Certainly, Meyer Lansky is deserving of his own movie. In the grand infamy of American gangsters, he may not have the name recognition of Al Capone or John Dillinger or even his own close associate Lucky Luciano, but he is one of the most influential never to have his own gang himself. He was a clever guy, known as the “Mob’s Accountant”, and his history in organized crime stretches from the early days of prohibition through to the early 1980s, encompassing such episodes as the development of Las Vegas, a government conspiracy to aid the war effort, an ill-fated attempt to build a casino empire in Cuba, and being deported from Israel. He’s also been the direct inspiration behind so many figures in gangster media for decades. It’s quite a big legacy.
And yet Lansky, a biographical movie directed by Eytan Rockaway, fails to communicate any of that. The film has quite a small budget for such a larger than life subject, but there are ways to work around that. Rockaway does not, choosing instead to broach Lansky’s life from the vantage point of a journalist interviewing him congenially over coffee as if it were Tuesdays with Morrie. It’s a bizarre way to tell the story of a career criminal to say the least; made more so by the framing of the FBI’s interference to recover laundered money from Lansky as explicitly antagonistic. I don’t know if Rockaway knows that Lansky wasn’t a good guy.
Harvey Keitel plays the elderly mobster, surely a sign of importance for a film of this stature -especially just coming off of The Irishman. And he certainly seems like the right choice, formidable and imposing even in his eighties, and obviously believable as this class of criminal. He’s quite good, though also not as good as might be expected from a legendary gangster movie actor playing a legendary gangster. His younger self as depicted through flashbacks is played by First Cow’s John Magaro, who really works as a younger Keitel, though I’m mixed on his performance as Lansky. At times he seems to be playing to more of an archetype than a character, though in other instances he is able to showcase Lansky’s unique skills and finesse. The best version of this character I’ve seen probably remains Anatol Yusef’s interpretation in Boardwalk Empire. Magaro isn’t really at fault though -Rockaway seems more interested in just telling the history than exploring Lansky’s place in it. The story arcs he’s given, such as an unhappy marriage and the gradual course of his friendship with Bugsy Siegel (beginning as teenage hoodlums, ending in Lansky betraying him as a liability) don’t strike me as dishonest necessarily, but just conveniently shallow.
“I don’t have the power to change my past,” Lansky says at one point. “I do have the power to change the perception of it.” This might imply that such hollowness in his story is intentional, but it seems much too subtle if it were. It strikes me more as just an unambiguous filmmaking shortcoming. I would guess this quote applies more to the thematic centre Lansky would prefer for his story, though it’s one that is vague and unclear and possibly out of touch with anything else we’re shown. It’s connected with his influence over his biographer David Stone, who takes up a substantial chunk of the narrative and is played by Sam Worthington in yet another underwhelming performance. Stone himself lets aspects of his personal life find their way into the conversations, Lansky even gets to know him on some level. At one of their meets they even talk about the girl he slept with the previous night. Specifically though it’s Stone’s divorce process that relates to Lansky’s troubled marriage decades before -at least that’s the idea. But the film can’t drum up any investment in Lansky’s relationship with his wife, a mere shadow of other such better plots in mafia movies. In fact of the limited focus his family does get, it’s his disabled son who’s more important -perhaps revitalizing Stone’s feelings for his own children. It’s hard to say. What’s clear though is that this elderly racketeer has a positive impact on Stone.
The journalist finds his story of violence and crime inspiring, even profound. “Lansky spent his life trying to control the game; but in the end he knew there was one game nobody gets to control: life itself.” This is an actual line spoken in voiceover near the end of the film, unironically and with conviction. It is a particularly wretched sample of the films’ disingenuous pretensions as well as its tendencies towards awful writing (most glaringly a series of awkward explanations pertaining to figures and events that really condescends to the audience). It would almost be an attempt to generate pathos for Lansky – he had to betray his friend, he had to place business over family –only he didn’t. And sure, he rarely got messy himself, but his own telling doesn’t skimp on his proximity to murder or maiming. That is an exceptionally dimwitted choice in fact for a movie that emphasizes his supposed brilliance: at the start of the interview Lansky swears he won’t incriminate himself, yet if the flashbacks are as indicative of his account as they’re implied to be, he most definitely does.
The plot going on around this with the agents trying to finally nab Lansky is fairly dull and not integrated with much care into the rest of the movie. Granted the pacing and structural editing is rather poor in the areas of the film Rockaway supposedly cares about as well. The whole thing is just not skillfully composed, which weirdly does Lansky a disservice at the same time the narrative probably overpraises him. Lansky feels like a movie made because its’ director wanted to make a gangster film and as a subject Meyer Lansky just happened to fit the bill in some of the right areas. The film ends with a title card stating it is based on true events –though the Stone character is an invention for the movie and I don’t trust that much else in the 80s sections actually happened either. But it’s one last cry for legitimacy and one more objective this movie cannot live up to.
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