Rainer on Film by Peter Rainer

Author:Peter Rainer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Published: 2013-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

ROBERT DE NIRO

American movies have rarely been worse, but the acting in them has rarely been better. What this means is that the acting is often the only reason to stay with a film. It also means that most good actors end up playing out their careers in third-rate material.

But what about an actor like Robert De Niro, who has the power to pick his own projects and even heads his own production company, Tribeca Films? Did he really need to play his umpteenth stalker-psycho in The Fan? Forget about what a performance like this does for us. What does it do for him?

As the baseball fanatic obsessed with Wesley Snipes’s superstar San Francisco Giants slugger, De Niro is scrunched and obdurate, with nasty-nutty eyes. He’s done this sort of thing so many times he seems to be literally doing it in his sleep. His cracked wacko grin has about as much menace as a plastic Halloween pumpkin. De Niro draws on our memories of him in Taxi Driver (where he was great) and The King of Comedy, Cape Fear, and This Boy’s Life (where he wasn’t).

Actually, De Niro hasn’t been great in quite a while, though critics still reflexively refer to him as our premier actor. To be fair, it’s not as if he has only taken on projects like The Fan. It just seems that way. He pokes around periodically as a nice guy in the movies, but De Niro “nice”—in such movies as Falling in Love, Stanley and Iris, Awakenings, and A Bronx Tale—is often De Niro neutered.

He’ll star in two other films this year—Barry Levinson’s Sleepers and the Broadway comedy adaptation Marvin’s Room—and perhaps they will allow him the latitude to do something new in the movies for a change.* The most promising thing they have going for them is that they are not directed by Martin Scorsese. But wait—Scorsese has announced plans to make the Richard Pryor story. Can we expect to see De Niro in his most challenging role yet?

Of course the De Niro-Scorsese partnership resulted early on in some extraordinary work. As Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York, and Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, De Niro was more than Scorsese’s leading man—he was the director’s demon seed. They brought out in each other a feral, operatic hipsterism; they merged improvisation and the Method and the revue sketch with lapsed Catholicism to create a new and alarmingly comic sense of dread. De Niro’s acting, like Scorsese’s direction, seemed to erupt right in front of us. You came out of a movie like Mean Streets or Taxi Driver—even more so than in Raging Bull—feeling as if you had been ringside at a live event.

But that was all a long time ago—Raging Bull, the last collaboration I liked, was 1980. They don’t do anything for each other any more. The animus has lost its animation. Did the critics who chided De Niro in Casino

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