a sprawling mess of a masterpiece

Rating: 8/10 (21 December 2010)

Sergio Leone's opulent, operatic fairy tale of Jewish gangsters in New York City wants to be the 'Citizen Kane' of organized crime movies, tracing the roots of gang loyalty and corruption from childhood to old age in a complex leapfrogging structure spanning more than half a century. The full length, belatedly released, restores to the film the astonishing scope and depth of feeling left on the cutting room floor before its initial opening, and boasts several excellent performances, led by Robert De Niro as the erstwhile street punk who betrays his friends in order to save them. The ambiguous script is still a textbook lesson in narrative overkill, with half a dozen writers contributing episode after incident after colorful digression, and the accumulative effect of the film's three-and-a-half hour running time is finally more exhausting than exhilarating. It's certainly the late director's richest (and, in many ways, most accomplished) feature, mixing equal parts elegance and crudity, not unlike a long, beautifully written poem peppered with gutter expletives.