The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (110 page)

The genius of the acting consists of De Niro’s refusal to simplify. He never opts for sacred monster or shaman. The long, lone sequences establish an hallucinatory confessional with the audience who know how severe this Travis could be from the way he goads his own dread of being watched: “Are you talking to me? You must be, ’cause I’m the only one here.”

Travis and Jimmy Doyle are his great parts, but
Mean Streets
(73, Scorsese) was training for them both, and an assertion of how out of conventional control he was. For all his special affinity with Scorsese,
Mean Streets
is shaped by the actor’s willful privacy. In that and Roger Corman’s
Bloody Mama
(69) he gave us a character so unpredictable and so locked in his own urgings as to be incoherent, a mess of spasm behavior sustained only by his rapture. That may be the perilous vein of reality the movies now need. Better that than the woefully respectable, dead-eyed civility of
The Last Tycoon
(76, Elia Kazan). Johnny in
Mean Streets
is self-destructive, if you want to moralize; crazy if you see it as a movie about purpose or ambition. But when it was first shown, and we were less familiar with the actor, it looked as if a rogue had come in off the streets.

By comparison, his Vito Corleone in
The Godfather, Part II
(74, Francis Ford Coppola) looks professional but overawed as if he felt unusual duty in having to furnish Brando’s youth for so expensive and prestigious a film. It is an intricate performance—sly, diffident, and deeply in period—but it is actorly. It shows the difference between working for Coppola compared with the charged huddle he shares with Scorsese.

De Niro once had a similar bond with Brian De Palma:
Greetings
(68),
The Wedding Party
(69),
Hi, Mom!
(70)—signs of a poker-faced anarchy. He also made J
ennifer On My Mind
(71, Noel Black);
Born to Win
(71, Ivan Passer);
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
(71, James Goldstone); and played the catcher in
Bang the Drum Slowly
(73, John Hancock), a tearful waste of his willingness to become a stupid, dying athlete. His largest failure is
1900
(75, Bernardo Bertolucci), in which he seems miscast and cut adrift from his improvisational language. But he is still the most beguiling person in that distended movie.
The Deer Hunter
(78, Michael Cimino) would not have existed without De Niro’s fierce generation of pain and honor, and the curiosity of an emotional movie with a restrained center who is preoccupied with unutterable things.

The surge in De Niro’s audacity as an actor reached its peak (and perhaps toppled over) in his Jake La Motta in
Raging Bull
(80, Scorsese), for which he won the best actor Oscar. He put on not just weight, but the burden of degradation. While in the ring, he was a terrifying spectacle, as credible as any movie boxer has ever been, despite Scorsese’s cheerful ignorance of how fights work. In his scenes with Cathy Moriarty, and with the “guys,” there were remarkable insights into sexual insecurity or ambivalence. This bull was in terror of steers, and the film sometimes leaned toward being a nightmare for the stud who dreads gayness. But the power of the performance and the extremity of the film have been hard to follow, for director and actor both.

De Niro’s priest in
True Confessions
(81, Ulu Grosbard) was all the better for being repressed. His Rupert Pupkin in
The King of Comedy
(83, Scorsese) had a frantic comic exuberance that we have hardly seen since. His Noodles in
Once Upon a Time in America
(84, Sergio Leone) seemed a little routine. But then De Niro fell on a stretch of odd choices and uncertain performances. The films were often unworthy of him, and there were signs that he was cashing in—no matter that he has never been a popular favorite: trying romance in
Falling in Love
(84, Grosbard); briefly in
Brazil
(85, Terry Gilliam);
The Mission
(86, Roland Joffe); Satanic in
Angel Heart
(86, Alan Parker); as Al Capone in
The Untouchables
(87, De Palma); with Charles Grodin in the amusing
Midnight Run
(88, Martin Brest); J
acknife
(89, David Jones);
We’re No Angels
(89, Neil Jordan); and
Stanley and Iris
(90, Martin Ritt).

