De Niro: A Life (85 page)

Cornered, Salander pled guilty to twenty-nine charges of grand larceny in March 2010 and was sentenced to six to eighteen years in prison and ordered to pay $114 million in fines and restitution. The following year, his associate, Leigh Morse, went on trial for her part in the fraud, including pocketing $77,000 from the sale of two works by the elder De Niro. His son was called upon to testify, which he did in March 2011 at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan. There wasn’t much to it. He was sporting a beard he’d grown for a movie role, and wore an appropriate if somewhat wrinkled dark olive corduroy blazer and gray slacks. He answered questions from both the prosecutor and the defense attorney, suggesting that he had first become suspicious of Salander when he traveled with him to Portugal for an exhibition of the painter’s work and discovered, to his surprise, that the art dealer had his own plane. The one dramatic flourish during his forty-minute testimony came when he was asked to identify Morse. He
turned his right hand into a pistol, pointed it at the defendant, and let his hand recoil, as if he’d just fired a shot.
^*2

I
F
R
IGHTEOUS
K
ILL
wasn’t what anyone wanted out of a De Niro/Pacino crime movie, making it seemed to pique De Niro’s interest in choosing projects. His next few films weren’t all memorable, but they generally had ambitions, intentions, and/or collaborators of substance, especially compared to what he’d done in the past five or six years.

Everybody’s Fine
was a remake of a 1990 Giuseppe Tornatore film in which Marcello Mastroianni played a widower who travels to Italy after his wife’s death to visit his grown children, only to find them all putting up false fronts of happiness and security so as not to reveal the painful truths about their lives to a father who had always seemed uninterested in them. It had been rewritten by the director Kirk Jones (
Waking Ned Devine
) for Miramax as a rather generic vehicle for an older male star and a trio of younger actors. De Niro was cast as the dad, Frank Goode, who traveled all across America with a tiny suitcase dropping in on his offspring, who were to be played by Kate Beckinsale, Drew Barrymore, and Sam Rockwell (genetic familial resemblances be damned). In a decision much more to do with money than with art, Connecticut would stand in for the entire United States, including Las Vegas.

It was a routine melodrama without much in the way of memorable writing or staging and a patently tacked-on happy ending (a homey Yuletide scene was clearly shot in the summer months, when the film was made). But De Niro took to it with a becoming seriousness, finding something empathetic in Goode’s workaholism and disconnection. In a neat detail, Goode was said to have devoted his professional life to manufacturing insulation for telephone and fiber optic cables—a perfect metaphor for De Niro’s own isolated nature. And he knew he had done something special, if slight, in the film: “I never say this about myself,” he told a reporter, “but I was very proud of that [performance], and Kirk is a terrific director. I certainly worked very hard on that one.”

Considerably more interesting was his next picture,
Stone
, a small and intense story of crime, punishment, sin, and redemption. One of the chief appeals of the film, which shot around Detroit in the spring of 2009, was that it would reunite him with Edward Norton on something that might erase the memory of the sturm-und-drang that made the production of
The Score
such an ordeal.
Stone
was a pet project of writer-director John Curran, who’d previously worked with Norton on
The Painted Veil.
Based on a play by Angus MacLachlan, it deals with the relationship of a prison convict, his wife, and his parole officer, to whom the wife is willing to offer herself sexually in exchange for her husband’s freedom. Curran had thought of Norton for the prisoner and De Niro for the parole officer, but they couldn’t make their schedules mesh, and Norton dropped out. Not long afterward, Norton’s calendar suddenly opened up. De Niro was still available and willing, and with the two stars aboard, a budget of $22 million became available.

The role of Lucetta, the prisoner’s wife, was still unfilled. Curran wanted an African American actress in the part, which would mesh with the Detroit setting and with Norton’s character’s self-presentation as a street tough. As Norton recalled, “
I was into that idea [and] Bob was into that idea.” But there were some pressures from the international financial entities who put up the production budget to seek a name that carried some weight abroad. Then Norton remembered how good the Ukrainian actress Milla Jovovich had been as a street-smart New Yorker in Spike Lee’s
He Got Game
, and when De Niro and Curran watched the film they agreed.

