Robert De Niro

ROBERT DE NIRO: MOVIE TOP TEN

EDITED BY JACK HUNTER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-908694-68-3

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2012 ELEKTRON EBOOKS AND CONTRIBUTORS

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INTRODUCTION

There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, concerning the poorly received but somewhat undervalued 1994 film, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. During pre-production rehearsals, the actor playing the Creature was preoccupied with finding a suitably grotesque look for his monstrous character.

Eventually, he gave his director and co-star – Kenneth Branagh – some photographs of murder victims, taken at the scene of the crime, moments after the discovery of the brutally ruined corpses. Already nervous thanks to the daunting scale of the production, Branagh was a little disturbed by the content of the pictures. Then he noticed the date printed on the rear of the 8 x 10s. The photos had been taken only two days previously. Where the fuck did you get these? he inquired, astonished. His leading man shrugged and muttered in a matter-of-fact fashion, I know a guy...

 It’s easy to believe the story is true. Robert De Niro had played timid crime scene photographer Wayne Dobie in John McNaughton’s Mad Dog And Glory a year before. The actor had spent time with real forensics officers, so it’s entirely feasible that he may have had unique access to such gruesome material. For a time, it seemed as if that was how history would remember Robert De Niro: not for his skill and range as an actor, but for the obsessive detail with which he researched each role.

This was the man who learned the entire Roman Catholic mass – in Latin – before he could feel comfortable in the garments of duplicitous priest Des Spellacy in True Confessions (1981). For The Untouchables (1987), he insisted on having silk underwear made in the same store from which his character, Al Capone, purchased his luxurious lingerie. There’s even a ridiculous myth surrounding the depth of his research into mob activity for Goodfellas, far too incredible, and libelous, to repeat here. Most famously of course, he piled on the pounds to play a bloated Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, but only after contesting a few semi-pro bouts as the boxer’s younger incarnation. Such extreme behaviour always impresses the Academy, and De Niro duly collected his only Best Actor Oscar to date (he’d won in the Supporting category for The Godfather Part II, in 1974).

In the case of Raging Bull, he contributed something more than a compelling performance. He and Scorsese reworked the early screenplay drafts by Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin – deemed unfilmable by United Artists studio executives – to get beneath La Motta’s skin and showing the man inside the beast. [1]

MOGUL AND HIRED HAND

Towards the end of the 1980s, De Niro’s working methods changed considerably. It was at this time that he established the Tribeca centre, named for the area of New York in which it was situated. Part studio, part facilities house, part creative haven, the idea behind Tribeca was to create a hive of movie activity on the East coast, away from the pernicious influence of Hollywood and the more artificial atmosphere of the California lifestyle. Although the venture attracted many high profile investors, among them Martin Scorsese, Danny De Vito, and Bill Murray, De Niro was the figurehead and largest single contributor. He began to increase his workload to fund Tribeca. In the first two decades of his screen career, the actor made on average twelve films. In the ‘90s he has made thirty.

Obviously, shooting three films a year put an end to such practices as spending four months gorging on pasta or learning ring craft. (Daniel Day Lewis has probably seized the method crown in that respect.) Critical convention has it that this has diluted De Niro’s talent, and there’s no doubt that the likes of Backdraft and Great Expectations do his filmography few favours, but I would argue that this has been a hugely productive period for the star. By working continuously, he has built up an impressive body of work and become a far more versatile and relaxed actor. It’s not that his later performances are in any way better than those in Taxi Driver or The Deer Hunter, from a period when a new De Niro picture was an event, it’s just that we get to enjoy his work on different levels, take pleasure in watching him for different reasons.

COP, CROOK, DOCTOR

Witness 1997. In twelve short months he appeared in Jackie Brown, Copland, and Wag The Dog. The first two performances were supporting roles, admittedly, but they were vital to the success of the respective pictures. Crucially they also involved being guided by two young writer-directors, hip auteurs only recently emerged from the independent film making community. In James Mangold’s Copland, the actor is called upon to show remarkable subtlety in his depiction of Internal Affairs officer Moe Tilden. He should be the film’s moral centre, yet even he is compromised when manipulating Sylvester Stallone’s slow-witted sheriff into action. He gets one terrific speech in the process, bellowing at Stallone: You had a chance to be a cop and you blew it.

