Beautiful, exhausting, emotional, existential and frustrating gangster epic

Rating: 7/10 (30 July 2019)

My opinion of this film has changed a lot over the past 25 years. When I first saw it as a teenager, I was interested but confused and bored for most of the running time for being too talky. Later in my snobby cinephile phase of 20's, I found it to be one of the most extraordinary and mystical films I'd seen outside of early Herzog and Vittorio De Sica. The bad "old age" makeup always bothered me though and took me right out of the movie. Nowadays I find it a greatly flawed film which aimed too high for what its script ultimately achieved.
Almost everything technically comes off amazingly polished considering that this was basically a bigger-budgeted Italian crime movie as they'd gotten so good at during the 1970's. Sergio Leone handles every frame with an OCD level of craftsmanship and the production design and cinematography are as good as you'll ever find. Robert De Niro, James Woods, and many of the supporters bring their A-game. Personally I would have loved to have seen more of Joe Pesci, Burt Young, Treat Williams, Frank Gio, Danny Aiello, Richard Bright, etc. but their roles all come and go extremely quickly and often with no resolution. It's a shame, but this film is not really interested in portraying a conventional kind of narrative. Instead it plays more like a very languid, slow-paced dream for better or worse, including its share of impressive pathos and frustrating red herrings.
While portions of the film have a humorous tone such as the baby-swap scam and some of the shenanigans of the flashback child actors, it's overall an extremely sad experience most explicitly conveyed by the graphic rape scene and extremely cynical presentations of relationships and sexuality. The women gravitate toward the men who treat them the worst and lifelong friendships dissolve at the drop of a hat once political expediency demands otherwise. What little violence there is feels extremely gritty and punches hard, but almost all of it comes early in the film and practically nothing of note happens the final half hour.
Overall I just feel like too much is missing from this film to be a fulfilling experience and possibly if was all left on the cutting room floor. Who was Frank Gio's character working for? What happened with the union? Why all the emphasis on the main gang being Jewish when it doesn't seem to affect anything later in the film? Why the trash compactor truck? I would recommend this to film buffs as it's much more well-polished than something like GANGS OF NEW YORK. However it's not nearly as exciting or as enlightening of a view of the criminal underworld as any of Scorsese's, Coppola's, or Brian De Palma's forays into similar territory. It avoids a lot of the organized crime movie cliches but to a such point where I wonder if the narrative would have worked even better outside of the genre.
As fan of eurocult and B-movies, I have to say it's still a delight catching glimpses of the likes of Salvatore Billa, Bruno Bilotta, Olga Karlotos, Mario Brega, etc. sharing the screen with American crime cinema actors in a major film. A lot of the New York exterior sets found their way into several Italian post apocalyptic films in the early 80's including RUSH, A MAN CALLED RAGE, ESCAPE FROM THE BRONX, and 2019: AFTER THE FALL OF NEW YORK.