De Niro: A Life (87 page)

As the title would indicate, there was droll humor in the book, but Weitz, whose father, the fashion designer John Weitz, died in 2002, was interested in the darker material in it: the dysfunction and the horror of homelessness, the crippling legacies that so often pass from fathers to sons. Weitz described the script he distilled from the book as appropriate for a “Romanian arthouse film,” but De Niro could easily identify with the theme of a young New York artist trying to make his way in the wake of a father who was also an artist—and isolated, slightly misanthropic, and maybe a little mad. When Weitz told him that studios had expressed interest in making the film only if he could brighten it up, emphasize the comedy, and otherwise coddle the audience, De Niro responded that Tribeca would be interested in helping to make the film properly and that he would be interested in playing the dad (a boon, per Nick Flynn, who claimed that De Niro carried just the combination of “grandeur and menace”). They finally got it green-lit by Focus Features for a budget of $8 million, with Paul Dano cast as Nick and Julianne Moore as his mother, who divorced Jonathan when Nick was just a kid.

It would be Dano’s film, just as it was Nick Flynn’s book and life, and it turned out that he was strong enough to play the part well in its best and its worst aspects. But the revelation in the film was De Niro, brushing against themes and situations from some of his earlier films and, more impressively, drawing on bits of his and his father’s lives to build the most full-bodied and empathetic character he had played in years.
Stone
had shown that he could engage if he wished to; in
Being
Flynn
, De Niro brushed against autobiography and truly personal material in a way he hadn’t done since
A Bronx Tale
almost twenty years prior.

For one thing, he took his research seriously for the first time in a while, learning about the day-to-day trauma of being homeless in lower Manhattan alongside Weitz and others in the cast.
^*
He read the scattered writings of Jonathan Flynn and went to an assisted-care facility in Boston to meet him (“So, you do a little acting,” the elder Flynn said to De Niro, to which he responded, “Yeah, I do a little acting”). De Niro picked Nick’s brain about details of his father’s behavior, habits, and comportment; he even hefted the club that the older Flynn carried around for protection, just to get a feel for it. The film was more or less shot in places where De Niro had grown up and lived his whole life, and a lot of it was shot in neorealist style, with the stars appearing in actual locations and blended in among non-actors.

There were outright allusions to De Niro’s working persona: the elder Flynn worked, like Travis Bickle, as a Manhattan taxi driver; his outbursts at homeless shelters, including the one where Nick worked, echoed De Niro’s explosive turns in
Awakenings.
And there was even a scene when Jonathan asks Nick to enlist some friends to help him move his belongings from the apartment that he’s being evicted from into a storage facility, a re-creation of De Niro and his acting chum Larry Woiwode helping the senior De Niro fetch the belongings he’d had shipped back to him from France after returning to New York in the mid-1960s. The film didn’t make much money, but De Niro showed some strength and spark in it.

D
URING
D
E
N
IRO
’
S
1998 appearance on
Inside the Actors Studio
, the camera flashed, as it often did on that program, to show the audience of acting students, among whom one in particular stood out, with an intent gaze of appreciation, eyes wide, mouth slightly agape, as if being
shown by a magician how all those amazing tricks are really done. He was a twenty-two-year-old kid from Philadelphia who was enrolled at the Actors Studio school at the New School (where De Niro’s dad had once taught painting) and who was just beginning to make his way from student stage productions to small parts in TV and film.

A few years later, when casting for Everybody’s Fine was under way, that same kid was still building a career and hoping for a big break, and he took the bold step of sending a videotape of himself reading a scene as De Niro’s son with his own mother, off-camera, reading the De Niro part. He didn’t get the role, which went to Sam Rockwell, but he did get a nice response from De Niro, who encouraged him.

By the time
Everybody’s Fine
made it into theaters, though, the kid had arrived, starring in a huge comedy hit and getting cast in leading roles regularly after a decade of toiling on TV and as part of an ensemble. In 2010, he finally got to work with De Niro, albeit not in very many scenes, in the surprise hit
Limitless.
His name was Bradley Cooper, and he and De Niro would, not long after
Limitless
, enjoy a high point in their respective careers by working together.