His work for Quentin Tarantino in Jackie Brown couldn’t have been more different, as Louis Gara’s stoned countenance transformed into a paranoid, psychotic grimace.

Two terrific turns in minor parts, then, just as De Niro had contributed ten years earlier in the Angel Heart/The Untouchables sinister extended cameo double whammy, but in 1997 there was still time for a leading role in Barry Levinson’s Wag The Dog. The film had strange origins: Levinson, De Niro and Dustin Hoffman had worked together the year before on the flawed drama Sleepers (in which De Niro has by far the best moment in the picture when being told of the abuse the young boys from his parish suffered.

The audience doesn’t get to hear the full horror, but De Niro is our conduit, as his eyes slowly fill with tears). All three enjoyed the experience and were keen to repeat it, but had only the smallest of windows in their schedules. Working from David Mamet’s screenplay, they cast, shot and edited the political satire in thirteen weeks. In the ‘70s, De Niro would’ve spent that long deciding whether or not to do the film in the first place or, if he had committed, to undertaking his painstaking research process. Now he took on producing as well as acting duties on the project. (And as with the other two films, he worked for a reduced salary, giving the lie to the perceived notion of his having turned mercenary in the ‘90s). His performance as spin doctor Conrad Brean doesn’t suffer from the enforced pace, if anything it benefits from the rough and ready style of the piece. In long, loose single takes, De Niro and Hoffman circle each other like tribal elders performing an ancient ritual, and the actor also seems invigorated by working opposite younger talents, such as Woody Harrelson and Anne Heche.

YOUNG BLOOD

Much of the actor’s best work has come when sharing the screen with inexperienced co-stars. Think of the neighbourhood kids in Sleepers, or Lillo Brancato and Francis Capra in his directorial debut, A Bronx Tale (1993).

Most of all, think of his electrifying clashes with Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy’s Life (1993 – another vintage year, with an against-type appearance in Mad Dog And Glory also in cinemas). Watching the two men go to war in the family kitchen represented everything that is great about the post-war American movie acting tradition. All the groundwork done by Brando, Clift and Dean in the ‘50s came to fruition in those exchanges, and it’s to be hoped DiCaprio’s subsequent rise to global megastardom is never allowed to eclipse his talent. Low key the film may have been, and a box office flop, but its place in the annals of cinema is assured by the Bobby and Leo scenes alone. De Niro’s eagerness to work with newcomers isn’t a symptom of elder statesman status, where he gives his seal of approval to the next generation in exchange for a burst of energy or credibility. Instead it’s a practice which dates back to The Deer Hunter, in 1978.

Since becoming a star in The Godfather Part II, the actor had made some conservative choices. He’d returned to Scorsese territory for Taxi Driver (1976 – another Oscar nomination and surprise box office success) and New York, New York (a disaster). There was also the rambling and unfocused The Last Tycoon (1976), which at least represented a chance to learn from one of the great directors, Elia Kazan. Bertolucci’s 1900 meant working with one of the acknowledged giants of European art cinema. The Deer Hunter however, was the first film in which De Niro had the chance to exert significant influence of his own on the production as a whole. He it was who suggested (and when a star suggests, studios and second-time directors like Michael Cimino treat it as a demand) stage actors Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep for the key roles as Nick and Linda. Walken picked up a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, and Streep’s career received a kick start which soon saw her established as the most critically admired actress of the modern era.

The star also lined up alongside his director when the studio wanted cuts in the film’s three hour running time. The creative forces won that particular battle, and The Deer Hunter went on to win Oscars for Best Picture and Director, with De Niro losing out to John Voight for Best Actor in that year’s other Vietnam movie, Coming Home. There are those who will tell you that The Deer Hunter is at best ridiculous and at worst racist, but they’re wrong, and by a long chalk. It is in fact a romantic epic, and has nothing to do with the war in South East Asia and everything to do with American Pastoral variations on mythic themes. It’s also unbearably moving and exceptionally tense, and for this most of the credit must go to its star. Any auteurists out there protesting at the director’s sacred right to authorship should sit through everything Michael Cimino has made since and then try to convince themselves that The Deer Hunter isn’t truly Robert De Niro’s triumph.

