Tag: Robert De Niro

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Killers of the Flower Moon

Leonardo diCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Killers of the Flower Moon.

When I asked Craig Brewer why people love Hustle & Flow, he attributed the film’s success to DJay, memorably portrayed by Terrence Howard. DJay is a pimp and low-level drug dealer, but he’s also an aspiring rapper who loves Shug (Taraji P. Henson). DJay veers back and forth between doing good — creating music, building community, and giving Shug hope — and doing bad — exploiting women and hurting people. The audience roots for DJay to do the right thing, and the drama is whether or not he will transcend his circumstances and emerge a more complete person. 

Martin Scorsese’s new masterpiece, Killers of the Flower Moon, is animated by the same moral tug of war. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a veteran returning to his hometown of Gray Horse, Oklahoma, after serving as a cook in the Army during World War I. The not-exactly-war-hero is taken in by his uncle, William Hale (Robert De Niro, in rare form), who insists on being called by his middle name, King. Things have changed since Ernest went away. Oil was discovered on land belonging to the Osage tribe, upending the racial hierarchy to which the white Oklahoma establishment was accustomed. Scorsese deftly demonstrates the new power dynamic in a sweeping tour of the town, ending with a white car dealer on his knees begging a well heeled Osage couple to buy one more luxury automobile so he could feed his family. 

King Hale (Robert De Niro) advises his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Killers of the Flower Moon.

The exception to the ever-present racial tension is King Hale, who has earned the Osages’ admiration with his generosity and fair dealing. In public, he treats them like any other rich landowners. He even pushes Ernest into courting an Osage woman named Mollie (Lily Gladstone). Ernest, a simple man who just wants a woman who “smells good,” goes along with the plan, first becoming Mollie’s driver, then worming his way into her bed. 

Ernest courts Mollie as her driver in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Onscreen chemistry is a delicate and elusive thing; I daresay there has never been an onscreen couple like Gladstone and DiCaprio. Mollie is impassive and reserved. Ernest is twitchy and clingy, always looking for the right lie to fit the situation. His come-ons to Mollie are transparently lame, but he eventually wears down her defenses. Gladstone reveals Mollie’s shifting, layered  motivations with an uncanny subtlety. She and her sisters, like many of the newly flush Osage women, take trophy white guys for husbands. But while her family is rich on paper, she is in a state-ordered conservatorship, because she has been declared “incompetent” on the basis that she’s not a rich white guy, so why should she have money? Marrying a white man means that her children will be the masters of their own financial fates — assuming she and the family fortune live that long. For one thing, the Osage are plagued by diabetes, which Dr. James Shoun (Steve Whitting) tells Mollie is caused by trying to eat like white people. For another, the wealthy Osage are being murdered for their money and the mineral rights to their oil fields. 

Mollie (Lilly Gladstone) and Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) are married by King Hale (Robert DeNiro) in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Scorsese spends the first part of this 206-minute epic methodically doling out the beats of Ernest and Mollie’s weird romance. He paints Ernest as a kind of thick schlub who lucked into a supportive family and the love of a good woman. Mollie thinks she can trust Ernest because his lies are so transparent. Then, the director casually reveals that Ernest is also a bushwhacker and bank robber. In fact, the man orchestrating the murder of the Osage is their biggest champion, King Hale. He’s methodically killing off Mollie’s sisters while waiting for her elderly mother Lizzie Q (Tantoo Cardinal) to join the ancestors. Once Mollie is the sole heir of the family fortune, Ernest will kill her with tainted insulin, thus bringing her oil rights under King’s control. 

Cara Jade Myers, Lilly Gladstone, JaNae Collins, and Jillian Dion as the four wealthy Osage sisters targeted for murder in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Killers of the Flower Moon is based on a 2017 nonfiction book by David Gann, subtitled The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. After the Osage organize a trip to Washington D.C. to plead their case to President Calvin Coolidge, the newly formed FBI shows up in the form of Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons) and starts digging into the locals’ secrets. Scorsese brings all of his thematic threads together in a jaw-dropping scene where White meets with his investigators on a lonely Oklahoma hilltop. As they piece together King Hale’s genocidal plot, they see in the distance men fighting a grass fire, their forms shimmering through the heat and flame like souls condemned to hell.

