Mark Reviews Movies: LANSKY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 24, 2021

Writer/director Eytan Rockaway's Lansky doesn't quite know what it wants to be or what it wants to say about the eponymous figure. The man at the heart of this movie, of course, is Meyer Lansky, the notorious gangster (less notorious than most of his contemporaries, since he was known as the "mob's accountant") and international gambling magnate. He was allegedly wealthy to a fabulous degree, although there's no official record or evidence of his riches. If he had stuck to legitimate business, Lansky would likely be championed as a personification of the American Dream. He didn't, though, and that's a major difference between fame and infamy.

There's little difference in Rockaway's movie, which begins with a simple and enticing conceit. Basically, it's 1981, and a septuagenarian Lansky, played by Harvey Keitel with understated confidence, has enlisted a struggling writer to listen to and document his life story.

There are a few ground rules for David Stone (Sam Worthington), the writer. First, none of their conversations can be recorded. Second, the book can't be published until after Lansky's death, since the tale involves so many crimes and the FBI is still looking for any reason to put him in prison. Finally, Sam has to keep all of this information to himself and be completely honest if anyone comes snooping for details. Believing the book could make him a success and a fortune, David agrees.

For a bit, the movie just watches these two characters, meeting in a diner and sitting across from each other in a booth, as Lansky establishes his philosophies on life and business, while impressing and charming everyone in the restaurant, and David furiously scribbles down notes to be formed into a narrative later. There's an intimate, almost theatrical quality to Rockaway's screenplay as this story lays out its narrative, its stakes, and the dynamic between the candid gangster and the almost star-struck author.

Rockaway seems to be teasing us in avoiding the obvious approach to this material, having Lansky relate a story about growing up in the then Russian Empire, without any dramatized flashback to the particular event. That particular tale, then, is more about the man sitting across from David had learned from it, not the drama and shock of the scene.

Almost inevitably, though, Rockaway does resort to and fully embrace the back-and-forth structure of modern-day narration and detailed flashbacks to Lansky's past. In those latter scenes, which eventually drive the entire narrative of this movie, a younger Lansky (primarily played by John Magaro) arrives in New York City as a child, becomes obsessed with math and gambling, becomes a friend and an illegitimate-business partner to Ben "Bugsy" Siegel (David Cade), and rises toward the top of the criminal underworld. There's a lot of backroom negotiating, forceful takeovers, plenty of killings as Lansky and Siegel form "Murder, Incorporated," and newfound sense of gangland unity with the formation of the National Crime Syndicate—a melting pot of Italian, Jewish, and Irish criminal organizations.

All of this is pretty routine, both from historical and narrative standards. Most of it, even the details of Lansky's personal life (mostly revolving around his understandably troubled marriage to his increasingly frustrated wife, played by AnnaSophia Robb), feels more clichéd than insightful.

Rockaway attempts to present Lansky as a complicated man, portraying his fight against local Nazis, as well as Nazi spies, during World War II and his financial support for the planned state of Israel (in a scene that isn't as inspiring as the score attempts to force). Lansky, who has come to see himself as a "wandering Jew," believes he should have been hero for such action, but the United States, in daring to investigate all of the crimes he admittedly performed or participated in, and Israel, in refusing him citizenship later for the same reason, betrayed his loyalty.

That's his story, at least, and while that unfolds in routine and morally unconvincing fashion, the modern-day tale, as a pair of feds are hunting for Lansky's hidden-away millions and coerce David to help them, tries to give the framing device some momentum and urgency. That section also feels shallow and routine, and Rockaway's attempts to thematically and morally connect Lansky with the uncertain, philandering David fail to develop the author's character, while also coming across as an intrinsically false comparison.

The movie works best, thanks mainly to Keitel, in its quieter moments of an older Lansky, trying to make sense of what he has gained and lost. Lansky itself, though, eventually becomes caught up in the mystery of and chase for the man's money, leaving the inspection of the supposed enigma of the man himself resolved with a final, simplistic scene of unsuccessful pathos.

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