff might have made for a more crowd-pleasing movie. But why fabricate a lot of Lucas’ life? Indeed, how much of this part of the film’s story is untrue?
With The Godfather, we know we are dealing with fiction, but we can relate the fiction to real life judiciously. With The French Connection, especially if we listen to director William Friedkin’s during-the-movie comments, we see how real life had to be boiled down to make an accessible film story, where the amount of fictionalization doesn’t matter so much. But the story of Frank Lucas, as described in an “elevator pitch,” is more edifying for being true to life. What use do we have for a largely fictionalized Lucas story (aside from it being a kind of Scarface, which incidentally I never saw)?
We have an entertaining movie, but if the film is mostly fiction, the semi-tragedy of a capable Black man becoming a master criminal via American business ideals may seem something of a lark, or a cheeky exercise of grandstanding—somewhat similar to the film’s minor contention of Lucas’ heroin being shipped via Army planes—if we don’t know, as we do more with the story of a Malcolm X, to what extent the spectacular tale we see actually had its seeds in the real life of our troubled nation’s growth.
More on this issue later, in a shorter Part 2.
End notes
1. In the area of credibility of the film’s story, I will prepare a Part 2 to this entry’s Part 1 (Part 2 will be much shorter!). A title card near the end of the film, according to a couple sources, refers to (as what would apparently later be the aggrieved parties) “New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency” (see this ABC News piece), but the plaintiffs in the lawsuit (which was filed in U.S. District Court) were apparently from the U.S. (?) Drug Enforcement Administration (see ABC News reference just cited). This is a temporarily tricky area to get clear on, and this isn’t my final word on who the aggrieved parties who sued were.
2. An article that took this film to task, in The Toronto Star, in January 2008 has Jacobson quoted as saying, “The magazine piece is a presentation of this guy’s story and that’s what he had to say”—i.e., it echoed Lucas’ story and didn’t opt to verify his claims. The same article also describes Richie Roberts’ character as an amalgam of different detectives and prosecutors.
References
DVD = 2008 DVD of the film.
