The notorious mobster Meyer Lansky was the inspiration for the Hyman Roth character in “The Godfather” and Max Bercovicz in “Once Upon a Time in America,” and actors from Richard Dreyfuss to Mark Rydell to Dustin Hoffman to Anatol Yusef to Patrick Dempsey to Ben Kingsley have played fictionalized versions of Lansky in various movies and TV productions through the years.
In the scenes set in the early 1980s, during Lansky’s waning years when he was essentially retired and living quietly in Miami Beach, Keitel portrays Lansky as a soft-spoken, articulate and seemingly benign old man who looks like a thousand other senior citizens.
In the flashback sequences, AnnaSophia Robb is Anne, who quickly falls for the bad-boy Lansky but just as quickly turns into a deeply unhappy wife who berates Lansky for his lifestyle and blames him for their son being disabled; it’s God’s punishment.
“Lansky” does have some compelling sequences, e.g., when Lansky and Siegel assemble a group of tough Jewish men who bust up a meeting of American Nazis, but too much of the film is spent on the David Stone character and his entanglements.