How Success Spoiled Robert De Niro
When I was a child and Robert De Niro appeared in movie I generally wanted to see it because De Niro had a richly merited reputation as one of our greatest film actors and an extraordinary resume of classic films, many directed by Martin Scorsese.
As a kid I assumed that if De Niro was in a movie it was probably good or he wouldn’t waste his time with it.
That was a LONG time ago, however. For the past two decades or so if De Niro was in a movie I assumed that it must suck or De Niro wouldn’t be in it.
It consequently brings me great pleasure to report that a few nights ago I spent three hours and thirty two minutes watching Killers of the Flower Moon, a two hundred million dollar historical epic based on a horrifying true story that features one of De Niro’s finest and most haunting performances.
De Niro is so good and so terrifying in his seeming normality in Killers of the Flower Moon that I would be surprised if he doesn’t win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance.
Killers of the Flower Moon illustrates just what De Niro is capable of when he has great material and great collaborators. I haven’t seen The Irishman yet but it lurks tantalizingly in my very near future because you snobs chose it over Zack Snyder’s Justice League in a Great Catch-Up poll.
I am very, very excited. Substack paid subscribers voted for me to experience six and a half hours of recent Scorsese and I couldn’t be more psyched.
That’s because I have been waiting a very long time for Robert De Niro to stop wasting everybody’s time with stupid, bullshit, half-ass movies everybody fucking hates because they suck.
Those are the kinds of movies De Niro has been making for the last two decades. He’s making these movies because he has increasingly dodgy judgment but also because he has a lot of ex-wives and he basically has to work constantly until his dying day in order to afford his many divorces.
De Niro NEEDS money, and lots of it and that informs his often questionable choices. But De Niro is also a victim of his own success.
In 1999 De Niro scored one of the biggest hits of his career with Analyze This, a Harold Ramis comedy that afforded the Academy Award winner an opportunity to satirize the goodfellas and mobsters he had played throughout his career as an acclaimed dramatic actor.
The following year De Niro had an even bigger hit with Meet the Parents, a comedy of awkwardness where De Niro got big laughs through what was essentially a dramatic performance.
De Niro played it straight in Analyze This and Meet the Parents. That’s why he was funny. De Niro isn’t naturally funny. Oh sweet blessed lord is he ever not naturally funny.
Yet the success of Analyze This and Meet the Parents seems to have convinced De Niro that he was a genuine, bona fide, one hundred percent funnyman and not a serious actor who needs funny material to be even mildly amusing.
I write that because I just watched The Comeback Trail, a remake of a cult 1982 dark comedy about a disreputable producer who hires an over the hill cowboy actor to star in his new movie hoping that he will die during a particularly challenging scene so he can score a fortune in insurance money.
The movie was finished in 2019 and may or may not receive a domestic theatrical release at some point.
Let’s just say that it’s no great loss that the American people cannot currently see The Comeback Trail legally now and may not be able to see it for quite a while.
There are many problems with The Comeback Trail. For starters it is a comedy that is never funny. Unlike the film it is remaking, it’s also super sentimental in a mawkish way that works against the slapstick and the dark comedy.
But the film’s biggest problem is that it needs someone funny in the lead role and that is just not De Niro. I wouldn’t necessarily want to see Chuck McCann, who starred in the original The Comeback Trail, play Jake LaMotta but he is more qualified than De Niro to play the lead in The Comeback Trail because McCann is funny. He’s a funnyman. He was put on earth to make people laugh. He wasn’t a comic genius but he was a comedian with a nuanced and complete understanding of the mechanics of comedy.
De Niro keeps playing roles that demand a professional funnyman, not a great actor who can do comedy when the material is right. He starred in a movie called The Comedian for the love of God.
Robert De Niro is just about the last person who should star in a movie called The Comedian. Even Werner Herzog would have been funnier in that role.
Yet De Niro keeps making broad comedies that require him to mug and goof around and engage in juvenile monkeyshines and do all sorts of other things he’s not good at.
According to Terry Zwigoff Harvey Weinstein was very keen to have De Niro star in Bad Santa. So he arranged for Zwigoff to have a dinner at De Niro’s home. De Niro reportedly told Zwigoff that he didn’t really get the script and wasn’t interested in making the movie.
I suspect that De Niro regrets having turned down a hit and a Christmas perennial. So he said yes to comedies even if he didn’t understand them or think that they were funny.
I’m just glad that De Niro has gone back to making great movies occasionally. My advice to him going forward would be to make fewer comedies where one of the guys from LFMAO grinds his crotch into his face and more movies with that Marty Scorsese kid. He’s a real talent and they’ve got something special going, those two.
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