pipe dreams

Rating: 9/10 (6 April 2007)

what a self-indulgent, self-pitying hero for a three-and-a-half-hour movie - Robert de Niro as Noodles grown up goes around, thinking, oh, what has America come to, crime isn't enchanted the way it was when i was a kid. and the movie goes with him - it's a shrine to his feelings and his lost childhood. it's the first two 'Godfather' movies turned into kitsch, or 'The Great Gatsby' without Nick, told from, say, Daisy's point of view. there are lost of questions that a cynical viewer could ask himself and smirk at, like, what has Noodles been doing for 20-odd years? just farting around, thinking about his lost childhood? but you don't ask those questions while your watching, or, you do but your still blown away by it. it's a great movie movie, full of brilliant set-pieces. my favorite is the one where Noodles rapes Deborah (inexplicably, at least to me) in the back of a moving car, and then the driver, disgusted, stops the car and makes Noodles get out and drives away, and Noodles is stranded in a wealthy, wealthy neighbourhood at dawn, and it's deserted and the dew is on the grass. mmmm. there's something about this mixture of kids and the first half of the 20th century and crime and sex and opium and lost friendship and mystery and sadness and failure that really touches my imagination, in the same way that Doctorow's 'Billy Bathgate' did. this movie is the opposite of realistic. Pauline kael used the word 'billowing' to describe it, and that's the perfect word for all Sergio Leone movies - at some level, they're all ridiculous, but they're beautifully made and structured and very distinctive. the Ennio Morricone score is the best movie score i have ever heard, and it fits the movie perfectly. there's one big flaw i think: teeny little jennifer connelly, incredibly beautiful even as a little girl, as young Deborah, doesn't seem like a trained actress, her line readings have a hollow, amateurish sound, but she has such a vivid presence anyway that Elizabeth McGovern as the adult Deborah is really disappointing. you want McGovern to live up to Connelly, not the other way around. they don't match at all. and ps i know i sound like Pauline kael. it's a curse.