Beautiful, elegaic storytelling

Rating: 10/10 (25 December 2000)

I decided, on Christmas Eve, to reacquaint myself with an old friend- Sergio Leone's heavyweight gangster epic, which I had previously watched in two sittings, 10 years previously, at Uni.
I was rewarded with a movie of tremendous vision and creative style as well as emotional integrity. When you take an idiosyncratic, brilliant, stylish director like Leone, his composer counterpart, Morricone, and a cast including two of the foremost actors of their generation (de Niro and Woods) then you have an idea of the kind of quality this film has. In fact, the only gangster movie(s) I've seen that match it are the first two Godfathers (in fact Leone almost directed those too... now that would have been interesting).
In contrast to earlier Leone Westerns, the characters are more fully developed- although the detachment of the characters in these movies made for a more rollercoaster, loose style of cinema, no one was ever going to win an award appearing in one, although they were all great movies.
Although I could tell I was in a Leone movie almost from the beginning, what was different was the inner lives of the characters dictated the way the plot flowed in a pleasing way. I also think that the performance de Niro put in was the best of any film I've seen him in, and that includes any Scorcese picture. To make the audience actually care about a character who does such evil (including raping the woman he loves) is a towering achievement. The apparent effortlessness with which he achieves this is a mark of true greatness. Leone's style of filmmaking, with its long silences and pauses and (in this case) slow pace suit de Niro's style of acting perfectly. It's a real pity that they never had the chance to work together again.
I think this a great film, and, at 3 3/4 hours, it kept me at least interested and often gripped all the way through. Why are Hollywood studios scared of movies like this? Some people out there love them.