GoodFellas
(90, Scorsese) was a return to home ground for everyone, and De Niro was appropriately chilling, even if Joe Pesci overshadowed him. At the opposite extreme, he gave a virtuoso performance in
Awakenings
(90, Penny Marshall), but still seemed like a Bickle trying to kid the hospital.
Guilty by Suspicion
(91, Irwin Winkler) was another poor choice.
Backdraft
(91, Ron Howard) was standard. But his Max Cady in
Cape Fear
(91, Scorsese) was so intricately nasty, so repellent, and so clever, that one wondered if the actor hadn’t developed too much devil worship.
Night and the City
(92, Winkler) was so much less interesting than Widmark had been in the original. While in
Mad Dog and Glory
(92, John McNaughton) De Niro was outdone by Bill Murray.

At fifty, he began to seem increasingly difficult to cast, or satisfy. He played the father in
This Boy’s Life
(93, Michael Caton-Jones) with a young Leonardo Di Caprio and it was clear how he had influenced the younger man.

Several of those films have virtues, but their aim was so routine that De Niro was sometimes left a little exposed. In 1993, he directed for the first time—
A Bronx Tale
(it was dedicated to his father)—and it was a decent, careful, small film. But the director’s load didn’t seem to take him over. In fact, working out of the TriBeCa, he became more and more of an entrepreneur. He went into the restaurant business (Nobu and the Tribeca Grill), into hotels and real estate—the totality of his estate may be quite startling. And after 9/11—the chief impact of which was so close to TriBeCa—De Niro became a leading force (with Jane Rosenthal) in the TriBeCa Film Festival, a spring event that went some way to eclipsing the authority of the New York Film Festival.

Why should an actor not turn to business, if he likes it and its rewards? He was also able to say, with feeling, that the challenge and opportunity of film had declined a lot since the 1970s. More and more of what he did onscreen was automatic. If that first list of pictures seems depressing, let this one sink in:
The Fan; Sleepers; Marvin’s Room; Cop Land; Jackie Brown; Wag the Dog; Great Expectations
(he was the Magwitch character);
Ronin; Flawless; The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle; Men of Honor; 15 Minutes; The Score; Showtime; City by the Sea; Godsend; Shark Tale; The Bridge of San Luis Rey; Hide and Seek; Arthur and the Invisibles; Stardust; Righteous Kill
.

It is a gloomy list, with one drab crime story after another. No wonder some people saw De Niro’s face settling into plain glumness—that fast, cold smile of the younger man (like a razor slash) was less and less evident. The range of his pictures was narrow. The stress on New York felt xenophobic. The lack of interest in women was chronic. And although he had six nominations for best actor, the last came in 1991 for
Cape Fear
. There were a few highlights: in Michael Mann’s
Heat
, he delivered a fine, restrained performance as a career criminal, and he also dusted the floor with Al Pacino in the great cup-of-coffee scene where for a moment they are together, but not quite together. He also plunged into broad humor with
Analyze This
, then
That
and the
Fockers
films. And he directed another film—
The Good Shepherd
. As a study in espionage, covering a wide range of time, and showing the destructive influence on family life and intimacy, it was deeply felt, even if it was too slow and measured. It gave an insight into De Niro in its haunting anxiety about the impossibility of trusting other people.

Claire Denis
, b. Paris, 1948
1988:
Chocolat
. 1989:
Man No Run
. 1990:
S’en Fout la Mort/No Fear, No Die; Jacques Rivette, le Veilleur
(d). 1991:
Keep It for Yourself;
“Pour Ushari Ahmed Mahmoud,” an episode from
Contre l’Oubli
. 1994:
J’Ai Pas Sommeil/I Can’t Sleep; US Go Home
(d);
Boom-Boom
(d). 1995: “Nice, Very Nice,” an episode from
À Propos de Nice, la Suite
(d). 1996:
Nénette et Boni
. 1999:
Beau Travail/Good Work
. 2001:
Trouble Every Day
. 2002:
Vendredi Soir/Friday Night;
“Vers Nancy,” an episode from
Ten Minutes Older: The Cello
. 2004:
L’Intrus / The Intruder
. 2005:
Vers Mathilde
. 2008:
35 Rhums / 35 Shots of Rum
. 2009:
White Material
.

