Barry Levinson’s Bugsy is an absorbing gangster drama, with Warren Beatty making its violent dreamer difficult to dismiss. The period craft is a pleasure; the film’s fondness for Siegel needs more questioning.
Barry Levinson’s Bugsy makes a good evening out of a man we would prefer not to spend one with. It is an absorbing gangster drama, funny and disquieting, though too ready to admire Ben Siegel’s ambitions for Las Vegas. James Toback’s screenplay treats the grand plans, the vanity and the criminal business as parts of the same personality. That gives Warren Beatty more to play than a succession of threats. The danger comes from how readily Siegel can make those threats seem compatible with being excellent company.
Beatty plays him as a man who expects attention and has trouble understanding why it might be withheld. The confidence is attractive until his temper changes the terms of the encounter. We were unsettled by those swings from charm to violence: Beatty makes the aggression feel like something the charm has allowed him to get away with before. Levinson keeps both sides recognisable as the same person. The performance remains persuasive even when Siegel is behaving appallingly.
Annette Bening’s Virginia Hill gives the central romance some resistance to Siegel’s self-regard, though the relationship is less convincing than the individual performances. Bening gives Beatty someone who can hold our attention alongside him, and that is no small part of the film’s appeal. Yet the lovers do not always persuade us to care about their attachment as much as the film plainly does. The supporting cast helps: Harvey Keitel’s Mickey Cohen and Ben Kingsley’s Meyer Lansky give the criminal company a weight of its own. Toback’s dialogue supplies much of the pleasure of their exchanges.
Allen Daviau’s cinematography and Dennis Gassner’s production design make the 1940s settings feel like places Siegel would want to possess. The finish is plush without making every scene look like an inspection of the furnishings. We can understand the attraction of this life before anyone starts explaining the dream behind it. Albert Wolsky’s costumes belong to that same carefully controlled presentation, giving the people the polish of their surroundings.
Ennio Morricone’s music is another pleasure, although it contributes to our sense that Siegel is being treated generously. It suits the romantic sweep, but we sometimes wanted the film to leave more doubt about the man we were being asked to follow. Stu Linder’s editing gives the actors room to make Toback’s exchanges work, especially when wit and menace occupy the same conversation. The pace is less assured when the love story has to carry the interest without the criminal business beside it.
The larger reservation is with what Levinson and Toback ask us to admire. A gangster’s dream of Las Vegas can explain his appetite without excusing it, but the film seems reluctant to let the dream look foolish or ugly. Its affection for Siegel limits how far it will question him. We want a gangster film to look harder at the people its hero frightens or hurts. The shifts between comedy, love story and tragedy do not always make his behaviour easier to understand.
That reservation does not cancel the considerable pleasure of watching this cast handle a script with some bite. Beatty gives the film enough unpredictability to keep its admiration from becoming completely reassuring, and Bening refuses to be merely decorative. At 136 minutes, it asks for a little more patience than the romance earns. Watch it for Beatty, but keep a little more distance from Siegel than Levinson does.
