Dark Leone

Rating: 8/10 (31 July 2014)

Sergio Leone made epic cinema - he understood events resonate only when you set them up properly.
In the 4 hours extended edition of Once Upon a Time in America, it's forty minutes before the first flashback to the initial storyline kicks in, with the protagonists as members of a teenage gang roaming the streets of early 20th century New York; it's a whole hour before Noodles (played as a child by Scott Tiler, as an adult by Robert De Niro in one of his iconic performances) meets Max (Rusty Jacobs / James Woods, never better), his criminal partner.
Leone's darkest movie - where his trademark male friendships are betrayed and broken - Once Upon a Time in America has a complex structure jumping back and forth in time, following Noodles' meteoric rise and fall during the Prohibition era as he poisons the relationships with his best friend Max and the only woman he loves, Deborah (Jennifer Connelly in a great cinematic debut / Elizabeth McGovern).
As an aside, while I loathe sexual violence in movies, the rape scene in this film, although highly disturbing, is among the rare ones not included for cheap sleazy drama but necessary character-wise: Noodles has become so accustomed to violence, he cannot cope with Deborah's refusal and hurts one of the few people he genuinely cares about. The criminal life brings the wealth with which he attempts to win her over, but eventually ruins her life and turns Noodles himself into a miserable, lonely man full of regrets.
Classic Leone themes - like the inherent violence of civilized society in general and of business in particular - are given a darker spin. Max morphs into a businessman / politician involved in the higher spheres of crime, someone who doesn't get his hands dirty (like Morton in Once Upon a Time in the West), severing his ties with Noodles until he chooses his own karmic comeuppance.
Or is the whole story an opium-induced hallucination by Noodles as a young man? It's possible, but besides the point: the ending is a way to show Noodles trapped into his own self-inflicted nightmare of violence and betrayal.