Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone's swan song, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), was an old man's lament about memory, absence, architecture, and the inevitability of death. Rightly called an epic poem of violence, greed, and betrayal, the film was also a masterpiece of narrative structure in which the ringing of a telephone inside of a Chinatown opium den initiates the (opium-induced) dream-memory-fantasy of "Noodles" Aaronson, the Jewish gangster played by Robert De Niro. The movie begins in the center, travels to the past, fades to the future, and returns/flashbacks to the center again, much as our dream life operates. Like Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (and the end of Taxi Driver), this "flashback" ending can be interpreted both as a dream itself and as a return to consciousness at the end of a dream. This film was in many ways Leone's lifetime project, as he had been ready to go into production since the early seventies. The principle cast, as assembled, was superb: James Woods as "Max" Bercowicz (aka Christopher Bailey); Larry Rapp as "Fats" Gelly; Elizabeth McGovern and Jennifer Connelly (pictured above at age 12) as Fats' sister Deborah, both true love and date-rape victim of De Niro. In smaller roles were Tuesday Weld; William Forsyth; Treat Williams; Joe Pesci; Burt Young; Danny Aiello. Marked with fantastic period settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century Lower East Side to the 1930s to 1968, the film was also supported by a tremendous score by Ennio Morricone (as usual). The film's dream-like narrative was centered in mythology, with the anti-hero De Niro returning from exile to New York City, the land of his boyhood. His return to Fats' bar was filled with an almost violent nostalgia, as he quietly surveys the building itself, the feel of the walls, the empty space, the removable plank in the bathroom wall from which he spied (and spies again) on his young love practicing ballet on the empty storeroom stage. The graphic violence, the corruption, and the betrayal seem to fade for De Niro, and Leone, beneath the inability to recover the lost dreams of youth.