"Believe in yesterday"

Rating: 7/10 (5 March 2011)

The old genres of classic Hollywood were bundles of convention and cliché, familiar in their tone and romantic in their recreation of an idea. And while Hollywood itself would change massively in the modern era, those movie stylings lingered on in the memories of those who had grown up with them. Hence it was just as likely to be European filmmakers who were documenting America's history on screen, albeit through the haze of genre-tinted spectacles. Once Upon a Time in America is celebrated Italian director Sergio Leone's tribute, not to prohibition-era America, but to the classic gangster genre which once claimed to portray it.
Perhaps the most striking thing about Once Upon a Time in America is its wealth of detail and compelling atmosphere. The production design is really impressive, with sets to feast the eyes on and realistically thronging street scenes. Leone and his art director Carlo Simi have struck a balance between throwing in stuff that makes sense in context and stuff that conjures up a certain feeling in the scene. A good example is when Noodles flees the opium den and makes his way to Moe's, and the streets are strewn with streamers for a forlorn, after-party appearance. Many of the 1922 scenes feature billows of smoke rising up from vents, for that dreamy, wistful look. Sound design plays an important part here, the creaking of a lift creating a tense build-up to a shooting in the way that one of Ennio Morricone's dirges might have done in a Leone Western. Morricone's music is still a key presence of course, tying various thoughts together across the decades, for example the eerie honky-tonk Yiddish theme that plays to introduce Moe's place in the opening scenes and again in the first set of 1968 scenes.
The principle cast for this one are chosen from the front ranks of contemporary Hollywood talent. Robert De Niro was by this time the archetypal New York mobster, so clearly the obvious choice, even if he has to swap his trademark Italian American accent for a Bronx one. He is however a little more serene and meditative than his usual exuberant gangster acts, and the quiet dignity with which he portrays the older Noodles is especially good. James Woods provides excellent support. I love his spontaneous anger in kicking Tuesday weld out of the office after a few words from De Niro. Character actors Burt Young and Danny Aiello do the job of making a memorable impact during their brief appearances, Aiello in particular giving us some great comic relief. Tuesday weld is very good too. A handful of the other cast members are guilty of a little overacting, but I'm not in a vindictive enough mood to name names.
Once Upon a Time in America may be a far cry from the surreal expanses and moustachioed bandidos of Leone's Westerns, but much of the director's visual style has survived intact. He's still just as in love with the gritty close-up as ever, bringing an unusual prominence to the mole on Robert De Niro's right cheek. For some of the actor's roles this would be covered by the make-up department, or at least the director would favour his left profile. Here however not only is De Niro's juvenile counterpart given a conspicuous mole for consistency, Leone even shows De Niro at three-quarter angles against a dark background, highlighting the mole in outline, for example when he looks at the photo of Deborah at Moe's. It's pertinent, adding an obvious flaw to those otherwise handsome features. And then of course there is Leone's painstaking slowness and protracted non-dialogue scenes, which are what make this the 230-minute behemoth that it is, since there's only really enough script here for a two-hour movie. As usual, Leone makes these unspoken moments a dance of tense mannerisms and darting eyes, which (just about) renders them watchable.
But perhaps it is Once Upon a Time in America's gargantuan sprawl that is its undoing. There is nothing wrong per se with a 3hr+ movie, nor is there necessarily a problem with slow, methodical pacing. The trouble is that this picture sacrifices narrative clarity for its stylisation. I don't mean the confusing timeline-hopping; that's nothing that a repeat viewing won't sort out. However there is clearly something missing and in spite of their length some segments of the movie seem horribly truncated. There ought to be at least one more 1922 scene that brings out the comradely warmth between the boys, and between Max and Noodles in particular. It's not enough that we see it – we as an audience have to feel it. Instead we seem to be hurrying from one key incident to another with no time for character development. And in 1933 Max and Noodles seem continually at odds – there is not enough evidence that their friendship is still strong despite their disagreements, and this means the final scenes in 1968 do not have weight they ought to. Some parts of the story seem to trail off into nothing, for example the reappearance of Joe Pesci at the end of the hospital sequence. Instead the screenwriters have focused on working little bits of symbolism into the dialogue and imagery (for example, "the key to your clock" and "I'll do something with your time"), but have not worked nearly as hard on the emotional continuity. As a result Once Upon a Time in America is an interesting and occasionally entertaining collection of references to gangster movie history, but it is a failure as a work of cinema.