Scorsese’s complete mastery of form allows him to shift tones and genres at will. At various times, Scorsese invokes the grandeur of Kurosawa and Lynch’s interior visions. What starts as a frontier epic becomes a period romance, then a howcatchem murder mystery. When John Lithgow shows up as a federal prosecutor, we’re in a courtroom drama. Many of Scorsese’s recurring themes are here — organized crime, toxic masculinity, mystic spirituality, polite society’s constant undertone of violence — but changing the setting from familiar environment of the Northeastern urban centers to the Oklahoma plains has provided new perspective, and a wider canvas. Killers of the Flower Moon is an exceedingly rare gem: A late-career breakthrough from one of America’s greatest artists.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Irishman

I need to begin this review with a confession: I’m sick of mob movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather is, of course, a great film. I was reminded of this fact recently as I drifted off to sleep with the BBC America Godfather marathon on in the background. Before he became scourge of the Marvel Universe, Martin Scorsese made some incredible films about organized crime and the Italian-American immigrant community, starting with Mean Streets, which was also his first team-up with The Godfather: Part II star Robert De Niro. Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, and The Departed are all great examples of the genre from Marty.

Somewhere along the way, Scorsese became a brand-name synonymous in some circles with mob pictures. Never mind that the vast majority of his film output has nothing to do with New York mobsters. Taxi Driver, arguably his masterpiece, is an irony-soaked story about a lonely PTSD-suffering vet’s descent into political assassination. The Aviator, one of my favorites, is a biography of Howard Hughes. And have you watched The Last Temptation of Christ lately? I’d argue that film was his real masterpiece, except that I think he’s entitled to more than one.

Al Pacino (right) plays Jimmy Hoffa in Martin Scorsese’s newest mob movie, The Irishman.

But for a couple of generations of filmmakers, “Scorsese” plus “mob picture” equalled “good cinema,” and, boy, did they lean into it. From The Sopranos to Good Time, there’s no shortage of films about male bonding over crime, violence, and honor culture starring a bunch of identical-looking guys mumbling in thick accents. Haven’t we seen enough of this?

The Irishman, though, that’s different, right? This is Scorsese’s long-gestating dream project, the story of the rise and fall of Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa, detailing the intersection of politics and crime, spanning the American Century. It’s got De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci — the mob film trifecta! The director and star tried to get it made for more than a decade, before Netflix agreed to commit a $150 million chunk of their venture capital. That allowed the director to use cutting-edge CGI to de-age De Niro, who was in his mid-70s when the film was shot, so he could play mob enforcer and Teamsters Union official Frank Sheeran at different stages of his life. The fact that it was ultimately destined to end up on Netflix, which values raw engagement time, meant that Scorsese could go as long he wanted — which turns out to be a whopping 209 minutes.

I saw The Irishman in a packed theater during its recent, one-night Indie Memphis screening at the Paradiso. It felt like a long movie, but it didn’t feel like three and a half hours. Scorsese and his band of friends and collaborators haven’t lost their touch. Virtually every scene is good to great in and of itself. Scorsese and his longtime ace editor Thelma Schoonmaker simply avoided having to make the hard choices of cutting stuff that works. No one will ever accuse this film of feeling chopped up.

(l-r) Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Ray Romano star in Martin Scorsese’s mob movie opus.

When the story sprawls, it’s always in the direction of character development. De Niro is absolutely masterful. Even though we get a good sense of Sheeran’s inner life from the voiceover narration he provides as the story jumps back and forth in time, it’s clear that self-awareness was never his strong suit. Looking back from his nursing home wheelchair at his life’s parade of murders, assaults, and corruption, regret slowly starts to seep through his matter-of-fact recounting. That remorseful thread culminates in a wrenching memory of a phone call Sheeran never thought he would have to make.

Sheeran’s perspective is narrow and naturally regressive, as you would expect from a hardened combat veteran turned mob soldier. One of Scorsese’s most interesting moves is how he reveals what the women in Sheeran’s life think about him, first with a subtle scene of a power struggle over his wife Irene’s (Stephanie Kurtzuba) desire to smoke in mob capo Russell Bufalino’s (Joe Pesci) car, then by tracing the deterioration of his relationship with his daughter Peggy, played at different ages by the fabulously expressive Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin.

As Jimmy Hoffa, Pacino matches De Niro’s brilliance. Scorsese channels the actor’s late-career bombast into the labor leader’s outsized persona. While Sheeran is the film’s blunted emotional core, Hoffa’s story represents Scorsese’s bigger ambitions, tracing the pendulum swing of corruption and virtue through American society. The Irishman reminds me of The Godfather: Part II more than any of Scorsese’s Cosa Nostra sagas. Its grand scope provides a sense of closure to a 40-year cycle of mob movies.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Comedian

In 1983, Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese followed up their epochal collaboration Raging Bull with The King of Comedy. De Niro played Rupert Pupkin, a mediocre stand-up comedian who, with the help of Sandra Bernhard, kidnaps Jerry Lewis in an attempt to get a break on his nationally viewed talk show. The scheme pretty much works as advertised, and when Rupert gets out of jail, he finds the attention he always craved. The King of Comedy was the biggest bomb of Scorsese’s career, but over the years its themes of toxic celebrity culture and its proto-Cohen Bros. inept kidnapping plot has upgraded it from “intriguing misfire” to “cult classic ahead of its time.”

