You're making a biopic, you want to involve the audience in the thinking of the main character, so you feel that in order for him to express himself, you have to invent a listener. But the listener can't just sit there, he needs to be justified by having a subplot of his own. In the case of this Lansky movie (not to be confused with the Richard Dreyfus one) too much of the script is about the listener. The tail wags the dog a little. Every now and then there's a flashback to a moment in Lansky's career, but each flashback is rather a self-contained episode; there's little traction moving us from one to the next.
Everyone says Harvey Keitel was wonderful here, but I got impatient with his phony laugh. I never did figure out whether it was a bad imitation of a laugh or an imitation of Meyer Lansky badly pretending to laugh.
Everyone says Harvey Keitel was wonderful here, but I got impatient with his phony laugh. I never did figure out whether it was a bad imitation of a laugh or an imitation of Meyer Lansky badly pretending to laugh.