The two were cast as father and son—as senior and junior, in fact—in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, an adaptation of Matthew Quick’s 2008 novel about a mentally unbalanced schoolteacher, Pat Solitano Jr., who is released from court-ordered institutionalization to the care of his parents, whose house is dominated by Pat senior’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, gambling addiction, and hair-trigger temper. At first Pat junior’s psychoses prove too much for his parents to handle, but he finds a path to normalcy and salvation in a relationship with Tiffany, a young widow of his family’s acquaintance who has suffered a mental crisis of her own.

Russell, the father of a teenage son with a mood disorder, was taken with the book immediately and had hopes of filming it even before it was published. He had known De Niro since his work touching up
Meet the Fockers
, and he knew that De Niro, too, was the father of a son living with psychological challenges. He thought De Niro would make a perfect Pat senior, and he broached the idea with him in a meeting. “
Robert and I have been speaking about these family matters for years,” Russell said. “So I sat with him, and we discussed the script
and personal matters, and he started to cry. I watched him cry for 10 minutes.… He told his agent, ‘Make this happen.’ ”

Russell worked on adapting the book with Vince Vaughn and Zooey Deschanel in mind for Pat junior and Tiffany. When the script was done, it drew the attention of Mark Wahlberg, who was working with Russell on
The Fighter
, and Angelina Jolie. When they stepped back, the script fell to Cooper, and the producers landed on Jennifer Lawrence, the twenty-one-year-old Oscar nominee from 2010’s
Winter’s Bone.
De Niro, everyone’s first choice for Pat senior no matter whom else the film starred, never budged and was ready to go when Russell was.

By the time the film was cast, it was mid-2011, and the Weinstein Company, which had budgeted the film at $22 million, was expecting shooting to be completed by Thanksgiving. That meant there would be almost no rehearsal, which suited Russell’s technique. In such films as
Flirting with Disaster
,
Three Kings
,
I Heart Huckabees
, and
The Fighter
he had developed a style that employed multiple handheld cameras and improvised dialogue; he would literally throw lines at his actors to repeat or respond to in the middle of a take, with all the cameras running. “The actors are never given the release of cutting the camera,” remarked the film’s editor, Jay Cassidy. “David is consciously shooting variations because he’s working out his script in the shooting and in the editing.”

De Niro wasn’t fazed by Russell’s methods, which somewhat recalled the wildcatting style of
Mean Streets
. “You’ve got the camera moving around,” he said, “he’ll push the camera over to this character, to that character, he’ll throw lines at you and you repeat them. And I don’t mind that, it’s all great. It’s a particular way of working and gets right to it and it’s spontaneous. You just have to go with it.” In fact, he admitted, he wasn’t always sure what shape the film was taking. Russell had reimagined the Pat senior he’d encountered in Quick’s pages, De Niro said: “He kept to himself more in the book it was based on and was more angry, but he didn’t have many other colors. I liked what David did: he kind of reversed him, pulled him inside-out.” Couple that revision of the character with the improvisatory filming technique, De Niro said, and anything might have happened. “It had a certain
chaotic, frenetic kind of energy, a spontaneity,” De Niro recounted. “And people would say that they didn’t know where it was going, which is a good thing.”

A very good thing, in fact. When
Silver Linings Playbook
debuted at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, it was immediately projected as a significant Oscar contender, with fine performances in all the lead roles (including the Australian actress Jackie Weaver as Pat senior’s wife, Dolores, and Chris Tucker as Pat junior’s best chum from the mental hospital). If Russell had been the film’s instigator, creator, and auteur, from the moment it left Toronto it belonged to Harvey Weinstein, a past master of turning Oscar buzz into box office and golden statuettes. Weinstein opened the film slowly, with New York and Los Angeles getting it just before Thanksgiving and the rest of the country on Christmas Day. The reviews were very strong, especially for De Niro, whose good work in
Stone
and
Being Flynn
had been overlooked but who was unignorable in what was turning out to be a crowd-pleasing smash; buoyed, in large part, by award-season eclat,
Silver Linings
went on to gross $132 million domestically and another $104 million abroad.

