So this is a Sergio Leone spaghetti gangster film (which… okay, I guess that’s just what the Mafia is, so fair enough). It’s allegedly in a conceptual trilogy with Once Upon a Time in the West; I can see that with stylistic things like the way that there’s a bunch of diegetic Ennio Morricone music in both movies[1], but there’s not much otherwise linking them together.

Anyway, it’s a giant decades-spanning epic, with scenes of our characters as kids in 1920s New York, scenes of them as adults in the 1930s, and then scenes of (some of them) as old people in the 1960s. The old-timey scenes are done super-well, and if this didn’t have a giant budget, I’m really curious how they made those sets. (The modern-day stuff feels less 1960sy than I would expect — I actually thought it was supposed to be set in the “present day” 1983 that it was made in, but couldn’t make the characters’ ages work at all.)

It’s a beautiful movie that evokes a sense of time and place in its older sections, and its time-hopping narrative has some satisfying twists to it (though one or two big ones feel a little cheesy). And, unfortunately, it is flawed in a way that I think destroys the movie.

So the big problem with this movie is that there’s a massive gap between what it thinks it’s about, and what’s onscreen. Because the story it thinks it’s telling is one of two young friends who get into the crime world, and the tensions that come between them, ultimately inciting a quasi-betrayal that leaves one of them wracked with guilt; and then the consequences of that decades later. And that story exists, the tale of “Noodles” and Max, it’s in this four hour epic.

But what’s also in this four hours is the story of how Noodles goes from some teenage sex pest stuff (spying on one girl undressing, exposing himself to another), into being a straight-up rapist. And to be clear, I don’t mean that in any subtle “by twenty-first century standards of consent” sense (in the way that the teenage stuff is clearly supposed to be seen as prankish antics) — it’s straight-up, old-school violent rape.

So look, I don’t demand that my movies be morality tales where everyone is a perfect saint, or that evildoers always get their comeuppance or whatever. There are good movies about bad people. I tend not to like them, simply because I don’t enjoy spending time in the company of unpleasant assholes, but I can admit that even if something like Taxi Driver isn’t to my taste, that it is a legitimately good movie.

The problem here is that the movie throws in this scene, which is both filmed brutally and which seemingly should have major significance for the story — this is our protagonist, and the woman he’s raping is the alleged love of his life whom he’s known since he was a kid and wanted to marry, the central love interest of the film up until now — and then… does nothing with it.

She goes off to Hollywood (where she was already planning to go) and drops out of the movie for a while. He just goes back to his other crimes, seemingly slightly regretful but nothing more. And… that’s it. When we come to the section of the movie where everyone is old, he meets up with her again, and it’s like nothing ever happened. You could literally take this whole intense rape scene out and nothing else in the movie would need to change in any way. (In fact, the air of slight regret and missed opportunities would make much, much more sense if it was just about her moving away while they still carried a torch for each other.)

It’s nonsensical as character development, it’s nonsensical as story development, and it’s far too central to the movie to just set to the side. It rings so utterly false that it ruins any sense of the movie as a character study.

Except, I guess, to the eighteen critics who considered this one of their ten best movies of all time. Go figure.

  1. (At one point, I wrote in my notes “diegetic telephone,” as a reminder to mention a ringing telephone whose jangling ring persists across like three increasingly-tense scenes, even through a mislead where someone picks up a phone… to make an outgoing call — only to finally be resolved when someone finally answers the damn phone after another cut. Autocorrect transformed that into “diarrhetic” and it didn’t really feel wrong.) ↩︎