Once Upon a Time in America — Looking Back, What Was Missed Has Become a Lifetime

Once Upon a Time in America — Looking Back, What Was Missed Has Become a Lifetime

Perhaps the story itself is not that important. After all, throughout history, there have never been that many stories human beings can tell. We move endlessly among family, love, and friendship; between gain and loss, loyalty and betrayal, success and failure. From these oppositions grow all kinds of joy, jealousy, anger, regret, and despair, and through such emotions we arrive, by different paths, at strangely similar shores. Whether a thousand years ago or a hundred years from now, the basic patterns of human stories remain much the same. There is nothing new under the sun.

And yet, perhaps the story is of utmost importance. Any life a person can experience is, in the end, only one tiny fraction among countless possibilities. No matter what choices we make, to be human is to make only a painfully limited number of choices. And each choice that may seem insignificant in the moment leads toward an unknown direction that could be entirely different from all others. For humanity as a whole, an individual’s experiences may be repeated in countless lives at every moment. But for that individual, they are unique and irreplaceable. At this very instant, countless men and women in the world may be in love or consumed by resentment, and that means nothing to you. The one you long for cannot be replaced by the whole world.

More important than the story is the storyteller. As a work from the same era as The Godfather, Once Upon a Time in America is every bit its equal in brilliance, yet its narrative charm is entirely different. Unlike the clear structure of The Godfather, it is hard to say exactly what kind of story Once Upon a Time in America is telling. Perhaps it is about gangsters, friendship, love... or perhaps it is about none of these alone. While watching it, one constantly feels that it is great, yet it is difficult to explain exactly where that greatness lies. This is more or less what people mean by “indescribably marvelous.”

These days, time has become increasingly unforgiving to me, and it is difficult to set aside four hours to appreciate such a long film. But Once Upon a Time in America is an exception. I still patiently compared the differences between the 4-hour-11-minute version and the 3-hour-40-minute version. Those extra dozens of minutes are very important to making the story clear. Many scenes that initially felt obscure immediately became understandable with just one additional shot. Perhaps in the slightly shorter version, the director deliberately made the story more elusive. But in terms of the viewing experience, fluency remains indispensable. I do think that, by today’s standards of pacing, a running time of three or four hours feels undeniably extravagant. Perhaps this film could even be cut to under two hours without damaging its original plot or its brilliance. After all, for a film spanning more than thirty years, what difference does an hour or two really make?

In this story, which is almost the story of Noodles’s entire life, the director lays bare many truths about human existence with piercing precision. What is so remarkable about it is much like life itself: unless one has lived through it personally, it is difficult to truly feel it. No amount of instruction or explanation can convey the most essential part of life, because life itself is not something that can be transmitted. The feelings between one person and another can never be fully understood by any outsider. Part of the charm of Once Upon a Time in America lies in how it manages to convey some of these feelings. The love between Noodles and Deborah, his partnership with Max, and the friendship among companions who lived and died together—all of it is followed by a blank span of more than thirty years after the first two decades of their lives. When one looks back, what was missed has already become a lifetime.

If Noodles and Max had not met at 6:33 one afternoon, where might their lives have gone instead? There is no way to imagine it, just as there is no way to imagine all the unlived versions of our own lives. The choices we make become history at the very moment we make them. What is lost is forever consigned to the past. Our lives keep accelerating toward paths of ever-narrowing possibility. And when we finally look back, what we missed has already become a lifetime. Perhaps the only thing we can truly hold on to is to cherish each moment of the present.