Once Upon A Time In America Movie Review

John Meyers lives and writes in Maryland. His work has appeared in Smokelong Quarterly, Spartan, the Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Louisville Review, and elsewhere. John was a 2018 Best Small Fictions nominee. His website is hammeredinmetal.com

Once Upon a Time in America is a movie about a group of desperately poor Lower East Side Jewish kids who prowl the streets of 1920’s Manhattan, committing minor crimes and dreaming of the day when they’ll become hardcore gangsters. The movie covers a fifty-year time period in which the boys manage to realize their goals, rising through the ranks of the criminal underworld, leaving a trail of dead bodies, double-crossed cronies, and disappointed loved ones in their wake. The first time I saw Once Upon a Time in America, I thought of my father, whose family emigrated from Ukraine to the Lower East Side around 1920. Of course, my father was not a gangster; he was an average poor kid whose own father worked in a hat shop. He didn't commit crimes as far as I know, but he did spend a lot of time hustling in his own way, which primarily involved bumming meals from friends. Apparently he knew the exact times his friends had lunch and dinner and he made sure to show up at their houses just as they were preparing to eat.

When my dad wasn’t searching for food, he was trying to figure out how to leave the Lower East Side and see the world. He had no money for college, so he joined the Merchant Marine and received a free education in return. The Merchant Marine was an unusual choice for my dad because he couldn’t swim. I once asked him if he ever worried about falling overboard and he laughed and said life on the ship was very relaxing. In fact, in his college yearbook his shipmates remembered him as the guy who could curl up and fall asleep anytime, anywhere. I guess being poor and having a father who drank too much whiskey helped you to feel comfortable wherever you were, as long as it was far away from home. The mobsters in Once Upon a Time in America were certainly a lot more desperate than my dad, but they were desperate to rise to the top of the criminal world and as far as I could tell had no plans to leave the Lower East Side. One of the coolest things about this movie is how the stretch of fifty years is covered via non-sequential flashbacks and flash-forwards. One minute the bodies of Robert De Niro’s gangster buddies are lying in front of a burning restaurant in the rain, the next minute, these same guys are wearing tuxedos and celebrating the end of Prohibition. These time shifts are not easy to follow, but as the movie progresses there is just enough traditional mob-movie momentum to help viewers connect the dots. No criminal undertaking is too extreme for these guys, until they reach the apex of their careers and come face-to-face with a pie-in-the-sky heist for the ages.

Once Upon a Time in America is a long, luxurious, beautifully violent film. It’s also a film my dad never saw. When I asked him why he hadn’t seen it, he just shrugged and said all mobster flicks are the same. I explained how I could easily imagine him as a tangential member of the gang, the good kid who broke away and left town. He was unmoved. He was always unmoved when the subject of his youth came up. To him it was a time to stay out of trouble and plan for the future. The biggest risk he ever took was to sail on a gigantic ship without knowing how to swim. He never told me how he managed to hide his secret, but I’m guessing he probably crossed paths once or twice with the types featured in Once Upon a Time in America. I suspect that these boys probably taught him something about trickery and evasion. I have no proof to back up this suspicion, it’s just a feeling I get when I watch the movie. I really believe my dad is in there somewhere.