There will be no such reappraisal for The Comedian. If there is, I shudder to imagine what a future culture that found this film relevant would look like. De Niro stars as Jackie Burke, a comedian who made his reputation as an Archie Bunker-like TV dad on Eddie’s Home. The show had a great run back in the 1980s, with Eddie waging a losing culture war with his liberal wife and gay son, but that was a long time ago. When the movie opens, Jackie is doing TV nostalgia shows hosted by Jimmie “J. J.” Walker. Halfway through his set of cut-rate insult humor, he is confronted by a couple of persistent hecklers who, it turns out, have a web series called “Stand Up Take Down.” Impulse control not being Jackie’s strong suit, the confrontation escalates until Jackie punches out the hecklers on camera. Naturally, this leads to a court date and a plea bargain arrangement which requires 100 hours of community service and an apology.

It’s the apology part that causes the problem. When the plaintiff mouths off, Jackie lobs some choice insult comic barbs in open court, offending the judge and landing the 67-year-old comedian in lockup for 30 days. As he’s being led to his cell, the prisoners on the cell block sing the theme song to Eddie’s Home to greet him.

When he gets out, he’s alone, his career is in the toilet, and his agent, Miller (Edie Falco), only agrees to get him gigs out of loyalty to the memory of her father, who was Jackie’s best friend until Jackie had him fired from Eddie’s Home. He’s forced to borrow money from his brother (Danny DeVito), which arises the ire of his sister-in-law, Flo (Patti LuPone).

You can just go ahead and substitute “arising the ire” for the verb in any sentence in which Jackie is the subject, because that’s pretty much all he can do. The man’s got one drum, and he’s gonna bang it. De Niro plays Jackie as a professional jerk who takes his work home with him. He can’t stop the flow of sick burns even when he’s serving his community service in a soup kitchen. That’s where he meets Harmony Schlitz (Leslie Mann), the hot-blonde love interest who might just be as big a jerk as Jackie. They bond over comparing details of their respective assault charges. Here’s a sample quip to give you the level of comedy we’re dealing with: “What, did your mom have a Nazi barbershop quartet?” To which Mann gives the first of a long series of pained laughs.

Indeed, much of the running time of The Comedian that isn’t taken up with long, saxophone-scored montages of De Niro wandering through the rain-slick streets of New York is taken up with people pretending to laugh at his jokes. De Niro, who has been stuck playing grumpy old men for the last few years, is not actually bad in this film. If somebody could get the guy a decent script, he could prove he’s still got it. But this script, penned by producer Art Linson and professional insult comedian Jeff Ross, is a stinker for the ages. There’s a parade of comedic cameos, from Cloris Leachman to Hannibal Buress to the man who almost single-handedly kept the Borscht Belt comedy tradition alive, Billy Crystal, but director Taylor Hackford seems to have given editor Mark Warner instructions to cut all of the funny parts of their performances. Worst of all, the timing is off, and for comedy, that’s death.

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Film Features Film/TV

Joy

Film is the most collaborative of media. There’s a tendency to give all the credit or the blame to the director, and, as the person conducting the orchestra, direction can make or break a movie. But, as much as they’d sometimes like to, directors can not do everything themselves, so they must find collaborators they trust. The business of filmmaking being what it is, it is a rare thing when a director can gather a trusted band of collaborators for more than one film. In the case of those who can, like Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson, their films become more like albums from a rock band. There are perfect albums, on which every song is a hit, and then there are the records with a few good songs and some filler.

Over the course of his last three films, David O. Russell has found a band who can play the music he writes. There’s longtime sideman and occasional writing partner Bradley Cooper, soul survivor Robert De Niro, and his lead singer and muse, Jennifer Lawrence. The band’s first film together, 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook, crackled with life and promise. Their second, American Hustle, shows a band who has worked out their chemistry and gained the confidence to explore new territory. Their third film, Joy, has a few good songs and a lot of filler.

Jennifer Lawrence in Joy

As it begins, Joy tells you it is “Inspired by the stories of daring women. One in particular.” Lawrence plays Joy Mangano, who, when we meet her, is a single mother juggling two children, a neurotic mother, Terry (Virginia Madsen), and an ex-husband, Tony (Édgar Ramírez), who is still living in her basement. Into this volatile mix drops her father Rudy (De Niro), who needs a place to stay because his current girlfriend is kicking him out.

