In death as in life, John Gotti’s a hard guy to pin down. The John Travolta-led biopic simply titled Gotti entered US theaters over the weekend, in the culmination of a long journey fraught with mishaps. The initial plan was a release straight to video back in December, until distributor Lionsgate decided to abandon ship 10 brief days before the slated release, throwing the film’s future into jeopardy. Lionsgate sold the rights back to the producers and left them to land a new benefactor, which they found in Vertical Entertainment (the same label that will quietly shepherd Billionaire Boys Club, the film containing what will in all likelihood be Kevin Spacey’s final leading performance, through multiplexes this August) and, in an inexplicable first, overnight phenom ticket retailer MoviePass. This new deal came together in time for the world premiere last month at the Cannes film festival, where press screenings were unceremoniously cancelled at the last moment, leaving only an exclusive gala premiere few critics were permitted to attend. As ever, nothing sticks to the Teflon Don.
But Gotti’s troubled road to the silver screen isn’t all that atypical for men of his stature – specifically, the kind of theatrically villainous men that have fascinated audiences since the dawn of the crime thriller. Quentin Tarantino has begun piecing together his next film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, said to revolve around the violent doings of Charles Manson, but the notorious cult leader has heretofore only shown up on TV. Meanwhile, former Doctor Who Matt Smith will take a whack at Manson in a new treatment from American Psycho director Mary Harron titled Charlie Says, and Hilary Duff will assay Sharon Tate in yet another upcoming project currently assembling its cast.
As for the most powerful narco of them all – two aborted Pablo Escobar biopics continue to float around in development hell, one from Joe Carnahan and the other from Oliver Stone. Those features that have made it to theaters take a convenient out by placing the focus on people in the man’s immediate orbit instead of putting him directly in the spotlight. The newly released Loving Pablo follows the hazardous path of Escobar’s girlfriend (a trembling Penelope Cruz), joining her as she’s instantly seduced by his wealth and power until his monstrous tendencies threaten her life and drive her away. Likewise, the 2014 indie Escobar: Paradise Lost explores how his influence strains romance secondhand, as a humble surfer makes time with a local girl who turns out to be Escobar’s niece. Both refrain from engaging with the Escobar story in full, instead approaching from an askance vantage point.
And even with its somewhat compromised debut to the public, the Kevin Connolly-directed Gotti marks the first proper treatment for the legendary mobster, following a handful of small-screen projects and the barely existent 2010 film Sinatra Club. (Connolly knows these travails better than most; his doomed efforts to bring the fictitious Escobar movie Medellín to life provided a major plot arc during his tenure on the showbiz satire Entourage.)
On paper, the reluctance to take a shot at these figures and the seeming impossibility of doing so effectively makes no sense. Criminals’ life stories come ready-made with all the elements that are supposed to amount to a gripping (or at least easily sold) work of entertainment: violence, hedonism of the sexual and narcotic varieties, internal conflict, a rise-and-fall narrative easily sculpted into the shape of a screenplay, and a name that everyone already knows and fears. The respective rises of organized crime and cult worship embody a dark id of the American psyche, its promise of prosperity twisted by those looking for faster gratification. Gotti does so particularly nakedly, but scads of smaller gangster flicks – Legend, in which Tom Hardy portrays the pathological Kray twins, is a recent example – have angled to capture some of that same magic Martin Scorsese harnessed with Goodfellas.
And therein lies the trouble. These films’ studious reverence for Scorsese’s mid-period masterpiece and the cinematic lineage from which it sprang has stunted this micro-genre’s growth. Movies like Goodfellas coined cliches instead of following them, excelling by virtue of their originality rather than repackaging someone else’s. In actuality, the ostensibly ready-made drama in the story of a Gotti, an Escobar or a Manson may be their greatest obstacle. What to do with a life in which the factual details closely resemble the well-trodden emotional beats of a movie that’s already been made, several times over? It’s almost safer to freely adapt the history of a man relatively unknown – as Scorsese did with wiseguy-turned-rat Henry Hill – than to wrestle the timeline of a story everyone has heard into a novel shape.
Connolly’s Gotti doesn’t do itself any favors, nicking the time-tested moves of fourth wall-breaking narration and incongruous pop needle drops during particularly brutal moments, but this project was an uphill battle from the start. It’s telling that the film comes closest to being effective when delving into the complicated relationship between Travolta’s domineering Gotti and Spencer Lofranco as his son and reluctant heir to the family business. The dynamic between a lion and the runt of his litter covers fresh narrative ground, as if Don Corleone had handed the reins of power to a Fredo instead of a Michael. But Connolly can’t resist filling the interim spaces around it with rote gangster business, erring away from the drama this could have been and back to the mold tacitly understood to be the default. Cinema’s most wanted men remain elusive, but the fascination of their lives has been watered down by generations of copycats, doppelgängers and descendants. In his new film’s opening narration, Gotti grumbles that a made man can only end his life dead or in jail. The Gotti of myth and his ilk face a slightly more optimistic choice: evolve or die (at the box office).