There was a long period of going over the script very carefully in New York, a kind of combination of rehearsal and revision between Curran and his stars, and Norton noticed that De Niro was more engaged in the process than he had been with
The Score.
“
I think Bob was just switched on from the get-go,” he recalled. “It was like weeks and weeks and weeks of kind of meeting with John in his office and going through stuff and all the best ways of working, talking, thinking, trying it out.”

For all their careful planning, when they finally went to Michigan to shoot, Norton had a surprise to pop on De Niro. The younger actor had been having some trouble coming up with a characterization for
his part, and he’d been interviewing prison inmates for inspiration when he met a fellow who he felt was perfect: a white man who wore his hair in cornrows and spoke in a raspy voice that bore a slight whistle on certain sounds. On the day they shot the convict’s initial encounter with the parole officer, Norton sprang his persona on De Niro for the first time. De Niro, of course, relished the surprise and wove his astonishment into the scene.

Norton came away from the film impressed with De Niro’s powerful sense of minimalism, the way in which he seemed almost to prefer
not
speaking dialogue, but to act from internal cues. “
A lot of times actors want more lines,” he said. “Both times I’ve worked with him he just takes a pen to it and kind of goes, I don’t think I need to say that, I don’t think I need to say that, I don’t think I need to say that. Almost to a fault … I almost think a good director ends up having to persuade Bob … that certain text is actually needed.”
^*3

D
E
N
IRO STARTED
accepting awards again: from the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic in 2008; from BAFTA-LA and from the Hollywood Film Festival in 2009; from the Taormina Film Festival in Italy in 2010. The biggest of these was the Kennedy Center Honors, the nation’s highest cultural award, presented to him by Barack Obama alongside fellow honorees Mel Brooks, Bruce Springsteen, jazz musician Dave Brubeck, and opera singer Grace Bumbry. Meryl Streep introduced him (he returned the favor the following year, when she received the same honor), Ben Stiller and others offered their memories of working with him, and the whole evening had an air of dignity.

In early 2011 he accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award from the Golden Globes for Outstanding Contributions to the World of Entertainment—but there was very little dignity in the air at all. Just the previous year, he had appeared at the same awards show to present
Martin Scorsese with the same honor. On the night he accepted the award, though, De Niro’s acceptance speech was a disaster of bad, even tasteless jokes (one suggested the service at the stars’ tables was lousy because so many waiters had been deported, along with Javier Bardem), and he read it from a teleprompter ineptly, as if seeing it for the first time. He even took a lighthearted dig at his hosts, declaring, “We’re all in this together: the filmmakers who make the movies and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association [which hands out the Golden Globes], who in turn pose for pictures with the movie stars.” The responses to his speech—both in social media during the event and in the following day’s newspapers—weren’t kind.

The next year, he was honored by his hometown during the seventh Made in New York awards ceremony. Noting that Meryl Streep would be receiving an award later in the evening, he joked, “I’m proud I have the same number of these as Meryl. For now. By this time next year, she’ll have seven. Last October, she beat me out for Italian-American man of the year.”

And he gave as many awards as he got. In 2010, he presented an honorary Oscar to ninety-five-year-old Eli Wallach, quipping, “Now that we’re going up for the same parts, I hope we can remain friends.… There’s nothing I like to see more than an even older actor.”

A few years later, accepting yet another acting prize, he went off on a rare comic spree about his status as an éminence grise in show business:

A
S INTERESTING
as
Stone
was, it satisfied neither his thirst to work nor his need to earn, and before the year was over he would address both of those with two more films,
Machete
, in which he played an evil-hearted southern politician with more than one dirty secret, and
Little Fockers
, yet a third go-round with Ben Stiller and Blythe Danner.

