July 12, 2008
There’s a scene not too far into “American Gangster” in which the eponymous gangster, Mr. Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington, is in Bangkok and outlining his plans to his contact here on how he wants to revolutionize the drug trade in New York. He wants to cut out the middleman and buy directly from the source – in this case, the Kuomintang operating out of the Golden Triangle (Thailand, even then, was known for its OEM work). This, his wide-eyed contact explains, would be impossible. Why getting the heroin at its source would require going into the deepest darkest jungles of Northern Thailand!
Sitting with a bottle of Singha in hand, amid the din of Bangkok street life (well the modern day filmed-in-Chiang-Mai representation), Lucas is not to be deterred and delivers one of the movie’s best lines: “I’m in the jungle. Look around. They’re eating roaches and whatever the hell that is.”
As fun as this scene and another brief one set in the Vietnam “R and R”-era or, more accurately by all accounts, the “I” and “I” (intoxication and intercourse)-era of New Phetchaburi Road are, especially for Bangkok viewers, the Southeast Asia drug connection, the logic of it, when considered, sets in a seed of doubt that only grows throughout the rest of this overlong, three-hour film.
It’s later revealed that Lucas arranged his drug shipments by having the contraband inserted into the body bags and caskets of US soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Forget about the organizational complexity of pulling off something like that and the utter corruption it would require at every level of the process used to repatriate soldiers’ corpses, but isn’t there something just a bit too poetic about this deadly scourge (the strength of Lucas’s heroin was such that many users overdosed on it) entering the country via the hated Vietnam War? With grainy clips of Nixon and soldiers in Vietnam littered throughout the film, there seems to be a muddled political message in there somewhere and this method of drug delivery reinforces that with hammer-over-the-head subtlety.
As the Bangkok Post’s Alan Dawson wrote in a recent critique of the film, there is no proof whatsoever that the alleged “cadaver connection” ever existed. “A few people ‘remember’ it happened,” Dawson writes, “but a few equally credible people also remember they were terribly abused by aliens who abducted them to a neighboring galaxy.”
In actual fact, it was a serviceman named Ike Atkinson who pioneered the Southeast Asia-US drug circuit – Lucas was merely a fortunate buyer who profited heavily from the connection. Dawson sums up his critique by saying that “…right down to the ludicrous scene where Washington drives from the airport to New Petchaburi Road in a pedaled samlor, ‘American Gangster’ is very much fact-free.” (If, by some chance, Lucas did get a pedaled samlor from Don Meuang to Petchaburi Road, one hopes he tipped accordingly).
There’s no obligation for filmmakers to stick with historical facts when retelling a story, but these little flights of fancy begin to unravel the internal logic of the movie, and by the time the closing credits tell us that Lucas’s testimony helped put away three-quarters of New York Drug Enforcement Agents for corruption, we’re left smacking our heads in disbelief. With the possible exception of traffic police in the land of smiles, has there ever been a group of cops more prone to having their palms greased than that? Of course, this fact too appears to be have been made up.
There’s also something deeply unbelievable about Denzel Washington’s version of Frank Lucas. At one point he is in his neighborhood diner – it’s his usual hangout, as he is a folksy, down home sort of New York City gangster – and lecturing a country relative he’s brought in to help him in the drug trade on the importance of family, honesty and hard work. Is he an honest joe selling quality men’s footwear or a vicious gangster pushing heroin that is killing junkies all around town?
The real Frank Lucas, as seen in press for the film, is a course-sounding guy from South Carolina, who pipes up mainly whenever an opportunity arises to inflate his own reputation. (The film likely worked gangbusters in that regard as in real life Lucas’s testimony did put away several drug dealers and one could assume that snitches don’t get much street cred). He bears no resemblance to the refined and noble version of him played by Washington. The performance that Washington gives bears many similarities to the one he gave in the equally bad – and for many of the same reasons – Norman Jewison film “The Hurricane.”
Filmmaker Ridley Scott puts the audience in an uncomfortable position by framing this one too in terms of race, even having Washington invoke the name of Martin Luther King at one point. He outsmarts the Italians, and goes where no black man has gone before in the history of the drug trade. Are we to cheer on Lucas for his successes in hustling heroin, as if we were watching the Jackie Robinson story?
There are certainly enough gangster-movie clichés in this film to give Coppala and Scorsese a run for their money, including the cursory involvement of a long-suffering wife drawn in by the glitz and glamour of her husband’s riches, but left weeping as their castle in the sky falls to shit. How dull and overdone – at least Carmela Soprano had a movie club and some hobbies.
There is another major portion of this movie that features Russell Crowe, giving a far better performance than that offered by Washington, in the role of Detective Ritchie Roberts, the man who would ultimately bring Frank Lucas down. He is an unapologetically straight cop, but without the noble bearing and pretence of the Washington character. When he’s in divorce court for a hearing on custody rights for his kid, for example, he leans over to his female attorney and suggests that they make good use out of an upstairs interrogation room he knows about.
But those welcome bits of character and Crowe’s performance are not enough to save “American Gangster” from its portrayal of Lucas and the damage done by the cock-eyed story it tells. This is the kind of movie that must have looked great on paper. With its two Oscar-winning stars and director and an album released concurrently by Jay-Z to hype it even further, its backers must have surely seen themselves uncorking the bubbly at this year’s Academy Awards. But with two nominations, and minor ones at that, the “American Gangster” table won’t be that festive. It fell apart in the details – from the samlor ride into Bangkok on.
Noel, Bangkok
