De Niro: A Life (73 page)

That didn’t affect his performance. There’s humor and wistful sadness to Louis Gara. His post-prison manners are crude and simpleminded—one aspect of modern life after another causes him to revert to a watchful shell. He’s glad of Ordell’s solicitude, of the chance to get back on his feet, of the booze and weed and the minute or two of sex he’s granted by Melanie (Bridget Fonda), but the world outside prison confuses and scares him. Asked to do something simple by Ordell—to accompany Melanie to pick up a stash of money—he is out of
his element and flustered; it takes only a few verbal goads for him to turn on Melanie and do something truly stupid and, in fact, unforgivable. His weakness and incapacity finally come to define him, and he becomes another employee Ordell must, in his phrase, “let go.” It’s a measure of the man that Louis used to be that Ordell is practically on the verge of tears when he does so.

I
N 1998
, D
E
N
IRO SUCCUMBED TO AN INVITATION TO SIT FOR A
live interview as part of the popular
Inside the Actors Studio
television series, which took footage from a lengthy conversation between a notable actor and moderator James Lipton, with current acting students and members of the public in the audience.

What was curious about the event beyond anything said onstage was its timing in his career. For a few years, De Niro’s acting choices—the actual roles and films and collaborators—had become the subject of cynicism in the critical community. Starting with a
Rolling Stone
review of
This Boy’s Life
entitled “Is De Niro Slipping?” (it was a misleading headline: the gist of the article argued, “No, he’s not, or at least not entirely”), there was a regular stream of articles questioning and even lambasting him for letting his status as “greatest actor since Brando” fade. Two antagonists in particular—Tom Carson of
Esquire
and
GQ
(the magazines most apt to bust De Niro’s chops for not consenting to proper interviews) and David Thomson of London’s
Independent
—each went after him more than once in articles entitled “Phoning It In,” “Weight Problem,” “The Buck Hunter,” and so forth. The gist of their arguments was that De Niro was coasting on a well-earned but insufficiently sustained reputation, that his most recent projects weren’t
up to the caliber of his talents, and that his talent itself was rusting or withering from lack of proper use, like the muscles of a paralytic. “
Robert De Niro is a hack,” Carson wrote bluntly, while Thomson took a more expansive view, trying to put what he saw as De Niro’s dubious choices in the context of his age, his family status, and his business activities.

It was true that De Niro had become more prolific over the years. He’d had thirteen films released in the 1970s, and the same number in the 1980s, but when the 1990s finally ended, he would have made twenty-four in those ten years alone. Granting that some of these represented fleeting appearances (as, to be fair, had been the case in previous decades as well, although less often), it was a significant increase in output. But it was true, too, that the 1990s saw him emerge as a director and producer, and he worked with such estimable collaborators as Scorsese (three times), Michael Mann, Barry Levinson (twice), Quentin Tarantino, John Frankenheimer, Alfonso Cuarón, Kenneth Branagh, Tony Scott, Harold Ramis and James Mangold. True, it wasn’t equal to his stunning stretch of work from 1973 through 1984, which included two Oscar wins and perhaps nine classic performances. But it wasn’t outright hackery, either, and almost every film in the period had something in it that made clear why De Niro had been attracted to it: a challenge in the characterization, an estimable set of colleagues, a story of weight or interest. There would come a time when he turned more toward comedy than to drama, when he seemed to be working for the experience of continuing to work rather than some greater artistic end. But it didn’t come as early in his career as his detractors seemed to believe. Not every film he made was up to the level of
The Godfather, Part II
or
Raging Bull
—or even, maybe,
True Confessions
or
Midnight Run.
But he hadn’t, as his detractors claimed, settled greedily into remunerative self-parody. The critical dismissals would keep coming, though, particularly as he turned to comedy and actually scored some box office hits. But the true depth of what he was choosing to do and what he was capable of doing continued, at least for a while longer, to be more complex and interesting than their authors would credit.

I
N THE EARLY
months of 1996, De Niro acquired a copy of the Cliffs Notes companion to Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations.
He wasn’t taking adult ed courses or seeking self-betterment. He was considering a role in a version of the oft-filmed classic updated for contemporary sensibilities. Ethan Hawke was to play the lead role and Gwyneth Paltrow his dream girl, and De Niro was being courted by producer Art Linson to play the small but vital role of the escaped convict who is aided by the protagonist and goes on to return the favor.

The first drafts of the script came to De Niro while he was visiting London in February 1996, with the prompt to decide soon whether he was interested, as shooting was planned for Eastertime. It turned out that production didn’t begin until the summer, under the eye of the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, then best known for his lovely children’s film
A Little Princess.
By that time, De Niro had agreed to play the role of the prisoner Magwitch, renamed Lustig for the adaptation (Hawke’s Pip had been similarly rechristened as Finn, a decision reached on the first day of shooting). It was another cameo—a few days of work, maybe a couple of weeks—and he was doing that sort of thing so often at that point that nobody blinked at it.

