By Armond White

American Gangter
Directed by Ridley Scott

Mr. Untouchable
Directed by Marc Levin


When Hillary Clinton commissioned a TV spot where she and Bill re-enacted the final scene of the HBO series “The Sopranos,” it was not only an appalling example of pop-culture pandering, but it implicitly aligned politicians with gangsters as an All-American family ideal. The Clintons’ ethical catastrophe was undeniable proof that the gangster film (and its permutations) has superseded the Western, taking over the popular imagination of essential American identity. Now American Gangster adds more confusion to that mythology.

Before “The Sopranos,” how Harlem drug dealer Frank Lucas created his 1960s-’70s criminal network and was eventually captured by Special Narcotics Unit cop Richie Roberts would have been one of those sub-cult Blaxploitation movies. Now it carries the specious epilogue “Based on a true story” and casts Denzel Washington doing badass shtick and Russell Crowe doing Mr. Conscientious. Ultrahack Ridley Scott directs this familiar narc-and-dealer contest from an epic-length script by Schindler’s List writer Steve Zaillian, using art-photographer Harris Savides’ streetlife locations. Instead of Scott’s usual TV-advert splendor, everything is seen as if through a grimy windshield. It’s artificial, yet American Gangster is loftily conceived as a national legend.

Not since Spike Lee’s Malcolm X has there been such an over-scaled, all-star, studio-financed film set in black America—and Scott’s impetus is as questionable as Lee’s. What is the point of an elaborate Frank Lucas biography except to approve that Clinton/“Sopranos” romance with power? American Gangster follows hip-hop culture’s denial of black political progress post-Malcolm X (Lee’s 1992 cultural event reduced ’60s radicalism to mere style). Scott and Zaillian exploit the hip-hop cool idea that Lucas wasn’t a predator but a new-era Black entrepreneur. Lucas’ only ambition was to circumvent the Mob, cutting out the middle man by smuggling his drug inventory direct from Southeast Asia via military convoys during the Vietnam war.

American Gangster avoids how Lucas waged war on black Americans. A brief Thanksgiving sequence between Lucas’ family at dinner and junkies dying in assorted hovels only shows that Scott covets The Godfather’s point/counterpoint montage.
Ultrahack emphasizes business procedure, either law enforcement or drug dealing. This facile contrast is only effective in the B&W, negative/positive graphics of the movie’s slightly racist ad campaign. Racist, yet honest in the way it sells the film’s good guy/bad guy stereotypes.

Being a Ridley Scott film, American Gangster is no more a critique of social history or political behavior than 1492 or Gladiator. It’s basically a big-budget glorification of ambition as in the current documentary Mr. Untouchable, director Marc Levin’s latest white-negro obsession—this time about Nicky Barnes, Frank Lucas’ rival in Harlem dope-dealing. Levin takes a low-rent approach to hagiography, shuffling specious documentary footage of Barnes and associates rhapsodizing about being original gangstas and snitches. There’s even an oldies soul music soundtrack to give an authentic ’70s Blaxploitation feel—the fantasy of empowerment and high-steppin’ that makes hip-hop audiences ignore that the dope trade is a new form of enslavement. “Was I a white man’s tool? I don’t think about that,” Barnes says which is clearer than the self-justification Scott and Zallian are pushing in American Gangster’s final scenes.

By the time Lucas makes his deal with the Feds by naming crooked cops who took paybacks, American Gangster’s rise-to-power narrative has footnoted innumerable gangster movie clichés: from The French Connection to Superfly to Scarface, GoodFellas to New Jack City to Wall Street, Hoodlum to Casino, Traffic to The Sopranos. This dubious historicism is as fanciful as Gladiator but the relation to modern social crisis makes it far more insulting. It “verifies” those crime stories through which pop media redefined American moral and social issues—and the Western lost its primacy.
Scott hasn’t thought through this modern mythology any better than the Clintons have. He, too, is campaigning for glory: the kind of serious acclaim accorded Traffic (for which Steven Soderbergh beat Scott out of an Oscar). That also explains Scott’s slo-mo Scorsese tropes—mannerisms meant to evoke art-cinema but are incongruent with the style of the black urban crime films that are American Gangster’s unacknowledged legacy. Scott and Zaillian don’t really understand this form. A truly artful Blaxploitation film like Larry Cohen’s Black Caesar had political intelligence plus B-movie sizzle, but American Gangster’s dull by comparison. It’s got prestige-movie airs—from portentous commentary on Vietnam (a heinous edit links cops killing Lucas’ dog and the coffins of KIA soldiers) down to a Justice Prevails ending meant to be ironic (misusing Public Enemy’s greatest track, “Can’t Truss It,” to underscore Lucas’ triumph). All this reasserts the status quo without any political critique.

Pandering to confused hip-hoppers and cynical Clintonians, Scott and Zaillian conclude that blacks are thwarted by the very System they emulate. “No nigger has ever accomplished what the Mafia hasn’t!” shouts an incredulous Federal agent. Yet Roberts insists, “Frank Lucas is the most dangerous man walking the streets of our city.” So Washington plays a heartless “family” don while Crowe plays a good citizen with an emotionally fraught sex life (Carla Gugino as his ex-wife speaks the only moral truth.)

This is typical liberal Hollywood math: balancing a black movie lead with a white movie lead. Washington’s Mephistopheles contrasts Crowe’s Faust. As Lucas takes over the heroin trade and becomes a folk idol, Roberts thanklessly studies for the New Jersey bar—essentially the same liberal condescension as Denzel Washington and Kevin Kline’s shared billing in 1987’s Cry Freedom. American Gangster’s simultaneous celebration of crime, punishment and upward mobility should be titled Cry Capitalism. That’s the code of the new Western.