It’s an intriguing game plan, but the spectacle played out in Levinson’s lyrical, dark-hued images never achieves the emotional whiplash the movie’s after. It begins seductively, as Siegel sets out to take over the California rackets and buys his way into the Hollywood celebrity circuit. There are nice mobster turns by Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley and the late rock impresario Bill Graham. But by the halfway point we’ve learned all we need to know about Siegel’s schizoid soul, and his alternating pattern of social charm and antisocial rage becomes repetitive. The romance plays out as a dark variant of screwball comedy conventions: it must be love because they’re always throwing things at each other. But the tonal shifts from romanticism to violence to an unfortunate strain of cuteness could work only if we cared about these lovers (think of “Bonnie and Clyde”). Instead of being richly torn by our feelings, we feel next to nothing. Levinson’s somber elegance and Toback’s volatile aggression don’t quite mesh: perhaps what this story needed was the fleet, gaudy ferocity of a Sam Fuller. “Bugsy” never makes the transition from the filmmakers’ heads to the audience’s gut.
