What’s funny about “Once Upon a Time in America” is that 1984 Robert De Niro made up to look 35 years older doesn’t look all that different from the way Robert De Niro actually looks today only 28 years later.
But what is noticeably different is the fantastically storybook world of early 20th Century America in comparison to the bleak present. Maybe blame Steven Soderbergh, but it’s hard to imagine a fairy tale set in the 2000s. Sergio Leone however takes pleasure out of envisioning a picturesque America as it once was, with orchestral elegance and lilting pan flutes filling the city streets and with lively color and sound paired with every romance and every knife fight.
There’s a scene nearly two-thirds through Leone’s nearly four hour gangster fantasy where Noodles (De Niro) takes the lovely Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) to dinner on the seaside. The dining room is sparkling white, expansive and occupied only by handsome waiters and a full string ensemble. Only in America can you have something so schmaltzy, so over the top and so gaudy and still be touched by the magic of it all. That’s the not so subtle beauty of this great nation.
Much has been made about the film’s length and complexity reaching over 50 years with dozens of characters and intricate plot layers all building to a twist in modern day 1967. It has been reasoned that the last shot in which Noodles is seen smoking opium and is left with a big stupid grin on his face indicates that the entire fairy tale was nothing but a pipe dream, and this wasn’t helped when the movie was butchered in America by 90 minutes into an incomprehensible mess when it was theatrically released in 1984.
But I think it hardly matters. In its essence, “Once Upon a Time in America” is a simple film between two friends about nostalgia and loss. The film begins at the end of Prohibition with a few scenes of ruthless violence because it signals the end of a period of true decadence.
The rest of the film recalls that period through flashback in a surprisingly touching coming of age story of a few gangster hoods in New York. Between the antics of trying to get laid by the village whore Peggy and pulling their first jobs, the film has a goofy innocence, and every moment is treated as an elegiac fantasy through the shimmering bright cinematography and Ennio Morricone’s swimmingly saccharine score that recalls Old Hollywood. Not even “The Godfather” is this romanticized.
And when we flash forward to the ’60s, the world is not nearly as pretty, and the scene is underscored twice by what other than The Beatles’ “Yesterday.” Noodles has lost the past and been wandering in the future for over 35 years, and Max, as we will learn, has been desperately clinging to that lost decadence from the days after Prohibition.
There’s certainly a lot more to be analyzed here, and that’s why this is a somewhat shorter and faster response to such a long, epic film. I’m curious for instance to understand why each of Noodles’s sexual encounters breaks the film’s element of fantasy, with him taking advantage of Peggy and raping Carol and Deborah. I also didn’t really get why Joe Pesci wasn’t in the movie more. I was sure that little kid that got shot early on would grow up to be him.
But if there’s a real answer to the film’s complex riddle, I think the truth is nothing more than a beautiful and unreal time has passed us by, never to return, but even if it takes smoking opium, there is still some giddy joy of that lost time frozen forever in our memory.