The early scenes where we meet the family—which also include Joy’s grandmother, Mimi (Diane Ladd), who narrates the story from beyond the grave—are filled with swooping camera moves and juicy, emotional moments for the actors to chew on. The family has no problems expressing themselves, but there’s a big question as to whether their confidence translates into success or even competence. It’s invigorating at first, but as the screenplay piles on character after character and woe upon Joy, it starts to lose focus.

In a flashback inspired by tea with her best friend, Jackie (Dascha Polanco), we see how Joy’s life lost focus after she was high school valedictorian who had to turn down a college scholarship to care for her soap opera-obsessed mother. The parodic soap scenes Russell creates with the help of daytime television legend Susan Lucci and a truckload of hairspray start to seep into the dreams of the overwhelmed Joy. After enduring an embarrassing outing on a boat owned by her father’s new girlfriend, Trudy (Isabella Rossellini), Joy has a dream inspired by expired children’s cough syrup and comes up with the idea that will change her life: the Miracle Mop. Her invention of “the last mop you’ll ever need” leads her to the Pennsylvania headquarters of QVC, the pioneering home-shopping channel where Joan Rivers (played uncannily by her daughter Melissa Rivers) hawks cheap jewelry to housewives from gaudy rotating sets. QVC VP Neil (Cooper) takes her under his wing and discovers that no one can sell the Miracle Mop like its creator.

The scene where Joy makes her television debut is an epic slow burn that ranks amongst the best work Lawrence has ever done, but it’s a strong song on a weak album. The screenplay, which was also written by Russell, collapses into a jumbled mess under the weight of flashbacks and failed structural experiments. Lawrence earned a Golden Globe for her performance and is nominated for the Best Actress Oscar, and she’s fantastic. Even though most of the performances are solid, particularly De Niro and Rossellini, Russell is not able to conjure the same synergy he tapped in Silver Linings Playbook or American Hustle. Hopefully, the next album by Russell’s crack band will prove to be a comeback.

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Throwback August: Casino

Robert De Niro as Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein

Casino (1995; dir. Martin Scorsese)—Heavily edited, poorly dubbed, grotesquely commercial-breaked TV versions of Casino sadden me. I’m happy that Scorsese’s best film continues to rumble across the basic cable landscape in various shapes and sizes at various times of day because exhibition and syndication play a major role in pop-cultural canon formation. But a sanitized version of Casino makes little sense because indiscretion and tastelessness are two of its cardinal virtues.

Trade secrets about the gaming industry and the workings of the Midwestern mob, violent confrontations involving power tools and baseball bats, an endless parade of pastel-colored custom suits so gaudy they threaten to burn out your rods and cones —there’s simply too much in this vulgar American epic to absorb in one sitting. Add in the dueling voiceover narrations, the hold-your-breath instances when the camera rushes at characters like an attack dog, and the car-bomb explosions of raunchy absurdist wit, and you’re likely to feel lost.

Sharon Stone as Ginger McKenna

The soundtrack does its best to disorient you, too; Casino’s nonstop music (62 songs are listed in its closing credits) is analogous to the constant electronic chatter of slots and video poker machines cluttering nearly every real casino floors. Given so many opportunities to choreograph miniature music videos within the frame of his story, Scorsese engineers perhaps his greatest pop epiphany—a long sequence where a pair of card cheats get taken down as Jeff Beck’s “I Ain’t Superstitious” wails in the background.

But give the movie the time and attention it needs and you’ll start to get it. Then you might start to love it. Casino is Scorsese’s Physical Graffiti, his 2666, his three-hour, thirty-course tasting menu that will set you back an entire paycheck if you add the beverage pairings, which you might as well because you’ve come this far. It is also a vision of craps-table capitalism unfolding in a multicultural American frontier where mobsters, bookies, cowboys, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Irishmen and anyone else who wants a piece of the pie can get in on the action if they’re willing to play.

Joe Pesci as Nicky Santoro

Although the three principal characters—gambler/casino boss Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), mobster/hellspawn Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and hustler/addict Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone)—are assholes, their long, painful falls from grace matter because their bosses are much, much worse. Which is why Casino now plays as an apt and timeless statement about the apparently untouchable gangsters responsible for the current (and no doubt future) financial crises bilking us out of our money whether we like it or not. “It’s a pity in this state that we have such hypocrisy,” says Rothstein late in the film. “Some people can do whatever they want; other people have to pay through the nose. But such is life.”

Grade: A+

Throwback August: Casino