It's A Good Film, But It's Long Enough To Be A War Of Attrition

I've said before I'm not much for gangster movies, but I wanted to try Once Upon A Time In America, because if anyone could make one I'd like, I figure it would be Sergio Leone. I finally sat down and watched and I liked it, but my brain doesn't really want to classify it as a "gangster film". It keeps insisting on "character study".

The film doesn't take the route of showing people performing criminals acts, but dismissing them as acts for "Family", or "honor", which is the sort of thing that typically irritates me. Noodles (Robert DeNiro), Max (James Woods), and the rest are crooks. Max might have some pretensions on being more, but I think he really just always wanted to be a more powerful criminal than he was at that moment. Deborah knew it about Noodles and Max when they were kids, James Conway O'Donnell (Treat Williams) knew it when the guys saved him from immolation. And he was idealistic enough (at first) to want nothing to do with them, because he knew they weren't concerned about the workers' cause for any reason other than someone paid them to.

I'm not sure what it says that O'Donnell and Deborah both eventually are reliant upon those crooks. Is it "you need me on that wall!", that it's all well and good to have principles and ideals, but it takes money or a mean streak to see them realized? Maybe that it's so much easier to drag a good person down, than to pull a corrupt person up.

There's a lot in the film about reflections or observing unnoticed, through peepholes or dirty windows. I think it's playing into something the film's saying about seeing how life could have been, the choices made or not made. You look in a mirror, you see yourself, the collection or sum of all the paths taken throughout life. Look upon someone else and see the results of their decisions, and wonder if it could be (or could have been) yours someday. That's what haunts Max, as he sees his life and believes it should have Noodles', which is wrong. I don't think Noodles ever aspired to the heights Max did. He liked the money, power, and respect, but he also recognized it couldn't bring him everything he wanted (Deborah, mostly, though he did his part to blow that to hell).

Max never could understand that, but I think he looked up to Noodles, and therefore thought that his dreams and Noodles' were the same. I think it's telling that every woman we know Max has slept with throughout the film, Noodles had been with her first. Whether Max was consciously copying Noodles, or it's just a sign of how Noodles was always better able to seize the moment, I'm not sure.

Speaking of things I'm not sure of, watching the end sequence I was suddenly unsure if any of the parts which took place in the 1960s were real, since the end is Noodles going into an opium den 3 decades earlier, laying flat on his back, looking up at the ceiling and smiling. Was he hallucinating this whole thing? I doubt it. It probably just represented Noodles being able to forget the pain of his decisions for awhile, but by that point the movie'd been running for over 220 minutes, and my grasp on reality was starting to slip.