So good and yet so bad

Rating: 7/10 (1 February 2012)

The 229 minute version of Once Upon a Time in America is too long because there is a repetitiveness in the presentation of the themes. Having said that, it is also true that the attention to detail and the lavish sets make the nearly four our of watching never a chore. Then there is also Robert De Niro who lifts the movie above an ordinary gangster flick. Arguably, one of the best things about the movie is the music, but since God Bless America was used so movingly in the ending of The Deer Hunter (also with De Niro), it was in poor taste to use it as the final song six years later again so stridently. The actors playing the gangsters as boys and those playing the gangsters as adults are all fine. With all that, what a pity that the movie finally fails. It does so in the sense that the ending is a farce, something that sits poorly with an epic movie, and it does so in the sense that it makes the mistake of practicing alchemy, of distilling friendship and love and sensitivity from a group of extraordinary vicious men, murderers whose sense of humor is expressed in swapping babies in a nursery. The viewer is asked to believe that these cockroaches are capable of great sensitivity. Deborah calls one of them a cockroach early on and she should have taken herself more seriously for she could have known she was right. The director wanted it both ways, violence and love undiluted from the same source. Kiss kiss, bang bang: it can be done, but not like this.