Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
★★★★½ — Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
There's a moment in Once Upon a Time in America where Robert De Niro is simply sitting, saying nothing, and yet you feel the entire weight of a life poorly lived pressing down on him. That's the kind of film this is. Not one that announces itself loudly, but one that seeps into you slowly, like a tune you can't quite shake.
Sergio Leone didn't make gangster films the way anyone else made gangster films. He made elegies. And this one, his final feature, might be his most haunting work of all. Where Once Upon a Time in the West used the dying frontier as its emotional backdrop, this one uses time itself as the enemy. Memory, regret, the terrible persistence of the past. It's a film about what we carry with us and what we can never put down.
De Niro is extraordinary here. I've seen him give plenty of big, volcanic performances, but Noodles might be his finest hour precisely because of what he holds back. He's quiet, calculating, hollowed out. You watch him and you sense decades of grief living just beneath the surface, never quite breaking through. James Woods matches him scene for scene, all nervy energy and danger. Elizabeth McGovern brings a kind of aching, unreachable beauty to her role. The whole cast feels like they've lived in this world, not just visited it for a shoot.
And then there's Ennio Morricone. I'm not sure he ever wrote anything more achingly beautiful than the score here. That violin melody arrives like a memory you didn't know you had, tender and mournful and completely unforgettable. It's the kind of music that makes images feel like they're already fading even as you're watching them, like you're trying to hold onto a dream. Every frame Leone composes feels soaked in that same nostalgic longing, golden light and long shadows, the past rendered as something almost mythological.
But I won't pretend this film is flawless, because it isn't, and it wouldn't be honest to say otherwise. At nearly four hours, it earns most of its runtime through atmosphere and character rather than plot mechanics, but there are stretches, particularly early on, where it does drag. You have to be patient with it. More troubling are the extended rape scenes, which I found genuinely difficult to sit through, and not in any way that felt purposeful or earned. They feel gratuitous. They undercut the emotional power the film works so hard to build elsewhere, and they remain a serious blot on an otherwise extraordinary piece of work. It's not enough to simply say "product of its time" and move on. These scenes are a problem, and you should know that going in.
What keeps me coming back, and what earns this film its place among the greats, is the way it functions as something richer than a gangster epic. It's a meditation on time and loss and the stories we tell ourselves about who we were and why we made the choices we made. The non-linear structure, moving between decades with an almost dreamlike fluidity, means you're constantly reassessing what you've seen, reading the past through the present and back again. It's structurally bold and, when it works, genuinely moving.
Four and a half stars. Not perfect. There are real and serious issues here that I won't brush aside. But Leone at this level, with De Niro this good and Morricone this inspired, is something rare and profound. This is a film that stays with you. It settles in like a regret you can't quite name, and it doesn't leave.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 1984 | Watched: 2025-05-14
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Sergio Leone: Duck, You Sucker (1971) · A Fistful of Dollars (1964) · For a Few Dollars More (1965) · Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
More with Robert De Niro: The Untouchables (1987) · The King of Comedy (1982) · Shark Tale (2004) · Little Fockers (2010)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1980s: Nightmare City (1980) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Style Wars (1983) · Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers (1980)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
