Bugsy

A tiny bit of a mess, Bugsy wants to be both a quiet character study, a loud mafia epic, and a portrait of a doomed love affair, while winding up being mostly a damn fine entertainment. Much of that credit goes to leading man Warren Beatty, a notoriously picky star who hasn’t made as many films as his reputation of Hollywood royalty would suggest. Beatty wouldn’t have to put much effort into making us want to watch him, but his work in Bugsy is completely committed.

This goes a great deal to making Bugsy work, because as written his character is very one-dimensional. The film leans heaviest on a plot for Bugsy to turn the Nevada desert into a wonderland of casinos and a Mecca for gangland behavior. No attention is paid to his back story, so he arrives and remains a bit of a narrowly envisioned enigma. Beatty’s megawatt charisma and background as an untamable bad boy add layers that wouldn’t be there otherwise. Is it a performance because Beatty makes it so flashy, or is it a flashy performance and so great because of sheer movie star strength? It’s probably a bit of both.

Bugsy does have the unfortunate feeling of droning on for a bit too long, and while Beatty and Annette Bening could start forest fires with the way their romantically stare at each other, the story never evolves in a satisfying way. Call me crazy, but I think Bugsy would have been much better if it had focused in on any one of these various plot strands and made it the main focus of the film. As much as I enjoy watching these two romance and betray each other, it repeats itself too much and becomes dull towards the end. If anything, Bugsy could have been a gangster epic on par with any of Scorsese’s 90s great films, but it ends up feeling like an entertainment from another era. One in which its epic length is not matched by a wealth of thematic material and high quality.