Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
I wasn't a member of the AARP when I started watching this movie, but by the time I finally finished it, I was eligible for the early bird special at Ponderosa. With a running time in the neighborhood of six days or so, Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In America is one of those movies where old timers look back on their messed up lives and reflect on the decisions that brought them to the point where a mysterious letter forces them to revisit old haunts for the first time in thirty years.
Like most geezers who have nothing else to do, Robert DeNiro's character takes his own sweet time in going over all the gory details of his misspent youth, a reverie frequently interrupted by him looking wistfully through rheumy eyes here and there while the haunting theme song plays. (I made a mental note to take a cheap shot at some of the theme music as sounding like Zamphir on the pan flute, but then the credits said it really was Zamphir!)
Like most old coots in epic movies, Noodles (DeNiro) remembers way back to the turn of the twentieth century when he and his crew were growing up in New York City under the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. Days spent roughing up drunks, enforcing their boss's protection racket, trying to score with the neighborhood skank, and fighting rival thugs as they tried to go into business for themselves are fondly recalled as is that moment when Noodles came of age when he watched a buddy get shot down in the street.
The vengeance he exacts for that murder earns him a ticket to the big house where he spends the next several years, but he was only missing those boring World War I years and is released just in time for the Roaring Twenties. And really, if you're going to be living a life so epic in scope, you're going to need flappers, Prohibition and the accompanying bootlegging and tommy guns. The specter of Prohibition's end as a metaphor for the passing of a way of life is just icing.
Noodles' friend throughout all of this is Max (James Woods), a kid from the Bronx that moves into Noodles' neighborhood back when Noodles still was messing around with penny ante crime. Max is a dreamer who doesn't want to work for any bosses and he builds up their criminal empire while Noodles is doing time in jail.
Though slow in revealing itself (and in a movie that requires two DVDs, just about everything is slow in revealing itself), there is a split between Max and Noodles in their attitude towards the "business." Max is the guy who wonders why they can't turn their million dollars in the bank into twenty million with new investments as Prohibition wanes, while Noodles believes that the cash he's got in his pocket is the only money that matters. "You'll always have the stink of the street," Max tells him and Noodles replies, "I like the stink of the street." Clearly this was a neighborhood in need of better garbage pick up.
It's Max's dream of a big job that ultimately destroys that friendship and sets in motion all the things that follow Noodles to the present day. Though some of the namby-pambies out there would point out that Noodles' penchant for committing crimes, killing people, and raping folks would make him a bad person, I'm sure that at the end of our lives, there will be a lot of stuff we aren't exactly proud of, but no matter what else you can say about Noodles, you can't argue that he wasn't the best friend a guy could ever have. Especially if his friend was a little crazy and got it into his fool head that robbing the Federal Reserve Bank was the way to kick business up a notch after Prohibition puts the gang on the unemployment line.
Though the movie focuses on all the events that take Max and Noodles to that final night together, it's really about the consequences of the choices both of them made that evening and how decades after the fact, the betrayal (real or imagined) by those closet to you still inform all you do.
Once Upon A Time In America is one of those sprawling epics with lots of characters shuffling in and out of the story as Max and Noodles become more powerful, yet the movie connects with us best as a rumination on a what it is that makes a person who they are. I'm sure that the movie is all metaphor for the growing pains America went through in the early part of the twentieth century and a commentary on the whole concept of achieving the "American Dream" at any cost, but when Noodles collides with the ghosts of his past, Leone is able to toss off all the "gangster cool" the film sometimes threatens to drown in and bring the humanity of these characters to the surface.
Memories, for good or ill, are all we finally have. All the things we've ever done, the people we've loved, the people we've hurt - these are what make us who we are. When Noodles finally solves the mystery behind the letter he received, we see the different ways that the past can destroy and imprison a person. Whether you try to hide from it or simply erase it, the past is a tireless pursuer.
Gorgeously realized (if not a occasionally self indulgent and at almost four hours how could it not be?) and a fitting capstone to Leone's career as a director, Once Upon A Time In America manages a surprising intimacy that keeps the characters from merely being mythic and renders them all too human. It also proves that Noodles doesn't just have to be a name for the family dog.