American Gangster
"American Gangster," you'll notice, is not called "American Gangsta." The director Ridley Scott and the screenwriter Steve Zaillian take us back to an era when a drug lord had some class. His jeans did not sag, because he didn't wear jeans. He did, however, wear chinchilla, lots of it. And as a show of community spirit, he gave back to the people. In this movie, we know this to be true since we see Denzel Washington throwing Thanksgiving turkeys from a big truck to the outstretched arms of Harlem masses. And what you think is, "Gosh, I hope nobody gets hurt."
But the man Washington plays, Frank Lucas, doesn't want to hurt anybody - unless he's just set you on fire then shot you or has bashed your head into a piano. Or unless he or his associates have sold you heroin. Right. How could I forget that?
Well, "American Gangster" isn't about heroin. It's about business, and the movie wants to make a case for Lucas, the real-life kingpin, as a risk-taking businessman. Maybe "American Entrepreneur" sounded too much like something on CNBC. But Scott and Zaillian, who adapted the movie from Mark Jacobson's New York magazine article about Lucas's rise and fall, mix boilerplate crime-epic frills with pointed observations about a black male rising to the top of a vast industry dominated by Italians. The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.
To drive home the legal angle, Russell Crowe lives in the movie's other half, using an unforgivable Noo Joysie accent. He plays Richie Roberts, a New Jersey cop and aspiring prosecutor promoted to head the federal narcotics squad that's trying to shut Lucas down. Roberts is upstanding at work (he turns in the million or so dollars he finds in a car trunk) and a mess at home; he's in the middle of a custody battle.
Lucas, meanwhile, came up through the Harlem underworld as the driver and collector for Bumpy Johnson (Clarence Williams III), the dapper crook who tried to keep the mob out of the neighborhood numbers racket. (Laurence Fishburne played Johnson in a 1997 shoot-'em-up about his life called "Hoodlum.")
By the early 1970s, Lucas takes Johnson's pride-of-ownership mantle and expands it. He cuts out the middleman in drug dealership, importing thousands of kilos of pure heroin from Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, via the body bags of US soldiers. Twice the quality for half the price, Lucas says of his Blue Magic powder. The movie has him and his soldier contact (Roger Guenveur Smith) sailing down a jungle river to a poppy field "Apocalypse Now"-style.
Business booms. To underscore just how booming it is, Scott gives us a montage of people shooting up and junkies walking down the streets scratching their arms, while Lucas monitors sales from his car. Right away, he moves his family from North Carolina to his deluxe mansion on a hill (Ruby Dee plays Mama Lucas). He marries Miss Puerto Rico (Lymari Nadal) and puts his five brothers to work; two of them are played by Chiwetel Ejiofor and the rapper Common (in a nifty bit of casting, another, dissimilar rapper, T.I., plays Common's son). When Lucas isn't sporting a tweed jacket to negotiate with the be-tweeded Mafioso (Armand Assante) miffed with Lucas's marketplace success, he's trying to avoid sharing his fortune with the NYPD, represented here by a scary moustache that's wearing Josh Brolin.
The contrasting irony between Lucas and Roberts is meant to have a neon glow: We can't miss their differences. The criminal, for instance, is the better family man. The movie jumps back and forth between its two halves until, of course, they meet in rather shameless fashion.
Some of Lucas's grandiosity verges on camp. But Denzel Washington couldn't do camp if John Waters assembled the tent for him. So when Lucas curses out a servant for wiping a bloodstain from his $25,000 alpaca rug when he should be blotting it out, you laugh both because that kind of flamboyance is ridiculous and because Washington doesn't find it funny (which almost makes it campy anyway).
The entire movie is caught between being a work of seriousness and a work of absurdity. And when Joe Morton shows up with a blond moustache and what looks like a dead beaver on his head and Cuba Gooding Jr. jives it up as a flashy rival of Lucas's, it's absurdity you want. Camp might have been too extreme a tone. But gentler, riskier hands could have fashioned a kind of social comedy from a movie about the black guy who shook up the drug world. You'd need real characters, though, to bring out the truth in the comedy, and they aren't here. Like Gooding, Ejiofor goes for something appreciably funny, but the movie isn't interested in that. They're playing screw-ups.
Besides, Scott, Zaillian, and producer Brian Grazer seem to think they're really showing us something surprising. But this is "New Jack City" with Oscar winners. (Incredibly, the movie ends the year "New Jack City" came out, creating a kind of reverse drug-flick continuum.) The central idea of "American Gangster" - and it's not a bad one - is that, on the one hand, Lucas is like John H. Johnson, the creator of Ebony, or
The moral part of those analogies seems beside the point. The movie has Lucas argue that Bumpy Johnson was as important as Martin Luther King, a jaw-dropping line of thought that might require some follow up. The movie suggests, by the logic of its premise, that the thousands of Harlemites hooked on Blue Magic were better off because the man pushing it was black and not Italian. Lucas seems to have been mistaken for some kind of freedom fighter.
No matter how many shots Scott gives us of babies crying over half-dead junkie mothers, "American Gangster" is scarcely convincing as social-problem filmmaking. It's a cautionary tale with a broken yellow light. The movie prefers the high of big business. When the title cards tell us at the end that Lucas served an abbreviated 15-year sentence for cooperating with Roberts, the audience cheers. Scott, like Lucas, appears to know his customer. We ride the ups and downs of a rise-and-fall drug-lord tale like a roller coaster. There's nothing fun about those 15 years and the ones that follow.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
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