In
Machete
he seemed to have some fun, chewing up scenery in a way that suited writer-director Robert Rodriguez’s overheated B-movie sensibility (the film had its origins in a mock trailer for a nonexistent film that appeared in
Grindhouse
, the portmanteau genre picture from 2007 that Rodriguez made with Quentin Tarantino). The script even gave him a little character twist—revealed in his final scenes—that allowed him to dig into the part with a bit of a wink and a spin.

Little Fockers
, on the other hand, was about as subtle and nuanced as a steamroller leveling a fruit stand. There was a new director, Paul Weitz, who had made About a Boy for Tribeca, but virtually nothing else was added to the
Meet the Fockers
recipe save Harvey Keitel as a home-building contractor who’s apparently milking his commission, leading to a shouting match with De Niro’s Jack Byrnes staged, inelegantly, as an echo of the stairwell quarrel in which the actors had engaged in
Mean Streets
almost forty years prior. Everything about this third
Fockers
film was smaller, paler, and more strained, and audiences weren’t nearly so charmed by it, resulting in $148 million domestically and $162 million abroad—the least any of the
Fockers
films had earned. That said, the three of them had a worldwide gross of $1.156
billion
, and as De Niro and Tribeca were participants in the profits from the outset, they wound up constituting the most lucrative enterprise of his life.
^*4

You’d think that would have slowed him down, but the late 2010 crop of films (
Machete
,
Stone
,
Little Fockers
) turned out to be the launch of quite literally the busiest phase of his career. In the coming three years, he would appear in no fewer than seventeen films, including one that never played in American theaters, one that played a single Times Square screen for a single week before appearing on
home media, and one that would earn him his first Oscar nomination in more than two decades.

In 2011 he appeared as a shadowy Wall Street tycoon in Neil Burger’s
Limitless
, a thriller about a struggling novelist (Bradley Cooper) whose use of a drug to combat writer’s block gives him superhuman abilities of concentration and application; as a bloodless mercenary (alongside Jason Statham and Clive Owen) in Gary McKendry’s
Killer Elite
; and as a dying photojournalist whose last wish is to see the ball drop in Times Square at the stroke of midnight in Garry Marshall’s
New Year’s Eve.
(There was also Giovanni Veronesi’s
The Ages of Love
, an Italian ensemble film in which he played a divorced art professor living in Rome and which never appeared in the United States either theatrically or for home viewing—a first for De Niro, not counting a few TV commercials he’d shot in Japan.) These pictures came and went almost unnoticed, often not screened for critics or only after virtually every print publication’s deadlines for opening day reviews had passed.
New Year’s Eve
made a small splash; buoyed by a cast that included Sarah Jessica Parker, Zac Efron, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, Ashton Kutcher, Jessica Biel, and Jon Bon Jovi, it did $55.5 million in ticket sales against a budget of a similar sum. But that hardly excused it as a piece of work—nor did it make De Niro’s appearance in it any less embarrassing.

He was similarly busy in 2012, with some wildly divergent results. In Rodrigo Cortés’s
Red Lights
he had a sometimes amusing but ultimately grating role as Simon Silver, a blind psychic whose claims to paranormal abilities confound a team of scientists dedicated to debunking such phenomena. (A bit of levity was provided by director Eugenio Mira, Cortés’s fellow Spaniard and an uncanny look-alike for De Niro, playing the young Silver in archival footage.) That picture came and went like a rumor, earning just over $50,000 at the American box office. But that was a massive hit compared to
Freelancers
, a film starring Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson as a rookie New York cop drawn into a culture of corruption by De Niro’s senior officer; that film played just one New York screen for only one week—surely fulfilling a contractual mandate of some sort—before appearing for home viewing. It was as
near to straight-to-video, to use the outdated phrase, as anything De Niro had ever done.