Once Upon a Time in AmericaDir. by: Sergio Leone
Country: US
Year: 1984
Running Time: 229 minutes
“Le temps detruit tout.”“Time ruins all things,” so Gaspar Noé’s
Irréversible (2002) claimed. Leone’s
Once Upon a Time in America is not so different. Both films contain a shocking rape scene at a pivotal point in their respective plots; both scripts play with narrative conventions to emphasise their point; both are blessed with great, emotively suitable scores; and both treat their protagonists as deeply flawed beings at odds with a world driven by inescapable violence.
But while
Irréversible portrayed its violence in an agonisingly post-modernistic, ultra-realistic fashion (and yes, it
is a fashion of sorts), Leone strived to make his part of poignancy which lay at the core of his film, making the violence, gunshots and even Noodles’ rape, seem nothing less than operatic. In the same way that his
Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) transcended the Western,
Once Upon a Time in America revitalises the gangster film, that genre which in the thirties Hollywood made its own, to spectacular effect.
Spectacularly slow, some might say. And they’d be right, but they would have no justification in complaining. For slowness is the point here. It emphasises Leone’s message: that time, as Noé made so clearly and polemically over thirty years later, does indeed destroy all things. Jewish gangster Noodles (Robert De Niro, restrained) grows up with Max (James Woods, calm with bursts of animation) and rises to the top of the Lower East Side’s prohibition racket. Sent away in exile after shopping his friends to the police—a betrayal out of compassion and love for them—he is lured back in 1968 to find that there may be one last secret for him to learn.
That we learn of Noodles’ betrayal so early on in the film and that it is, chronologically, very late in the tale, shows how convoluted this is. Leone’s sharp eye for period detail—captured lovingly by photographer Tonino Delli Colli, particularly in the extraordinary exterior shots—lends the film a grandiose feel of the epic, placing viewers in its
mise-en-scène with wonderful authenticity, much in the same way as
The Godfather (1972) and its
sequel (1974) did. Carlo Simi and James Singelis’ art direction adds much visual and production value, while writers Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero de Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini and Leone’s adaptation of David Aaronson’s novel
The Hoods adds operatic weight to the proceedings, a fine blend of hardboiled colloquialisms and Shakespearean extravaganza.
As with
Once Upon a Time in the West , the music is a character in itself, and perhaps the most important, since it is that which evokes most of the film’s emotion. Morricone’s score was again written before filming began, a unique way of creating the scene’s tone, which was repeated to phenomenal effect when Krzysztof Kíeslowski filmed his
Trois Coleurs: Bleu (1993) to Zbigniew Preisner’s score. A haunting pan-pipe motif, mixed with other rare instruments,
America’s score suggests a humanity full of despair and regret, a hymn to the American Dream sadly gone wrong.
This is a magnificent film, a sweeping epic in the strongest sense, with Leone drawing attention throughout to his obsession with time and how it relates to our lives. Note the beautiful, noted sequence where a phone rings to the memories of Noodles, for some twenty-four times, before finally revealing whose phone is ringing. And even then, the context of the phone call is not revealed until much later in the film, a delaying device used more overtly in González Iñárritu’s
21 Grams (2003), which inter-cut scenes in a non-linear narrative to address how much substance lies in the little moments of life.
As it was also suggested in
21 Grams, time is but memories, which soften the past and destroy the present. Leone delivers a tale of love, friendship, and the corruption of the avaricious West; compelling stuff, and, more than anything, a mere fairytale, suggested by Leone’s full awareness of how fake Cinema actually is, epitomised in the dream-like title itself:
Once Upon a Time…Thanks for reading,
Mick
