Light Version of The Wire

Rating: 8/10 (22 May 2012)

Sort of like Polanski's The Ghost Writer or Spielberg's Munich, Ridley Scott's American Gangster has been one of those movies by a big director that no one ever talks about but that I rated highly without remembering why. Having now also seen the extended version, I do think it is a very good film, although I can see why it is neglected alongside his far more memorable sci-fi output.
"The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room", Denzel Washington's character Frank Lucas says early in the film. That's what makes him so strong; while clearly the main character, he is one of the quietest, not just due to his taciturnity, but also in the way he dresses and carries himself. In fact, during the opening scene, where Clarence Williams ominously talks about the degeneration of America and how "the grocery store on the corner is now a supermarket", it takes a few good minutes before Washington says anything. Deviating from these principles, by wearing a huge fur coat in public and starting to distribute drugs in larger scale and "pushing out all the middlemen", which Williams also complains about, is the beginning of his downfall.
That's sort of how the film at large operates. It is very understated, and apart from the brutal first shot, probably less violent than the average gangster film, interrupted by just a few outbursts from Washington.
Other than that, the film is steeped in the classic gangster movie tradition (case in point: it uses the score from The Godfather or something very similar, but with different instruments) and does not bring anything new to the genre, but at least it manages to take a lot of the good aspects of such films, making it a very solid effort all things considered. What I especially like is that it depicts the gangsters and the policemen in equal depth, without romanticizing either side, which made me think of it as a (much less ambitious) light version of The Wire. The drug unit's office is a seedy looking warehouse or something that even looks a bit like that of McNulty et al (and it has Stringer Bell!). And to be sure, like in Baltimore where one generation of dealers replaces the previous, the dope world in American Gangster neither starts nor ends with Frank Lucas.