leone's finest (4) hours

Rating: 10/10 (31 May 2001)

Where to begin? This hasn't always been on my list of favorite movies. I first encountered it when I was 9 or 10 and my parents let me watch the first videotape (first half) before deciding it wasn't appropriate for me. I didn't see it complete until five years later. Since then, I have seen it about half a dozen more times including once in a theater (crappy print, but still). I wrote an essay about it for my entrance paper to get into the graduate program at NYU and since I got in, OUATIA will always have a particularly special place in my heart. I now throw it out as my favorite film when people ask and the reasons that I love it are perhaps best encapsulated by Leone himself in the biography Something to Do with Death that came out last year:
"I make fairy tales for grown-ups. I pay scrupulous attention to detail and making the setting realistic so I can focus on making the story mythic."
In a nutshell, that's all his films, but in particular the one that took fifteen years to get off the ground and ate up three full years of his life. OUATIA is above all else, for film lovers, with its spiderweb plot drifting through the decades and back and its deliberate, dreamy pace. It is also the finest gangster film ever, precisely because it focuses on the lowest rung of criminals and succeeds in never making the gangster life look glamorous. The friendship between Noodles and Max surprises with its refusal to paint one as the "grounded" half and the other as the "loose cannon." They're both given to violent outbursts and both capable of (increasingly diminishing) moments of tenderness and compassion. This makes Noodles'(DeNiro) betrayal of Max (Woods) all the more haunting, and since Noodles's guilt is what drives the entire film, it's crucial for that to come across.
Much has been said about whether the film is a simple story, told out of sequence, a flashback, a flashforward, or an opium dream/ nightmare. I opt for the latter interpretation and without spoiling any of the film's surprises, consider this: Move the last shot of the film to the very beginning and everything else falls into place. The beauty of the closing shot (and it is one of the greatest closing shots in cinema) is the way it reveals nothing and everything.
There isn't even time to go into everything else that moves the spirit (Morricone's mythic score, Tonino Delli Colli's cinematography that finds the right tone for each of the three decades portrayed, the art design, particularly in the 1923 sequence with the children). I am not automatically a fan of long films but Leone creates a world that is worth falling into for 227 minutes)
A note about the running time: the bio reveals that the film runs 229 minutes outside the US, the extra two minutes being from the rape of Deborah. No longer version exists. Leone had wanted the film to run for 250 to 265 minutes but the footage that exists to make it longer was never dubbed to do so.