everyone who saw this movie picked up on this and the movie has
suggestions of such... but the movie's power would be diminished if it
was indeed just an opiate dream.
mcgovern isn't still young. she has that stage make up on and when she
removes it, we see the lines of her wrinkles. at the party she is
definitely wrinkled. anyway, european make-up department weren't and
arent' up to par with ours. it was just a bad job.
Noodles got his first glimpse of the sixties Deborah on a poster of the
Antony and Cleopatra play and quoted the bard line "Age cannot wither her"
When he first meets her, she's washing stage makeup off her face, and we
can't really tell how she's aged, if at all.
When we finally see her sans stage make-up, she's a bit wrinkled, but still
too young for her age. Hence the Cleopatra line.
We're seing her through DeNiro's eyes.
as for the 60s being unreal, of course. we're not cruising with the
hippies but strolling around with a man for whom time stood still.
50s, 60s, 70s, it doesn't matter. noodles goes to sleep early, is lost
in his memories and dreams and is oblivious to the chaning world
around him.
True, and you can add the Cleopatra bit to this 'unreality'.
as for the final shot in the opium den, i think it suggests here's a
man who dreams of his past and perhaps even fantasizes about his
future. in his drugged out mind, he can feel the pain and beauty but
also see it as some wickedly funny cosmic game. that when he's under
the drug, he's freed of obsessions and guilt and feels as though
hovering over his life, looking at it from childhood to future old
age, all of it so ridiculous, even funny from the perspective of a
pipedream poet. even the use of opium in itself is exotic and strange,
as though it connects noodles with all of human history, its romantic
dreams and its follies. this in a time when most people are happy to
get off on booze.
yet, as an old man, he doesn't smoke the pipe anymore. if his opiate
dreams opened the space wide open, his exile and his aging self has
turned his dreams into the walls of a jail cell or that of a morgue.
The movie is a series of brilliantly intertwined flashbacks and
flashforwards. It isn't till the last scene that we realize what the
center, timewise, is.
This is where Noodle's story should have ended, from Noodle's point of
view. His betrayal had resulted in the death of his friends, making for a
tragic climax, but of the romantic tragedy variety.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote that people's lives can end long before their
actual death, the last bit being an extended epilogue. That's how Noodles
led his existence following that fateful night.
Of course, the kicker is that reality and neatly-arched lifestories are
rarely congruent, which is why the sixties sequence is so jarring.
Leone constructed the movie in this way to reflect his impression of his
interview with the author of The Hoodlums, the autobiography which the
movie was based on. It turns out the gangster's recollections of his
gangster days were more of a medley of old Hollywood movies than reality.
That man's life (in the Vonnegut sense), had ended when prohibition was
repealed.
***
This is easily the movie that impressed me the most. That last scene of
that DeNiro smile seen through a veil hit me like a ton of bricks hurled by
a catapult. I was speechless for an hour.