And De Niro could take some credit for that. His Pat Solitano Sr. is a jackknife of a man: slender, muscled, almost pompadoured, a natty dresser, with a quick temper, unbridled passions, and such a powerful need to control his environment that there could be ten of him in his small, neat Philadelphia home, straightening the remote controls near his TV-watching chair, counting the envelopes in his bookmaking business, carefully archiving his videocassettes of Eagles games. He loves his wife, Dolores, and his sons, Jake and Pat junior. But chiefly he loves his peace of mind and his routines and his football team, and anything that gets in the way of any of that is an issue for him.

When Pat junior comes home from a mental institution, his dad is dubious, and when Pat junior threatens to fall apart once again, the father’s concerns spill out into a confused blend of self-protectiveness, anger, embarrassment, and worry. He loves his boy—he is moved to tears and a choked voice in an unsolicited confession of his wishes for him—but he has no clue how to handle Pat junior, perhaps because he has no clue how to handle himself.

Pat senior is a gambling addict, at the very least, running an illegal bookmaking business out of his home, and he can’t attend Eagles games any longer because he’s been banned from the stadium for fighting. (When he drops Pat junior at the parking lot before a game, his parting advice, “Don’t drink too much, don’t hit anybody, you’ll be fine,” seems equally directed at himself.) When he feels his territory is being invaded, altered, or even
touched
, his anxiety becomes palpable. His game-day superstitions are vividly real to him, and he truly believes there’s some connection between a football team’s performance and the posture in which people are sitting on the couch in his home or holding a lucky handkerchief.

Facing a real threat, though, he unleashes fury. When Pat junior finally loses the thread of his sanity and accidentally bloodies his mom’s nose, Pat senior engages him in an actual fistfight that leaves both of them sporting shameful shiners. When a neighbor boy (played by David O. Russell’s son) shows up on the doorstep during a loud family quarrel to ask if he can interview them for a school project about living with mental illness, Pat senior chases the kid back home and threatens him so terribly that the kid actually laughs (picture De Niro, bloody-nosed and pajama-clad, shouting, “I’m gonna take that fuckin’ camera and I’m gonna break it over your fuckin’ head and then I’m gonna come back and interview you about what it’s like to get that camera broken over your head,” and the source of the humor is clear).

But he’s adaptable. When Pat junior’s new love interest, Tiffany, makes the case that she is
not
a bad luck charm but rather
helps
Pat junior’s pro-Eagles mojo, and she cites the statistics that prove it, Pat senior turns from lambasting her to endorsing her. “I gotta say I’m impressed,” he declares with his face frowning in grudging appreciation. “I gotta rethink this whole thing.” Soon enough, he’s standing beside her and they’re literally repeating each other’s sentences.

Finally, in one of the most touching moments in the film, the older Pat tells the younger to chase after Tiffany and not let her get away. It’s a truly memorable pep talk, delivered firmly and earnestly and with love: “I know you don’t wanna listen to your father, I didn’t wanna listen to mine … but it’s a sin if you don’t reach out. It’s a sin. It could haunt you the rest of your days like a curse.… Don’t fuck this up.” They
embrace. They’re deeply flawed, but they’re bonded just as deeply. It’s a sweet, savvy capper to a quietly powerful performance.

I
N
J
ANUARY, WITH
the film doing strong business on a relatively modest number of screens, Oscar nominations were announced and
Silver Linings Playbook
was a big story: eight nods in total, for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Editing, and one each for Best Actor (Cooper), Best Actress (Lawrence), Best Supporting Actress (Weaver), and Best Supporting Actor (De Niro). It was the first film to earn nominations in all four acting categories since Warren Beatty’s
Reds
more than thirty years prior. And it was De Niro’s first Oscar nomination since 1992’s
Cape Fear.

Much had changed in the decades since he was last a contender in the Academy Awards sweepstakes, including the advent of Weinstein, who had turned the race for Oscar gold into a blood sport, first at Miramax and now at the Weinstein Company, and the rise of Oscarazzi, the hives of bloggers who spent as much as nine months of the year prognosticating the awards. Participating in this sort of exercise didn’t seem like anything that the famously publicity-averse De Niro would dream of doing. Yet, perhaps bowing to the influence of his friend Harvey, perhaps acknowledging a special relationship to the material, perhaps grateful to be recognized for his work and not just by lousy impressionists or by people wondering what had happened to him, he plunged into the Oscar race, doing interviews and personal appearances, traveling and smiling and accommodating requests—behaving, in short, as he never had, not even when he was an eager up-and-comer.