Spring Cleaning -- Once Upon a Time in America

Finally.

After 3 years, I finally got around to watching Once Upon a Time in America on DVD. I bought it when it was released in the summer of 2003, but always put off watching it because of its length, a whopping 229 minutes. Movies of that length change a person. You feel almost the same way you do after taking a flight halfway around the world, or staying up all night to study for a big exam. There's an adrenalin rush that goes along with it, a feeling of accomplishment, a feeling of overcoming something insurmountable. As Hector said in Wild Style, I should be earning a medal for this. 229 minutes, man. Jesus. I don't know whether to laugh or to cry.

I was lucky -- the phone didn't ring once (ironic), and there were no other interruptions. Sometimes the planets just align in the right way. Sure, I had watched the film before, but always in intervals. The first time I saw it I was in high school. I, my brother and some friends watched it one night, but by the time the first laserdisc had ended we were all too drunk and too tired to continue, so we watched the rest the next day. The second time I saw it was a few months later, alone. That time, I had intended to watch it all the way through in one sitting, but when my brother, sister, mother and father all got home and began to storm around the house, I gave up and postponed watching the final hour for the next day.

I wonder, is it possible to watch a film only three times and consider it one of the ten best films ever made? If not, that's too bad. I think I'd still proclaim it one of the ten best if I were to watch it a dozen times more, but in all likelihood that'll never happen. When am I ever again going to have 229 free minutes, plus added time for bathroom breaks? In my case, that's like a pitcher throwing back-to-back perfect games. I'll be lucky if I ever get another chance to see it, and that thought makes me a little sad. Maybe I should leave my family like Charles Strickland and move to France so I can watch all of my favorite films again and again. Tempting, but I don't speak French too well, so I guess I'll have to accept the hand life's dealt me. C'est la vie.

Yes, the film is a masterpiece, but it is not without one huge flaw, namely that it's too short like Todd Shaw. That's right, this 229-minute juggernaut is too damn short. At least another hour is needed to make it more coherent. How did Noodles find Carol in 1968? I dunno, he just all of a sudden is talking to her in a theater, of which she may or may not be the owner. Same goes for Noodles' girlfriend, Eve. How did he meet her (this is a rhetorical question, mind you, because I know the answer, having read parts of the original shooting script)? The film never explains how, but that I can overlook, because it's fairly obvious that Eve didn't mean much to Noodles, and that he never loved her. But there are similar chunks missing from the film that confuse the viewer. What's up with the frisbee scene? And why was Joe Pesci's character entering the hospital before the union leader's surgery? What happened there? I'd also like to see more of the union subplot, and more of the gang's fraternization with The Combination. This film deserves to be 5 hours or longer.

Other than that (and the runtime was hardly Leone's fault), though, the film is perfect. Absolutely perfect. The best romantic gangster film not titled The Godfather, even though in some respects Once Upon a Time in America has Godfather beat. The sets are better, for one, and it's certainly the more cerebral film of the two, the more stylish.

Ennio Morricone's score probably deserves its own post, because it is possibly the most beautiful piece of music ever put to film. Make that one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed, period. I often wonder how much of an impact Leone's epic pictures would have were Morricone not involved.

As for the characters, we as viewers are asked to compromise our morals somewhat whenever we view a film in which the protagonist is a gangster. Gangsters are deceitful, and the ones around whom the stories often revolve are cold-blooded murderers. They're amoral superheroes. They'll do whatever it takes to succeed and survive, and you'll envy their power, because what they do takes a certain kind of skill, a special kind of nerve. They're also philanderers. In the case of this film, the main character is a rapist. It's as though Leone was making a point of sorts: this is my story, and I want you to be interested in the lives of these men, to hope they succeed and aren't killed; but make no mistake, these men are also tigers with claws and sharp fangs. They are not good men. They are not moral. Approach with caution.

(As a side note, I find this a very intriguing and important part of fiction. It's when it crosses over to the real world, and people start to make heroes out of such base individuals as John Gotti, Chopper Read, and Issei Sagawa (just to name a few), that I believe a dangerous line is crossed.)

To wit, the main characters of the film, specifically Max and Noodles, are both protagonists and antogonists -- because there are no other well-defined villains. Is Noodles the good guy? Yes, but he's also the bad guy. Is Max the bad guy? Yes, but he's also the good guy. Of every gangster film I've seen, the roles of these two men best exemplify the duality of man. Tony Montana? Bad guy (self-proclaimed to boot). Michael Corleone? Tragic hero. Lucifer. Noodles? Probably closer to you or me than the aforementioned. Max? Ditto.

In the end, it's astounding that a film about men who are, to put it bluntly, dispicable thugs, has the power to make one contemplate the sad fate of loss, regret, and to consider how things might have been, had the dice not been loaded from the get-go.

Which leads me to my final point about the film. It's obvious to anyone with half a brain that Leone's intention was that the portions of the film which are set in 1968 are an opium-induced fantasy on the part of Noodles. Yes, there's no way he would have known the Beatles would write the song Yesterday, nor would he know about televisions or how cars at that period would look; but would the film work if his vision of the future contained flying cars and other far more surreal elements of fantasy? Of course not. The 1968 scenes are indeed not part of the film's reality. If one considers them as such, the fact that Carol happens to be the owner of the theater at which Deborah is a headlining actress is not only implausible, it's a downright insult to the viewer's intelligence. And if the 1930's era car that passes just after Noodles sees Max disappear behing (or into) the garbage truck, or the film's final scene doesn't convince you, you probably also believe Neil Armstrong never walked on the moon (though both cases make for stimulating debate).

Either way, it's unimportant whether or not the 1968 scenes are a part of the film's reality. They're a part of the viewer's reality. They happened and they didn't. That's what makes art great: how you interpret it, which part you choose to see. And contradiction be damned, both scenarios are equally valid and poignant. How things "really" happened is up to the viewer, much in the same way the end of Yann Martel's Life of Pi is. Both are real, because both are completely false. That's the beautiful paradox of art.

but I'm still correct: it's all just an opium-induced dream

The Treacherous Three:

Seven Samurai
Scarface
Training Day