New Faces, Old Genre: Indie Filmmakers Re-examine the Gangster Flick
Appeared in Sundance Daily Insider, 2008Gangster movies, those glorified tales of the Mafia such as Scarface, Goodfellas and The Godfather, have left an indelible mark not just on American film, but on international cinema as well. But like gangsterism in real life, the genre is not confined to New York, Italy, and Las Vegas. Instead it spans the globe and follows its own convictions. “In the independent genre, we don’t have to live by any genre rules,” said Hong Kong filmmaker Kenneth Bi whose film The Drummer is screening in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. “The viewer has a chance to be a little bit surprised. Whereas, when you watch a genre film they have to be really, really good to surprise you.”
Bi’s film is not centered on the glamorous underworld leader or the neophyte tough guy common in both American and Hong Kong gangster movies. It’s about the weak and reckless son of a mid-level crime boss who is caught in the arms of his father’s enemy’s girlfriend. The boy is subsequently whisked away to a remote town to avoid punishment by the scorned gangster, and while there, stumbles across a group of Zen drummers living on a nearby mountain. The majority of this “gangster film” is spent with the drummers as they teach their art and peaceful way of life to the spoiled young man.
“This group of drummers does exist,” Bi said. “I went up to the mountains to see them, and it struck me this dichotomy that they would experience… Up in the mountain they live this isolated, hermetic life, training themselves. And every day they would go back to the city where they’re confronted with modernity. This dual life got me thinking that I didn’t want to have a film that was all in the mountain, all pristine and clean. I thought the absolute extreme opposite [would be] the gangster world.”
“It’s like the Brechtian thing,” he added. “It sobers you instead of getting you all wrapped up. That’s the thing with my film – these two worlds keep reminding each other that there’s something else out there.”
Irish filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh is known for genre twisting and rule breaking. But in order to break the rules of a genre, one first needs to know the rules are, so for reference material for his feature In Bruges, McDonagh turned to classic gangster movies. “Mean Streets is one of my favorite films,” he said. “I guess that one would have the most correlation to my film because it’s about gangsters – tough guys – but also about redemption and guilt.”
In Bruges follows two gangsters who are sent to the medieval city of Bruges, Belgium, presumably for a job and, at their boss’ urging, a bit of sightseeing. We eventually learn that one of the gangsters is tearfully suffering from guilt over a past mistake, displaying a level of remorse for his actions that is atypical in the gangster genre, which tends to glorify perpetrators of violence. “My idea was to set up two archetypal gangster hit men but then not go to that macho place,” said the filmmaker. “To go to something quite the opposite and explore what happens when a fairly morally decent criminal-type causes something really horrible to happen… It’s more about real life sadness and despair, I guess.”
Humanizing the gangster figure is a common element in many of these films, such as the Colombian movie Perro Come Perro. Filmmaker Carlos Moreno said making a gangster movie wasn’t his main objective, but rather to tell a universally human story that could happen anywhere in the world and set it in his home country. The film centers around one small-time gangster, who steals a large sum of money to enable his estranged wife and daughter to flee the country, but the money belongs to a fearsome mob boss. What follows is a terrifying bloodbath that would dissuade anyone from pursuing a life in crime. “I made a movie about a how people change their values around money,” he said. “And it’s not because they are gangsters, it’s because they are humans.”
Likewise, in The Merry Gentlemen, American actor/director Michael Keaton added a human dimension to the hit man character he plays in the movie. At the beginning of the film, we him witness murdering a small-time thug. Afterward, he returns to his car and then puts the gun in his own mouth, clearly plagued by inner turmoil created by his chosen profession. “He’s an outlaw. He lives by his own rules. He’s created his own world of right and wrong and he struggles with that a lot,” Keaton explained.
In Brad Anderson’s film Transsiberian, the main character also struggles with right and wrong, but this person is no gun toting gangster, but a woman inadvertently thrust into a Russian mob drug trafficking scheme while traveling along the fabled Transsiberian railway. Anderson’s meticulous research of the Russian underworld creates a sense of realism that is anything but glamorous. “It’s very authentic,” he explained, “particularly in the far east in Siberia where this movie is set. Woody Harrelson’s character describes it at one point as the ‘wild, wild East,’ a place where a lot of rules and laws are not really followed.”
But regardless of how these filmmakers chose to tell their gangster stories, one common element binds them all – the enigmatic figure of the gangster. Author John McCarty wrote a book on the subject called Bullets Over Hollywood: The American Gangster Movie from the Silents to the Sopranos and shed some light on why we love them. “I think one of the reasons we find gangsters appealing is because they reflect what’s going on around us and sometimes we want to know how to make sense of it,” he said. “On the other hand, there’s a fantasy element that we buy into when we watch these things. Like, wouldn’t it be nice to have the kind of power these guys have? And we can enjoy that vicariously without actually going out and trying to do it ourselves.”
Unless of course, you are a gangster in real life.
For his latest documentary Made In America, filmmaker Stacy Peralta ventured into gang-plagued South Central L.A. in an attempt to explain the area’s history of oppression and violence. The director of Riding Giants and Dogtown and Z-Boys interviewed dozens of people who grew up in the community, including members of the infamous Cripps and Bloods gangs. The film presents a terrifying window into a desperate situation – a far cry from the canonized figure of the movie gangster.
Ironically, any references to the genre in this film are from the gang members themselves, who Peralta explained, idolize the vicious characters they have seen onscreen. “A lot of these kids look to the Al Pacino character in Scarface as hero number one,” he said. “That’s one of the favorite movies among gangbangers I talked to. Skip [one of the people interviewed in the film] told me it was like a how-to video for him.”
McCarty said this is phenomenon is nothing new, and it speaks to the enduring allure of the gangster figure in cinema, for better or for worse. “It’s interesting, especially in American cinema, but I’m sure in overseas cinema as well… you would have gangsters being portrayed on the screen, and then ultimately gangsters in real life would try to emulate or behave like them.”
“There’s a famous quote from actor George Brent [who often played gangsters in the 1950s]. Someone asked him, ‘Why do all gangsters talk like you?’ And he said, ‘Because I taught ’em how to talk.’”