Lanksy (2021 | USA | 119 minutes | Eytan Rockaway)
A biopic that chooses to make use of a framing device that removes all engagement and immersion, Lansky is a massive misuse of an interesting story with strong talent.
Before saying some unkind things about the film, a truly meandering mess with little to no sense of purpose or direction, there is at least one kind observation. Harvey Keitel is a great actor. He has not only been in some of the most iconic movies of his era, but he has also consistently challenged himself with the roles he has taken. As the incredibly influential former gangster Meyer Lansky, he brings a real sense of gravitas and depth to his portrait of a man reflecting on all the mistakes that he made in his life. It is almost enough to trick one into thinking that there is more going on in the film. In reality, there is next to nothing.
The film is often less about Lansky as it is about fictional journalist David Stone (Sam Worthington) who, in a stroke of luck, is given the opportunity to interview the historic figure for a biography he wants to write. Stone’s separation from his wife and kids are confined to bare minimum background and motivation for taking on this chance to turn his life around.
His life may need a reset because, above all else, he is not actually all that good of a journalist. The interviews, that could have been written as an engaging exchange of ideas between the two men, never take hold of anything interesting. They almost all take place in one location and exist primarily as a Cliffs Notes version of Lanky’s life. An in-depth interview would be required if writing even just a lengthy piece, let alone a full book. The surface level scenes are just the wrong way to frame the narrative. It creates an agonizing detachment by telling the story in a scattershot fashion through extended, disconnected flashbacks that lack a compelling throughline.
Stone himself is an incredibly passive presence and mostly exists as an audience surrogate. That he is based on writer and director Eytan Rockaway’s father Robert Rockaway may initially seem strange, though it gives some insight into the story’s framing. The foremost reason is that Robert was a professor and not a journalist. The other is that Eytan seemed to draw mostly from his father’s transcripts in writing the film and he evidently did not have the confidence that they would carry the story. This lack of confidence manifests itself in the insertion of a strange, out of leftfield plot about Lansky being investigated one last time by the FBI.
That element remains the most frustrating. It would have been preferable to just have the two men go back and forth with more time to establish elements of the flashbacks. Instead, the parallel investigation storyline feels like a cheap way to instill some degree of tension that instead just becomes a distraction. Don’t even get me started on the moments where Stone finds an unexpected romance in Minka Kelly’s Maureen that is so shallow and superficial it makes for a sigh of relief when the subplot is promptly abandoned.
What it most reminds me of is the way Josh Trank’s 2020 film Capone had similar subplots playing out all at the same time, causing the film to lose focus. However, and I never thought I’d say this, Lansky makes Trank’s narrative construction look downright masterful by comparison. At least Capone had a committed central performance from Tom Hardy. Lansky tasks a regrettably out of his depth Josh Magaro (an otherwise fantastic actor in films like First Cow) with portraying the excesses of the younger version of the gangster and these scenes come across as cartoonishly over the top.
Further, it is hard not to notice how cheap and unprofessional everything looks. The flashbacks, which are meant to be the exciting embodiments of the stories Lanksy is telling, more closely resemble the staging and production value of a high school play. This is with all respect to a high school play, many are fantastic within their means, though a film of this ambition really begins to fall apart the closer you look at it. It shot for too much and clearly didn’t have the resources to pull it off.
There is a good film in here. All one needs to do is look at Keitel in The Irishman to see the potential. Yes, he was not the main character, but that film is an example of how an older gangster reflecting on the mistakes of his past in his later years can make for engaging stuff. While Keitel himself is worth seeing as the alternatively threatening and melancholy old gangster in some of the quieter moments, the film is far too noisily uncertain about what it wants to be.
When an ending postscript informs us that Lansky was really most known for bringing economic benefits by expanding the gambling industry, which the film has just shown required immense amounts of violence and destruction, it makes you wonder if even they knew what they were doing with the story.
Lansky is in select theaters and on demand June 25.