The second best film of the 1980s.(spoilers)

Rating: 10/10 (27 July 2000)

'Never trust the artist. Trust the tale' urged DH Lawrence of American literature, and it is a maxim we would do well to heed in watching any film by Sergio Leone, but in particular this, ostensibly his most realistic and straightforward. None of his films have packed the given period with so much signifying detail - the gorgeous sepia-toned 1921 sequence, with its Jewish shops and inhabitants, horses and carts, cakes, clothes, the pervading brown, the corrupt cops, the sexual fumblings; the Prohibition years, the sharp suits, the mixture of bonhomie and surgical violence, the disused harbours and warehouses with fading signs, the speakeasies and opium dens, the vast art-deco restaurants. Only the 60s sequence feels undersketched, a handful of stray signs - muzak Beatles, acoustic-strumming hippies, corruption-exposing TV - pointing to the era. This, I think, is very deliberate.
1968 was a crucial year in American history from the assassination of RFK to the heated civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests. It was as if all the bogus American myths had been exploded, rising to the surface the nasty, sour-tasting truth. It was also the year Leone made 'Once Upon A Time In The West', the film that for all time defined the impulse behind American history - 'make believe it didn't happen'. This self-referentiality is appropriate to a film about cinema, full of people looking through screen-like apertures, never acting, letting history wash over them; this is a milieu where shops and stations are named after the likes of Altman and Pabst, where the hero loves an actress, where his best friend spends 35 years playing someone else.
Allied to this careful, material realism, is a straightforward narrative, a mystery story: why did Noodles betray his friends? As in a conventional Hollywood film, this central enigma is suspended, and background information is sketched in, to raise the stakes of solution. Everything initially inexplicable is explained, we answer the telephone call from the past, we find out what Rosebud is. But as Borges said of 'Citizen Kane', 'Once Upon A Time In America' is a labyrinth without a centre - we must tread warily.
Like 'The Godfather 2' and 'Reds', 'America' is an epic panorama of 20th century American history. We see how gangsterism is less a metaphor for American capitalism, but its very essence. We see how unions, the law, politics, even religious communities are infected by it, poisoned, learn to accomodate and live with it. As Conway says to Max, the gangsters achieve more dealing with the bosses in one night than he would have in two years negotiation.
Leone shows how the American dream (oh yes), the very idea of capitalism, is inimical to democracy. He shows this through the central story of Max and Noodles, the great betrayal. And the revelation is numbingly shocking. In a film full of ironic godlike long shots, at one stage the lads, after the hospital babyswitch farce, declare themselves deities, with the power to dispense lifelong happiness or misery. But it is Max who pulls off the God trick in reality. He is a Platonic kind of God, who creates a world of illusions, of lies; who dispenses power and paralytic guilt for his own ends, who can actually change the destiny of people's lives, not just in the usual sense of killing them, but in destroying their soul, making them live in a hall of mirrors, a world of empty memories reflecting back on each other, nothing reflecting nothing. Watching De Niro in the 60s section is one of the most dispiriting things in cinema - it's like watching the walking dead.
Unlike the Dollars trilogy, which are full of disruptions, Brechtian jerks and jokey intrusions, Leone's last film seems very smooth and unified. But underneath this surface, the tensions wrench. There are some remarkable shifts in tone, from the extraordinary opening section, virtually silent, a fluid requiem; to the joyous rites-of-passage sequence; to the middle gangster segment, which contains some excellent comic bits, filmed with a disarming flippancy that seems to have intruded from another film altogether; to the somnambulations of the 60s.
Leone films much of 'America' like one of his Westerns, with an emphasis on extended rituals, extreme close-ups, and a contraction of time. The very 70s use of zooms seems jarring in an 80s film. The opening sequence, in its framing, its use of pace, decor and lighting, and in its editing, in its story of a helpless woman being shot by three killers, is pure spaghetti Leone. This infiltration of the Western, with its expansiveness and codes, plays havoc with the gangster film, such a claustrophobic, urban genre. The chase and murder in the feather factory is jaw-droppingly beautiful.
The music plays a crucial part in the formal disjunctions - the manipulation of emotions it achieves is disturbing, so that you wonder why music that has signalled melancholy emotional crescendo is swelling at a boy eating a cake; of why the most gorgeous, heartbreaking melodies are made evoke the tragedy of a rapist, informer, murderer. If we follow these cues too closely - and it is almost impossible not to; never has sentimentality been so ruthlessly deployed - we fall into the same trap as Noodles.
But does he? Is the story of a man who has been hoodwinked, who never knows what's going on, who's always left out, or in the dark; a man who walks like a ghost through his own life, whose inability to act petrifies him, turns him into Lot's wife, actually an illusion as audacious as Max's?. For many, the enigma of the film is the fate of Max, the mystery of the refuse truck,. Obviously he was planning a final self-saving scam, a way out of another mess, getting Noodles to think he's shot him, and then having his friend's mangled body, not for the first time, passed off as his own. The body (and soul) snatching would be complete. Does he in the end finally mangle himself; is this phantom, this resurrection from the dead, finally laid to rest? The scene seems to crystallise Noodles' life - victim, dupe, onlooker, not knowing what's going on, shuffling in the dark outside the sites of great events?
But there is something very Gothic about this scene - the nocturnal setting; the mansion with secret passages; the wealthy, successful, melancholy man willing death; the idea of the doppelganger; the candle-lined avenue. Noodles begins and ends 'America' in an opium den, and the final image is of a big smile, like he's pulled off the biggest scam in history, fooling us, shrouded like Jill in 'West'. The film actually begins in 1933, so that the 1968 scenes are flashforwards, rather than the central narrative, which is where the film begins and ends. Like all Leone's films, there is a strong homoerotic charge, and Max has a clear longing for Noodles; the one consensual sex act in the film is in a hearse (heterosexual love=death) - the rest are violent rapes. Is the film a working out of homosexual tensions, the narrative the ultimate solipsistic gesture?

The 'revelation' doesn't explain anything: it opens new enigmas. The film is full of inexplicable loose ends - what happens to Joe Pesci after he spots Noodles and Max coming out of a lift before they go to Florida? Is he the drunk in 1921 the boys rob? These repetitions, the longs shots of silent, tiny figures against huge backdrops, the rigid Kabuki gestures, the sparse oneiric 60s sequence, all seem to suggest a kind of dream; Noodles' passivity as he slopes through time seems that of a dreamer. How reliable are the points of view, the assertions, the flashforwards of a film whose main character has been left in the dark for 35 years?