A BLESSED UNION

The Deer Hunter is not covered in depth in this collection, and while it’s absence is regrettable, it is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the desire for as broad a cross section of movies as possible – to give a career overview, rather than a predictable selection of highlights. It would be remiss however to ignore this and certain other entries in the De Niro back catalogue. Mean Streets (1973) obviously merits more than a passing mention. Not only is it a fine picture in its own right (covered extensively in the Harvey Keitel Movie Top Ten, published earlier in this series), it is also significant as the first fruit of the most important actor/director partnership in film history. Indeed, it would’ve been very easy – and wholly justified – to virtually monopolise this book with the eight films De Niro has made with Martin Scorsese. In the end, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King Of Comedy and Cape Fear made the cut and there can be little argument with their selection, but the other collaborations are equally deserving of inclusion.

Shambolic though New York, New York may have been, at the very least it gave De Niro his first stab at a romantic lead, albeit a self-centred, insecure individual, but hey – that was the ‘70s. Better was to come when the two re-united after a seven year spell apart, post-King Of Comedy, to make Goodfellas. When we see Jimmy Conway working the room through the eyes of young hood Henry Hill, we understand the attraction of a life of crime. If a few truck hijacks can buy you this kind of charisma, who wants to waste time among the ranks of the law-abiding? Jimmy’s final fate, staring balefully at life imprisonment through an old man’s bifocals are a reminder of the old adage that crime doesn’t pay.

The pair followed that immediately with Cape Fear, with De Niro as the muscle bound, tattoo-adorned angel of vengeance Max Cady. Both may have made the film as a kind of experiment in commercial cinema, but that didn’t stop them producing a superior thriller. It’s unfortunate that Robert Redford, originally cast as De Niro’s lawyer nemesis, bailed before shooting began. His replacement, Nick Nolte, possesses immense screen presence and is a fine actor, but he’s nobody’s idea of the embodiment of American ideals. With golden boy Redford up against him, De Niro might’ve had even more to sink his teeth into – and not just the flesh of the woman he brutalises.

The duo’s last joint effort to date is Casino, a film actually criticised for being too similar to Goodfellas, as if that could ever be a bad thing. Here, as Ace Rothstein, De Niro is a paradox – a gambler and a control freak. He’ll bet on horses, play the odds at a table, but insists on supervising his environment and relationships to an obsessive degree. Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone get to go spectacularly but effectively over the top as unhinged partner in crime and adulterous wife respectively, but it’s De Niro’s performance which anchors the entire film. Casino and Michael Mann’s Heat were released within weeks of each other, giving audiences nearly six hours of De Niro running time. The two roles, coming so close together, can be seen as twin peaks of his career this decade. There was no doubt that here was a man who could still dominate the screen.

A brief aside before leaving the partnership with Scorsese altogether. When the director was struggling to raise cash for his long-treasured project, The Last Temptation Of Christ, De Niro offered to take the lead role if it would attract financial backers. Knowing that this was a gesture born out of friendship rather than a desire to make the film, Scorsese explored other avenues. Fine though Willem Dafoe was in the finished picture, it’s tantalising to envisage exchanges between De Niro’s Jesus and Harvey Keitel as Judas. That might have made the journey begun in Mean Streets complete.

Although De Niro’s stature within the industry is such that he has seldom been denied a part he truly desired, there is one famous instance of him missing out. Francis Ford Coppola saw practically every young actor in the country when casting for The Godfather, and De Niro was up for the part of Sonny, fiery first born son of Don Vito Corleone.

Coppola was impressed by the unknown’s screen test, but felt that his intensity was such that he might draw the audience’s attention away from the central figure of Michael Corleone, and unbalance the entire picture. As back-handed compliments go, it’s one of the best, though God knows how much more intense De Niro could have been than the eventual choice, James Caan [2].

A WANTED MAN

There is one other omission from this tome which