Bugsy
Barry Levinson’s 1991 film Bugsy is about Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and his designs on starting business in Las Vegas in the form of a casino. The film was nominated for a slew of Academy Awards, including Best Art Direction (which it won), Best Costume Design (which it also won), Best Actor for Warren Beatty, Best Supporting Actor for Harvey Keitel and Best Supporting Actor for Ben Kingsley, Best Director, Best Music, Best Picture, and Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. The Silence of the Lambs would win most of the awards that Bugsy didn’t win that year, for the record.
Warren Beatty stars as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, bringing a glossy portrayal on the screen to fill the shoes of the notorious gangster. Siegel, as we discover when the film begins, works for the mob on the East Coast and is sent to California to look after some mob business. When he arrives, he falls in love with the lifestyle and with a woman, Virginia Hill (Annette Bening), despite his marriage relationship back home. Siegel buys a house and starts a life in California. He takes a trip to Nevada and discovers a business potential there, so he works with some local gangsters to finance his business venture and opens the Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel and Casino.
I did not enjoy Bugsy. First of all, I found the film to be overall glossy, vitreous and slick. Beatty’s Bugsy is a romantic hero of sorts, given the red carpet treatment as though we are to forgive his abuses because, according to the end credits crawl, he was the catalyst for Vegas generating an awful lot of money. Beatty draws on this gloss and this sex appeal as he plays Bugsy, bringing out the best in the character and downgrading to these odd flashes of rage which are supposed to feel like sudden little destructions of character but, instead, feel like lines on a script. Beatty shows no range, only a classy exterior that we are supposed to love and respect. Bugsy is drawn up as a hero here, which isn’t necessarily wrong in and of itself, but its efficacy as a film suffers as a result of this unbalanced and uneven portrayal.
To elaborate, the coruscating feel gave Bugsy a lack of actual texture. Instead of being a film that can be experienced, it feels simply like a sort of watered down Ocean’s Eleven gangster film minus a few Brat Pack members. Keitel and Kingsley are good, but they aren’t good enough to help the film rise above its fairly low self-esteem. It aims to create interest through its look, it seems, as Levinson sets his shots based around the backdrops instead of the performances. Unfortunately, the direction by Levinson and the glitz doesn’t add up to a good film here and Bugsy stumbles out of the gate.
It’s also, sadly, very bland. See, gloss in and of itself is not all bad. American Gangster used a decent amount of gloss as Denzel Washington brought Frank Lucas to the screen, but his Lucas had an earthy gloss. You could feel where he came from. With Bugsy, it doesn’t matter where Siegel came from and that makes for some bromidic storytelling. We’re supposed to be interested in how Bugsy “set up” Las Vegas, yet for some reason Levinson’s film doesn’t convey that interest through the performances or the failing script. Instead, we get “bark like the dog you wish you could be” type rhetoric whenever it’s time for Bugsy to act “mean” and we get glitz and glamour the rest of the time. It all feels so tepid and perfunctory.
To that end, it became very difficult to effectively hold an interest over the relationships on screen. The real life fireworks that erupted out of Beatty and Bening after the film aren’t evident on screen, as the chemistry between the two is sorely lacking. Instead, lines feel read verbatim from the page or prompter and the passion in even the most intense scenes feels, at times, laughable. The film’s dialogue has a very goofy feel, in fact, and this reflects on the relationships the film attempts to formulate through its characters. At the same time, you have Warren Beatty trying to be cool and it all just erupts into an ostentatious mess.
Bugsy is a lightweight film on every level it attempts to capture. As a character study, it falls short because the character of Bugsy Siegel as told through Beatty’s performance fails to capture any interest. As a gangster film, it flounders because of its lack of indomitability and passion. And as a film in general, of any genre or archetype, it fizzles because it’s just not entertaining.
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