De Niro: A Life (75 page)

The film was shot quickly from May through July in New York and Florida, and Ramis turned it around in time for a March 1999 release. By then, though, they had competition. In January, HBO had premiered
The Sopranos
, an elaborate series about a mobster who begins to visit a psychotherapist, secretly, when he suffers a series of panic attacks. As it happened, Warner Bros., the studio that had produced
Analyze This
, was owned by the same conglomerate that owned HBO. There was some real concern that the immensely popular cable TV series was going to outshine the $30 million theatrical film. That turned out not to matter.

I
T MUST BE
made clear in any consideration of his performing career up to this point that De Niro was
always
funny. He was funny in
Hi, Mom!
and in that AMC car commercial, in
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
and
Bang the Drum Slowly
and
Mean Streets
, in
Raging Bull
and
Brazil
and
The King of Comedy
and
The Untouchables
and
Midnight Run
(obviously) and
We’re No Angels
and (yes)
Cape Fear
and
Mad Dog and Glory
and, most recently, in
Wag the Dog
and
Jackie Brown.
He has always been thought of as an actor’s actor, a thespian most adept at playing heavies. But far more often than is commonly recollected, he had a breezy, winking lilt to him, a born comic’s way with jokey dialogue, a killer grin that could sell you a pained laugh even in a picture like
Taxi Driver.
He never seemed exactly a joker, but he was, as Jerry Lewis used to say of Dean Martin, “funny in his bones.” As Ramis, a comedian’s comedian, said of De Niro, “
It’s not as if he has a shtick he does or some routine that he’s worked up in clubs. He’s funny because he’ll grab on to a reality and just shake it and just milk it for everything. And he knows that excesses of behavior can be very funny. That’s why we laugh sometimes at things that are excessively violent. It’s part discomfort and part irony. But he knows that.”

It’s no surprise, then, that De Niro is so adept in
Analyze This
—far more so, indeed, than Billy Crystal, whose character, Dr. Ben Sobel, is essentially the straight man or interlocutor to De Niro’s comically skewed mob boss, Paul Vitti. De Niro’s Vitti always carries an air of menace—at any second he is apt to take a firm, even threatening, tone with his henchmen, his rivals, his psychoanalyst. But whether discussing his sex life, his family, his anxiety, his history of violence, or the ins and outs of his work, he’s genuinely funny. “You don’t hear the word
no
too much, do you,” Sobel says to him, and Vitti insists that isn’t true: “I hear it all the time, only it’s more like, ‘No! Please! No! No!’ ” Right there is the genius of the film: the shocking and straight-faced blend of mob movie and buddy comedy.

It works best in the early going, and better still when De Niro is on-screen and we’re not caught up in any of the limp plotting having to do with Sobel’s wedding or his inferiority complex vis-à-vis his own father. Vitti is cautious when entering Sobel’s office for the first time, but he immediately comes to dominate it and to congratulate the doctor for having cured him even though they’ve only had a single vague conversation of a few minutes’ duration. “The load? Gone,” he says blithely about his troubles. “Where is it? Don’t know.” He insists that he’s had a breakthrough, telling Sobel, “You got a gift, my friend.” When the doctor demurs, Vitti is adamant: “Yes, you do” and then “Yes, you
do
.”
But even in a happy fettle, he serves Sobel with a warning: “I go fag, you die.”

He has a grand comic moment while trying to make love with a mistress whose chatter distracts him into impotence—“I’m trying to do this here!” he scolds her—and another when Sobel starts asking about his father and suggests he might have an Oedipal complex:

(Later, when Sobel mentions Freud again, Vitti complains, “I can’t even call my mother on the phone after that thing you told me.”)

At its best, the film rolls like that again and again, with De Niro effortlessly crafting a sleek, crude, ruthless mob boss aura and then digging into the rich dialogue with real gusto. Unfortunately, Ramis and company determined that they had to balance the Vitti story with a Sobel story, and the last act, in which Sobel becomes engaged in mob business, becomes increasingly inane, a tendency that became chronic and ultimately fatal in the awful sequel. But during that opening hour or so, when De Niro is diving into the chance to make light of his own tough-cookie persona,
Analyze This
is a genuine treat, and it truly deserved its success.

It was received well in the press. By now, critics had seen De Niro trying virtually everything that an actor could do, including—as far
back as
Midnight Run
—straight comedy. But by and large they were impressed with his full-on comic turn in
Analyze This.
“Without betraying the genre that has handed him such choice opportunities,” said Janet Maslin in the
New York Times
of the very notion of De Niro sending up a mob movie, “Mr. De Niro gives a performance that amounts to one long wink at the viewer.” In the
San Francisco Chronicle
, Mick LaSalle wrote, “De Niro has figured out that his best strategy for playing comedy is to play it as he would a drama. He plays it straight and lets the situation determine whether it’s funny.” But there were some negative notices mixed in: “Playing tough is what made De Niro a star, and his reluctance—or inability—to send up his own clichés is understandable. Which is why he’s especially awkward when he tries to be funny,” said Manohla Dargis in the
LA Weekly.
“De Niro doesn’t just seem uneasy—he seems lost.”

