November 08, 2007
american gangster
American Gangster's soundtrack, despite a flirtation with a cred-desperate Jay-Z, is comprised of thick dollops of Seventies soul/funk album tracks real and imagined...until the final scene when Frank Lucas, having served his time, walks out into a world utterly changed. Well, utterly changed in one regard: Public Enemy has appeared on the soundtrack, specifically that song of anthemic skepticism, "Can't Truss It." It's a great song, of course, and the "idea" — the distance between Bobby Womack and Chuck D — is clear enough, and explains why Jay-Z had to be turned down: if the whole movie is hip-hop, that last rhetorical gesture can't happen.
But it's an odd gesture, finally. Lucas walks out into the New York in 1991: the world in which gangsta has just replaced PE's nation rap in a swap as total as it was sudden. Moreover, a gangsta track would have made the actual relevant point: not that times done changed, son (duh!) but that the particularities of Frank Lucas's life of crime had become universalized into a worldview, that the black superman gangster with a naturalized corporate sensibility was now the lifestyle icon par excellance.
Such a move would scarcely have been genius; it's just the minimum to have an account, and its absence utterly exemplary of the film's ceaseless failures of intelligence, its hemorrhaging of meaning. No one is asking for some kind of heavy social theory, even in a film that takes itself so seriously: it's Hollywood. But throwing up 20 seconds of Kool G Rap (if a New Yorker was needed — though a non-New Yorker would have made the universalizing point better) would scarcely have turned the film into a think piece. As it is, the movie is flatly thoughtless, unable to make even the simplest points it has in mind about the big-boxing of the urban dope trade. Perhaps it merely hopes we've all seen The Wire, Dostoyevsky to this film's Leskov.
And so, unable to think, it simply leaves the drama to the conflict between Lucas and cop Richie Roberts, with some vague suggestion that Frank in his grasp of necessity is as different from the mafia as Richie is different from crooked cops — and thus they meet as odd equals. But even this doesn't really play, given that it's staged by Denzel and Russell Crowe, a comparison able to do nothing but embarrass the latter and his comically bad Jersey accent.
Posted by jane at November 8, 2007 11:48 AM | TrackBack