The script, by John Belushi’s onetime writing partner Mitch Glazer, who had already modernized
A Christmas Carol
into
Scrooged
, was so different from the original that De Niro never did crack his Cliffs Notes. Rather, he focused on the physicality of the character: a hobbled walk, a cagy silence, and, especially, a beard. His production files were filled with scores of images of famous beardos from history: Fidel Castro, Rasputin, Lenin, Trotsky, Ulysses Grant, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and anonymous Orthodox Jews and Russian peasants. And he called in a small favor from Linson: his daughter Drena was cast in a tiny role as an art gallery assistant (Grazer’s Pip/Finn had been reshaped into a painter).

The film appeared in the early part of 1998, to disappointing box office. Just fifteen months earlier, the same distributor, 20th Century Fox, had a massive hit with Baz Luhrmann’s update of Shakespeare,
Romeo
+
Juliet
, but Cuarón’s
Great Expectations
didn’t spark nearly the same heat.

T
HE SHORT FORAY
into the classics, even modernized, struck a chord in De Niro, however. As he was working on
Great Expectations
, he was producing an adaptation of
Moby Dick
written by the English novelist Philip Kerr and retitled
Ahab
to give a sense of its emphasis and the role De Niro saw himself as playing. This was the biggest thing that he and Tribeca had undertaken to date. So far the company had been content to put its name on a couple of De Niro’s films and to work mainly on small, indie-scale movies and TV series, such as
TriBeCa
and
New York Undercover
, neither of which had succeeded in holding on to an audience for very long.
Ahab
, though, was to be a full-scale seafaring epic, with significant water work and special effects. On its own, Tribeca couldn’t come up with anything near the more than $50 million that would be required to make it, so De Niro and Jane Rosenthal courted financial backers, eventually finding a partner in Shochiku, a Japanese film studio, which was willing to provide funds for three projects, including
Ahab
.

Even so, De Niro was never quite able to pull the trigger. He studied seafaring art from the nineteenth century and watched adaptations of
Mutiny on the Bounty
, Renny Harlin’s
Cutthroat Island
, and the two epic films about Christopher Columbus released in 1992. Kerr’s script bobbed around the Tribeca offices throughout 1996, and De Niro even sent it to Steven Spielberg, who knew from large-budget ocean-based movies, to get a reading on the material and the cost. “
It’s a very good project with exceptional writing,” Spielberg replied. “I liked it a lot. I honestly don’t know, with all my special effects expertise and experience on the water, whether $50 million is enough to put all of this up there.” Eventually the project simply died.

Even with
Ahab
a no-go, and as busy as he was now that he had come to live with the idea that he was an actor for hire, he could have been much, much busier if he had had the time or the inclination. His name was attached to dozens of films throughout the 1990s. Some of the parts he rejected would go on to be filled by other actors: the Harvey Keitel role in Spike Lee’s
Clockers
, the Jack Nicholson role in
Danny DeVito’s Hoffa, the Kevin Spacey role in Curtis Hansen’s
L.A. Confidential
, the Armand Assante role in Arne Glimcher’s
The Mambo
Kings, the Al Pacino role in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, the Jack Nicholson role in Rob Reiner’s
A Few Good Men
, the Billy Bob Thornton role in
Monster’s Ball
(Queen Latifah was rumored to be cast opposite him), the Joe Pesci role in Chris Columbus’s
Home Alone
, the John Malkovich role in Jane Campion’s
The Portrait of a Lady
, the Michael Douglas role in David Seltzer’s
Shining Through
, the Paul Newman role in Marek Kanievska’s
Where the Money Is
, the Nicolas Cage role in George Gallo’s
Trapped in Paradise
, and the Liam Neeson role (opposite Meryl Streep) in Barbet Schroeder’s
Before and After.

The Hollywood trade papers carried word of him starring in biopics based on the lives of boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, painters Diego Rivera and Jackson Pollock (the latter, which actually seemed possible for a time, had Barbra Streisand penciled in as the artist’s wife, Lee Krasner), financier Michael Milken, auto maker Enzo Ferrari (with Michael Mann directing), and, with Martin Scorsese, columnist Walter Winchell and Rat Pack icon Dean Martin.

There were rumors of De Niro appearing in another Scorsese film,
Silence
, based on a Shusaku Endo novel about Jesuit missionaries in Japan,
^*1
and yet another, a version of Arthur Miller’s
View from the Bridge
that was to be staged as a play and then shot on film. There was a movie about the Red Scare called
33 Liberty St.
; a comedy opposite Dustin Hoffman entitled
Gold Dust; The Little Things
, a Danny DeVito–directed thriller about the search for a serial killer; Michael Cimino’s adaptation of
The Fountainhead
;
Out on My Feet
, a Barry Primus film in which he would play the manager of boxer Mark Wahlberg; a film about espionage in the Middle East; and
Stagecoach Mary
, a western (!) with Whoopi Goldberg (!).