Risky business

Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington, centre) has business on his mind in American Gangster. (David Lee/Universal Studios)

American Gangster, Ridley Scott’s vigorous new epic about 1970s Harlem heroin kingpin Frank Lucas, could easily have been titled American Entrepreneur. Lucas, played here with Cristal smoothness by Denzel Washington, was the epitome of the criminal as shrewd capitalist, whose smartest — and most shocking — manoeuvre was pure Business 101.

Lucas figured out a way to streamline Harlem’s heroin distribution system by cutting out the Mafia middlemen and going straight to the South Asian source. The shocking part? He shipped the stuff to the United States concealed in the caskets of American servicemen who had died in Vietnam. It was an outrageous scheme that makes the fabled French Connection look uninspired, and Lucas got away with it for years. It allowed him to offer high-grade powder at a competitive price under a brand name, Blue Magic, that he protected as if it were a trademark like Pepsi.

In The Return of Superfly — the 2005 New York magazine article by Mark Jacobson that inspired the film — the North Carolina-born Lucas is quoted as suggesting that, had he not been black and poor when he arrived in New York, he would have ended up on Wall Street. Indeed, as portrayed by Washington, he’s less like Superfly than an African-American Rockefeller, living in a penthouse with a grand piano and alpaca rugs, dressing impeccably in conservative suits and ties and eschewing the funky threads and bling of his rival, Nicky Barnes (Cuba Gooding Jr.).

“The loudest one in the room is the weakest one in the room,” Lucas says, explaining his sartorial choices and, by extension, his discreet business philosophy. Tellingly, when he briefly abandons his good taste and wears a gaudy chinchilla coat to the Ali-Frazier heavyweight bout in 1971, it marks the beginning of the end for his under-the-radar operation.

The man determined to bring him down, in contrast, is a frumpy New Jersey narcotics detective named Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe with a bad David Cassidy haircut and a wardrobe limited to jeans and Hawaiian shirts. (On the rare occasions when he dons a tie, it chokes him.) Roberts, too, is a real-life character, but he’s also a familiar movie type: the scrupulously honest cop who becomes a pariah to his venal colleagues; the working-class schlub who lives in a crummy apartment and goes in for one-night stands. In other words, he’s a composite of those two classic ’70s film cops, Frank Serpico and The French Connection’s Popeye Doyle. Crowe even has Serpico’s soulful eyes and Popeye’s fast-food gut.

Scott has clearly been influenced by the aforesaid films, especially The French Connection: like director William Friedkin in that 1972 Oscar winner, Scott contrasts the luxurious lifestyles of the criminals with the lousy situations of the underpaid policemen trying to catch them. But Scott takes his social commentary further, intercutting scenes of a Norman Rockwell-style Thanksgiving dinner at the palatial home Frank has bought for his Mama (Ruby Dee) with shots of strung-out Harlem junkies dying in squalor — a reminder that Lucas bought his way into the American Dream at the expense of his own community.

For the most part, Scott, like Friedkin before him, lets the facts speak for themselves, and the story is so involving you can’t take your eyes from the screen. If you did, you might miss some character or detail in the film’s densely packed frames, which flash by at a restless pace, jumping between Frank’s ruthless rise and Richie’s dogged pursuit while simultaneously capturing the look and feel of the times.

Scott and his production designer, Arthur Max, give us a gritty picture of New York BG (Before Giuliani), the rotting Big Apple that was, in the words of Lou Reed, “something like a circus or a sewer.” Most striking is Frank’s Harlem “factory,” where beautiful young women cut and package heroin in the nude — a vision straight out of a ’70s blaxploitation flick, but literally true. (The women worked naked so they couldn’t sneak away with any dope.)

Washington is like the calm eye in this sordid hurricane. His driven Frank is nine-tenths quiet intensity, whether cutting a deal with his heroin suppliers in the South Asian poppy fields or staring down a Mafia boss (Armand Assante) who wants in on his monopoly. The other one-tenth is explosively violent, his rare outbursts triggered by acts of stupidity and incompetence — he’s not a man who suffers fools, even in his own family.

Crowe’s Richie, despite his sloppy appearance, is no less intense. He and Frank are brothers under the skin: smart, low-key, bloody-minded. A workaholic with a busted marriage in his wake, Richie sedulously tracks the Harlem heroin trade while studying to be a lawyer on the side. After his annoyingly flashy performance in 3:10 to Yuma, it’s good to see Crowe get back down to some real acting, with a flawless but unostentatious Jersey accent and the kind of subtle character touches that fill in the blanks in Steve Zaillian’s screenplay.

American Gangster is a masterful piece of filmmaking — at 160 minutes, the picture never slackens pace or wastes a minute — but there’s nothing here that quite raises it to the level of brilliance. Scott has given us some virtuoso moments in the past — Gladiator’s combat scenes, Thelma and Louise driving off the cliff — but we wait in vain for something comparable in this much more ambitious movie. The closest he comes is a scene where Frank interrupts lunch with his brothers in a Harlem coffee shop to step out on the street and blow away a disrespectful dealer, then returns and cheerfully tucks into a burger. But Scorsese, Coppola and The Sopranos have already done that ice-cold gangster bit so well — it just feels obligatory now.

That may be the essential problem Scott has come up against: while the story itself is fresh, the gangster genre is tired. After The Departed and the end of The Sopranos, it feels like there isn’t much left to say about crime as an all-American family business, at least for now. American Gangster may be exciting, but its ironies are all worn out.

American Gangster opens Nov. 2.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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