The Stuff I Watched: Once Upon a Time in America
One of my favorite movies I have seen this year by far! Hope you watch it like I did.
Happy Friday!
Today is a day that I have been waiting for for a long time. Today marks the release of Martin Scorsese’s latest feature film, Killers of the Flower Moon. I will be watching the film tonight with a friend of mine and will be reviewing it next week. That review should come out next Wednesday morning, so be sure to be on the lookout for that.
The reason I chose the 1984 gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America is because I feel there is a connection to Scorsese. Scorsese’s previous film, The Irishman, is a long scale gangster film about the rise and eventual depressing ending of a mafia enforcer. Both films look to poke holes in the gangster genre over a long period of time and feature Robert De Niro. I read one Letterboxd review that read, “Once Upon a Time in America walked so The Irishman could run.”
Here is, Once Upon a Time in America:
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Director: Sergio Leone
A
Content warning: This post has a reference to sexual assault and rape.
Sergio Leone is undoubtedly a master, with his Dollars trilogy with Clint Eastwood being known as absolute classics in the Western genre. But in my eyes, Once Upon a Time in America is his finest work.
The film follows two friends, Noodles (Robert De Niro) and Max (James Woods), as they rise out of the Jewish ghetto in New York as kids to become established gangsters. Through this insanely long 229-minute runtime, we see how our two main characters find love, experience extreme loss and eventually feel an insane amount of regret from what they did to each other during the time of Prohibition. It's important to note the European cut of this film, which bounces back and forth in a non-linear fashion, is the true way to watch it, not the shorter American version that shows everything in chronological order. The European version is way way way better. Trust me.
It’s fascinating that one of the best stories about the United States of America is told by an Italian. Once Upon a Time in America tells a familiar tale of how young, impoverished men rise from their squalor to become rich and successful before the eventual fall that eventually results in death. Along the way, their heritage and friendship get stripped, especially Max who changes his name to become a powerful politician. However, Leone uses this film to poke holes in even this tale. Neither Noodles nor Max are inherently decent men and their rise wasn't really because of their hard work. Noodles was in prison for years and Max just became well-connected. We don’t even get to see the rise of Max and his friends becoming big time gangsters. It goes to show how Leone does not care for this aspect of the gangster genre.
Leone controversially focuses on how truly despicable Noodles and Max are. The two, along with their two other associates, are vicious thugs. They murder and steal for the joy of it and they treat as subhuman. Even Noodles, the character we’re supposed to care about in this damn film, rapes his childhood sweetheart Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern). For as brutal and uncomfortable as the scene is, Leone makes us stay with the aftermath of Noodles’ actions to show us how awful of a human being he is. We aren’t supposed to root for him, even with De Niro giving a remarkable performance.
Composer Ennio Morricone really steals the show here. His beautiful score contrasts some of the film’s more violent and unsettling scenes. I know I wrote that we aren’t supposed to root for the characters, but Morricone’s score makes us feel some sense of pity for these characters because there were chances for the gangsters to become good people. Lots of the music is Instead, Noodles and Max remain stuck with the consequences of their decision and the former even starts to deny reality.
The cinematography in this film is also truly magnificent. Leone and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli use smoke to haze the viewer's and Noodles' perspective to add a sense of mystery. There are also some very famous and astonishing wide shots of New York City, particularly when Noodles, Max and his friends are walking down the street with the Brooklyn Bridge in sight. Creating a reminiscent and decaying version of the city immigrants first came to when they got off the boat.
In Once Upon a Time in America, it feels like the characters are always just doomed to fail. The flaws were as clear as day and absolutely cemented their downfall. It's very similar to the stories Scorsese likes to show in his films like Goodfellas or The Irishman. The ambiguity of the ending might point to Noodles' perception of the world being flawed and our ideas of the American Dream being flawed as well. Leone said he never wanted to poke holes at the myths of the gangster drama or even the Western with his previous films like Once Upon a Time in the West. He rather looked at America as a daisy, with Once Upon a Time in America probably serving as a rotten flower.
Sergio Leone Interview from American Film, June 1984
I am not fascinated, as you say, by the myth of the West, or by the myth of the gangster. I am not hypnotized, like everyone east of New York and west of Los Angeles, by the mythical notions of America. I’m talking about the individual, and the endless horizon—El Dorado. I believe that cinema, except in some very rare and outstanding cases, has never done much to incorporate these ideas. And if you think about it, America itself has never made much of an effort in that direction either. But there is no doubt that cinema, unlike political democracy, has done what it can. Just consider Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, Scarface, or Rio Bravo. I love the vast spaces of John Ford and the metropolitan claustrophobia of Martin Scorsese, the alternating petals of the American daisy. America speaks like fairies in a fairy tale.
Leone uses Noodles’ story to focus on the endless horizon. The director finds America to be an endless horizon that becomes an opportunity for Noodles to be good or bad. He obviously chose the former. But the amount of nuance, grace and downright poetry that came from Leone places the film as one of the greatest gangster films ever made.