Despite the enthusiastic support of
Film Comment, Beau Travail
didn’t really “take” with American audiences—so much the worse for them. For plainly, this beautiful reverie on the culture of men in a regiment, set in the Djibouti where Denis had spent some of her childhood, and managing to take in allusions to Herman Melville, and Benjamin Britten as well as Godard’s
Le Petit Soldat
(63), is a movie that makes
Full Metal Jacket
(87, Kubrick), say, look adolescent and sheltered (as well as clumsy and underlined). Denis was doing
Billy Budd
in the context of the Foreign Legion, yet she was also making a kind of poem to the corps—both the body and the regiment. It’s a stunning, beautiful film that marked an important career.

Denis paid her dues as an assistant director—on
Sweet Movie
(74, Dusan Makavejev);
Serail
(76, Eduardo de Gregorio);
Hanna K
. (83, Costa-Gavras);
Paris, Texas
(84, Wim Wenders);
Down by Law
(86, Jim Jarmusch)—but I noticed her first in the tender, probing documentary on the very shy Jacques Rivette (indeed, I think that film nearly deserves to be included in Rivette’s own filmography, for it is so sensitive to his work).

In addition, Denis did the excellent
I Can’t Sleep
, which bears comparison with the unease of
Paris Nous Appartient
(60, Rivette); the comedy of
Nénette et Boni;
and
No Fear, No Die
, a daring and graceful contemplation of male bonding that is less homoerotic than fascinated by all the fresh gender associations in modern society and film—Kent Jones has talked about this mood being due to the revolutionary impact of Jean Eustache’s
The Mother and the Whore
(73). So it’s clear, I think, how far certain running ideas in French cinema—evident in the thirties and hurried forward in the New Wave—are still being pursued. Claire Denis reminds one not just of the wonder of French film, but of its sense of history.

Brian De Palma
, b. Newark, New Jersey, 1940
1964:
The Wedding Party
(not released till 1969). 1966:
Murder à la Mod
. 1968:
Greetings
. 1970:
Hi, Mom!; Dionysus in ’69
(d). 1972:
Get to Know Your Rabbit; Sisters/Blood Sisters
. 1974:
Phantom of the Paradise
. 1976:
Obsession; Carrie
. 1978:
The Fury
. 1979:
Home Movies
. 1980:
Dressed to Kill
. 1981:
Blow Out
. 1982:
The First Time
. 1983:
Scarface
. 1984:
Body Double
. 1986:
Wise Guys
. 1987:
The Untouchables
. 1989:
Casualties of War
. 1990:
The Bonfire of the Vanities
. 1992:
Raising Cain
. 1993:
Carlito’s Way
. 1996:
Mission: Impossible
. 1998:
Snake Eyes
. 2000:
Mission to Mars
. 2002:
Femme Fatale
. 2006:
The Black Dahlia
. 2007:
Redacted
.

There is a self-conscious cunning in De Palma’s work, ready to control everything except his own cruelty and indifference. He is the epitome of mindless style and excitement swamping taste or character. Of course, he was a brilliant kid. But his usefulness in an historical survey is to point out the dangers of movies falling into the hands of such narrow movie-mania, such cold-blooded prettification. I daresay there are no “ugly” shots in De Palma’s films—if you feel able to measure “beauty” merely in terms of graceful or hypnotic movement, vivid angles, lyrical color, and hysterical situation. But that is the set of criteria that makes Leni Riefenstahl a “great” director, rather than the victim of conflicting inspiration and decadence. De Palma’s eye is cut off from conscience or compassion. He has contempt for his characters and his audience alike, and I suspect that he despises even his own immaculate skill. Our cultural weakness admires and rewards technique and impact bereft of moral sense. If the thing works, it has validity—the means justify the lack of an end. De Palma is a cynic, and not a feeble one; there are depths of misanthropy there.

De Palma was the son of a surgeon, and he has been heard to joke that that may account for his high tolerance of blood: the movie director as glib interviewee. He studied at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence, switching from sciences to film and carrying into his professional career the hustling ways and the reference-book style of a domineering student. His films of the sixties were nearly underground: cheap, inventive works of cinema verité, pulp satire, and comic-book essay form. They showed the mark of Godard, and they had the vigor of a rock album: a collage of pieces that got a pungent mood across. Their originality is worth underlining because the films were and are still very little seen, and because their humor and their interest in the world has been replaced by a sardonic imitation of Hitchcock’s engineering movies.