Film reviews: American Gangster and Brick Lane

Denzel Washington as drug baron Frank Lucas in Ridley Scott's American Gangster
Denzel Washington (fourth from left) as drug baron Frank Lucas in Ridley Scott's American Gangster

Ridley Scott's American Gangster paints a romantic picture of the man who flooded 1970s Harlem with cheap drugs, writes Sukhdev Sandhu

American Gangster


18 cert, 157 min

Say what you like about American Gangster, but you have to admit it's got a pretty amazing storyline. Apparently, it's a true one.

Harlem in the early 1970s: a once-proud black American enclave, home to poets and jazzers and artists, now on the brink of implosion. The economy is in freefall, businesses are moving out, thousands of families are living in rotted tenements.

Worst of all, more and more of its young men and women are ready to do anything to score some of the heroin that's flooding into the area. Who's responsible? Most New Yorkers, most New York cops too, assumed it was a huge Mafia clan, a brigade of tight-knit Don Corleones.

It turns out, according to Ridley Scott's new film, that it was a sober-looking, hard-working black guy called Frank Lucas. A one-man drug epidemic who, supported by his brothers from North Carolina, sold junk twice as pure and twice as cheap as any of his rivals.

A clear-eyed method man who journeyed to the poppy fields of war-strafed Vietnam to make face-to-face deals with local dealers. A schemer of extraordinary daring who imported heroin from those fields to the US in the coffins of soldiers. A gangster for sure, but here's the rub: one to be admired, one worthy of the greatest honorific Hollywood can offer - the prefix "American".

Denzel Washington plays Lucas as a man with a mission - to live up to the high standards of criminality established by his mentor, Bumpy Johnson, and to replicate the efficiency and cruel dynamism of American capitalism itself.

He is a striver, an entrepreneur in the Booker T Washington mould, who prefers local businessmen (meaning, mainly, himself) rather than big corporations to control the fate of Harlem. His particular formula for heroin he dubs "Blue Magic", a brand name he compares to Pepsi, and one whose "trademark infringement" by rivals results in them being battered.

Out to get him is Richie Roberts (a casually excellent Russell Crowe), a New Jersey police officer with terrible hair, terrible clothes, and terrible eating habits: a shot of Lucas laying on a lavish Thanksgiving spread is followed by one of Roberts preparing a tuna-and-crisps sandwich.

The criminal has a Puerto Rican beauty queen as a wife and a doting mother; the cop's wife and child have left him. Lucas seems clean, but is utterly crooked; Roberts looks all over the shop, but is totally straight, so much so that, much to the disgust of his cynical colleagues, he hands in the million dollars he finds in a car.

There are good performances from Josh Brolin as a bent cop and Cuba Gooding Jr as Lucas's flashy rival Nicky Barnes. but the real fun is waiting for Lucas and Roberts to face off against each other.

This encounter is delayed to the very end, and it's so enthralling - because it's great to see two alpha-male leads strut their stuff, and because of the way they establish an understanding close to conspiracy - that it could and should have been longer.

That said, Washington doesn't really nail the role. Lucas, according to Mark Jacobson, whose New York magazine article "The Return of Superfly" was the basis of Steve Zaillian's script, was a "braggart, trickster, and fibber". He had his bling, proto-Shaft tendencies.

Washington though is restrained and white-collared, muzzling his libidinal, brawly energies. Even when he torches and shoots-dead rivals, his violence seems performed, not intrinsic.

American Gangster evokes meltdown Manhattan well. An early and eerie scene shows Johnson dispensing turkeys from the back of a truck like a humanitarian worker at a refugee camp.

Cinematographer Harris Savides drains the film of bright colours so that it resembles a corpse. Heroin victims are shown, their veins as clogged and filthy as the alleyways outside their broken apartments.

That said, a funky period soundtrack, plus footage of Ali fights and Nixon broadcasts on TV, can't help but add palatability to proceedings; we should be shocked by the sight of a project-housing room full of "table workers" wearing nothing but face masks while they chop up heroin, but instead it just looks - groovy.

Scott is something of a romantic at heart. His film is nowhere near as jaded or as hard-bitten as the '70s films such as The French Connection or Serpico that it hopes to echo.

He has, you feel, fallen in love with Lucas, his messiah pose, and his status as the black guy who outsmarted Italian and Irish mobsters, the latter being something that Roberts describes as "progress" and a challenge to the existing social order.

Sure, we may find ourselves rooting for him because he bests the racist, mendacious and hypocritical cops on his tail. But I was left uneasy at the implication that Lucas's gangsterism was merely a mirror to core national values ("I can do anything I want: this is America!").

The man pimped and culled the Harlem people he claimed to protect: that makes him a gangster as pure and cheap and evil as the poison he peddled.

Brick Lane


15 cert, 102 min

Brick Lane, Sarah Gavron's subdued adaptation of Monica Ali's bestselling novel, is in equal parts English social-realist drama and American-style "spiritual awakening" fable.

Its heroine is Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a Bangladeshi teenager brought to England in the early 1980s to marry a much older, jowlier and frog-faced husband Chanu (Satish Kaushik).

By 2001, now a diligent home-seamstress, wife, and the mother of a couple of bolshy daughters, she falls in love with the lively and politically radical Karim (Christopher Simpson).

He also values her because she's not too reckless, not too inflamed by the liberties that the West offers. He is, in other words, just another man who wants to place her in an ethnic and cultural straitjacket.

Gavron's film, like Ali's novel, is keen to portray east London from Nazneen's perspective. The flat in which she lives seems at best like a retreat, at worst a prison. Often she is shown peeking through windows, insulated from the world by net curtains.

Writers Abi Morgan and Laura Jones use regular flashbacks to contrast the grimy housing outside to her bucolic past in Bangladesh, an apparently eternal summer in which young children gambolled and plunged into picturesque lakes.

Unfortunately the romance at the heart of Brick Lane never comes alive. Chatterjee is doleful and weepy, Simpson enervated.

The most interesting part - that of Chanu - is underwritten, though Kaushik imbues him with such gentle warmth that he becomes more a stereotypical Asian patriarch.

In the film's most dramatic scene, he addresses a hall packed with angry young Muslims and denies that religious faith alone is capable of uniting them: "My Islam is in here," he cries, pointing to his heart, "And that is the only thing worth defending."