Leone's final Jigsaw puzzle

Rating: 8/10 (23 January 2010)

This is truly a complex film to watch! Leone's final testament to his cinematic artistry and his most beloved project is a movie that draws inevitable comparisons to such films as The godfather and Novecento. There are many elements in common with these pictures: the chronological leaps in the story, the gangster background, a love-hate friendship, all of which are treated in a unique way that distinguishes this movie from his pears and gives it Leone's brand.
Robert DeNiro is David "Noodles" Aronson, a young hoodlum turned gangster that, as we are told in the beginning of the movie, has betrayed his friends and partners and so goes in to hiding. Several years later he returns to track down a mysterious person who found him and somehow knows all about his betrayal all those years ago. This premise stars off a series of flashbacks from Noddles that, piece by piece shed some light in to previous events and scenes from the beginning which to the viewers didn't make much sense.
Leone's storytelling is slow. It was in his previous two movies and much more so in Once upon a time in America. That in itself might detach even the more patient viewers. Truly he aimed very high with this picture, and if you take on the suggested comparison I mentioned, you have DeNiro's "Noodles" a tragic character that ends up losing everything and everyone in the end, much like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, or some of the characters from David Lean's movies for that matter! So, the epic proportions of Once upon a time have a precedent that must have been present in Leone's mind when he conceived it. Even more: Franco Arcalli, co-writer of the movie, was also co-writer, and editor of Novecento, so you can't help wondering how much of the "two men friendship" motif transpired from that Bertolucci film. But I think the similarities stop there! In Once upon a time in America the love triangle between Noodles, Maxie and Deborah come to the central fore, and the prohibition/gangster plot, despite providing long pauses in the narrative, serve as a stylistic background to the main theme. Leone was a passionate for American History, as his Western movies confirm, so it would be expected that he explored an American period (the prohibition era) with so much elements in common with the violent and mythic Wild West. Furthermore, to add to the complexity of this film he introduced yet again an unexpected turn in the story witch unfolds in the very end, and keep you guessing about what you have just seen. It was so in the end of Once upon a time in the west and in Duck you sucker, and here you get the idea (as suggested by Leone himself) that the whole movie is Noodles opium based dream, and you really never leave the Chinese theater where he is smoking his pipe in self pity for his actions! Complex? Very much. In the end you get the feeling that Leone got through his point rather more effectively in his earlier western Once upon a time in the west. But enough with the critiques! If you can get through the slow pace of the movie, and really sink in the intended suggestions in the narrative the reward will be, as the whole movie in itself, grandiose and epic. After all this is a Sergio Leone film. As a "master painter of pictures", if you don't quite grasp the meaning of the painting you can still get reward by just admiring the colors. You have the beautifully composed shots of 1930's New York through the cinematography of Tonino Delli Colli (Leone's regular collaborator); the extreme close-ups that depict character emotions like with no other director; Leone's trademark eyes close up which are reduced to a single, beautiful transition shot between the elder and the younger Noodles watching his beloved Deborah; the final showdown, which evolved into a duel of words between the two friends; and last but not the least, Ennio Morricone at the helm of the soundtrack (composed prior to the film) conveying the dream like feel to movie, both idyllic (in Deborah's theme) and cruel (in Dominic's death scene). My advice? Whach it! After all, this was Leone's final masterpiece!