In fact, it was a global smash, earning nearly $107 million at home and another $70 million or so abroad, spending two weeks at the very top of the North American box office and ten weeks altogether in the top ten. De Niro didn’t get paid as much up front as he had on
Ronin
: his paycheck on
Analyze This
was a relatively modest $8 million. But Tribeca Productions owned a piece of the film, which provided the company with its first bona fide megahit. The success gave De Niro some ideas about what else he could be doing, ideas that would change his career, his life, even his legacy in ways nobody could have foreseen.

E
LIA
K
AZAN WON
A
CADEMY
A
WARDS AS BEST DIRECTOR IN
1948 and 1955, for
Gentlemen’s Agreement
and
On the Waterfront
, respectively, and he amassed five other Oscar nominations throughout his career for directing such films as
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
East of Eden
, as well as three Tony awards as best director. But his life’s work had been mitigated, in the eyes of more than a few in the Hollywood community, by his 1952 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when he had been a friendly witness, providing the committee with names of people whom they had already identified as Communists or Communist sympathizers. Not only had Kazan never apologized for his decision, he staunchly defended himself in a full-page ad in the
New York Times
and in interviews and writings throughout his life. To many eyes, in fact,
On the Waterfront
, which was written by Budd Schulberg, another friendly HUAC witness, was an attempt to show how informing on one’s former peers could be a sign of honor rather than a badge of shame.

In some circles, Kazan’s cooperation with HUAC was overlooked; in 1983, he was named a Kennedy Center honoree, one of the highest civilian honors that can be bestowed in the United States, and in 1987 he was feted at a benefit for the American Museum of the Moving Image. But he was still considered a self-serving rat by others in Hollywood, a man who helped fuel the ruinous Hollywood blacklist of the McCarthy era, a cruelty that was still acutely felt decades later.

It was thus headline news when in early 1999 the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences announced that it would give the eighty-nine-year-old Kazan an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement. Karl
Malden, who’d worked with Kazan before
and
after his testimony and who was a past president of the Academy, had proposed the award, and the thirty-nine-member board had voted its approval unanimously. The award would be presented during the Oscar telecast in late March by two of the contemporary cinema’s most prominent heirs to Kazan’s artistic legacy: Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.

In Hollywood, where various victims of the blacklist still lived and the business of sorting out which screenwriters should properly be credited for films they wrote pseudonymously while under the shadow of the blacklist was still being debated (witness the many feature stories about the era that had greeted the release of
Guilty by Suspicion
), the news of Kazan’s honor was received with powerful emotions. A full-page ad in
Daily Variety
signed by, among others, Sean Penn and Ed Asner accused Kazan of having “validated the blacklisting of thousands” and doing “enormous damage to the motion picture industry.” Survivors of the blacklist spoke out in the media and organized a demonstration for Oscar night. The award was meant to be a sentimental gesture, but it was shaping up to be a scrap.

De Niro had grown up enraptured by Kazan’s work and had starred in the director’s final film,
The Last Tycoon
, more than twenty years prior. The two had maintained contact and friendship over the years. Kazan had sent De Niro a letter after seeing him onstage in
Cuba and His Teddy Bear
, offering a few suggestions for the performance, and had written him again after having seen
A Bronx Tale
, declaring, “I don’t know anyone who could have done it as you did.” De Niro was among the five hundred people who turned out to honor the director at the American Museum of the Moving Image gala. So for De Niro the Oscar was a matter not only of artistic just deserts—Kazan’s work clearly merited the recognition—but also of personal loyalty. Of course he would present it.

On the night of the awards, a frail Kazan entered the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion through a side entrance, meaning that he didn’t have to walk past the couple of hundred people who were protesting his appearance peacefully across the street from the red carpet, where they were opposed, also peacefully, by a smaller group carrying placards in favor of Kazan. When the moment for his award came, highlights
of Kazan’s impressive career were shown and Scorsese and De Niro spoke from the podium, De Niro describing the honoree as “the master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral truth in acting.”

Then, accompanied by his wife, Frances, Kazan came out from the wings to a mixed response. As TV cameras showed, some in the crowd stood immediately to applaud him, including Malden, Warren Beatty (who made his film debut in Kazan’s
Splendor in the Grass
), Meryl Streep, Helen Hunt, and Kathy Bates; some, including Steven Spielberg, applauded but stayed in their seats; and some, including Nick Nolte, Ed Harris, and Amy Madigan, stayed seated and unresponsive, their hands still, their gazes accusatory.

Kazan did not make too much of the moment. “I want to thank the Academy for its courage, generosity,” he said, noting his long and not always harmonious relationship to the institution. He looked around for Scorsese and De Niro and thanked and hugged them both. Then he declared, “I think I can just slip away,” and Frances led him back off the stage.