Visually stunning but incongruous screenplay

Rating: 6/10 (14 January 2008)

"Once Upon A Time In America" is both great and terrible. Ambitious and lavish, Director Sergio Leone's epic is an obvious attempt to create a work on par with Coppola's "The Godfather." Wonderful score and great cinematography in a decade-spanning story that wouldn't seem so long had it been written better.
Often compared to "The Godfather," OUATIA has nothing to do with that story or characters except a parallel time line. OUATIA is about NY Jews, and this group of childhood friends who become gangsters in NYC during Prohibition. This film is not about Italians or the Italian Mafia, and the difference was largely missed by director Leone. He didn't do his homework on these characters and the history of Jews in New York. The characters and scenes depicted of what Brooklyn life was like during the first half of the 20th century are seen through Mr. Leone's non-American imagination. These guys are not "organized crime," they were just a bunch of pals from the 'hood.
This film hits close to my family. My grandfather had a Kosher restaurant in Brooklyn in the 1920's-1940's, similar to the family restaurant owned by "Moe's" family. My father spent most of his childhood in the kitchen. I have photographs of Pop's restaurant that could have been research for "Fat Moe's." My father reminisced fondly of eating charlotte russe pastries.
Director Sergio Leone and Art Director Carlo Simi missed the mark on so much. The bond between all these characters was their Jewish identity, not family ties as in "The Godfather." Although these boys were not observant, at that time they would have been thoroughly Jewish in culture and very involved with their families, despite what they did when they were out of the apartment. Why wasn't even one of the lead actors Jewish? It's laughable. Only actor Larry Rapp as "Fat Moe" is Jewish and gets the mannerisms, gestures and pronunciations right. De Niro naturally gives decent NY/Brooklyn accent. The other lead actors never get it right. Elizabeth McGovern's accent is so awful she sounds like she's trying to speak after major oral surgery. We only get a few tastes of these characters' Jewish identity, such as when they toast Noodles' return, but even then most of them mispronounce "L'chaim" badly. The scene of the first night of Passover, where all the men in the neighborhood stream out into the street wearing talit (prayer shawls) makes a great visual cinematic statement that this is a Jewish neighborhood, but it is factually wrong; the men would not have worn their talit in the street. Burt Young tells a disparaging story about Jews, and the boys barely exchange glances. After the diamond robbery, Noodles and Max discuss their future working for Pesci, "Frankie," but Director Leone misses half of the point; Noodles not only doesn't want a boss; he doesn't want to get involved with the Italian Mafia because his crew are not Italians and that's why he knows they wouldn't survive. After Max staged his own death, then reappears at the end of the film as a successful business man now US Secretary of Commerce, he's reinvented himself as a gentile named "Bailey," because only a gentile could have risen to that status at that time in America, but that point is never clearly made.
There are many errors in continuity, geography, and anachronisms in props, set dressing, and scenery that confuse the audience as to where the action is taking place and what year it is- if you are knowledgeable about architecture, geography, and technology they are obvious.
The very first exterior shot of "Brooklyn" in the 1910's is obviously European and doesn't resemble Brooklyn at all. Most of the interiors are larger and grander than what they would really have been in New York, ridiculous past artistic license. Fat Moe's family restaurant is too large and sprawling; there were no buildings in Brooklyn that large, and the adjacent storeroom with the skylight was not believable. No speakeasy in New York City was ever that large; it came across as a glorious nightclub on par with a ballroom, and not a clandestine booze joint in the back of a building. The lavish hotel on Long Island where Noodles takes Deborah for dinner doesn't resemble anything that was on Long Island ever; the location is so obviously in Europe, plus the extremely poor choice of costumes for the orchestra. Did Leone and Simi really think that the Gare Du Nord train station in Paris could pass for Grand Central Station, an icon of American architecture?
With 6 credited Italian screenwriters, it's no wonder that the storyline has huge holes and wandered away from Harry Grey's book "The Hoods." The film begins with the murder of Noodles' girlfriend, and we never find out who she is and she is never mentioned again; it's just a gratuitous murder to set the "gangster" tone of the story. Robert De Niro appears as elderly "Noodles" in 1968 and goes to find Fat Moe at his family restaurant. Noodles asks Fat Moe about his history, and we eventually learn what has happened to all the other characters. We never find out what Noodles has been doing for the past 35 years. There are too many times where connecting story lines or information is left out.
Performances are uneven. De Niro is great, but there was no on-screen chemistry between him and James Woods, which makes their scripted deep friendship not believable. Burt Young steals the show with a cameo in one scene that is both disgusting and hilarious. Tuesday Weld is excellent as "Max's" masochistic nymphomaniac older girlfriend. Treat Williams plays a Jimmy Hoffa-type union boss, but his storyline is lost so his scenes don't connect with anything else. The ending of the film is just a big question mark of "what happened?" but not in an intriguing way. It's an unsatisfying and contrived mystery.