DeNiro Sells Out

Robert De Niro has become a prostitute.

There's simply no other way to put it. Once a peerless actor - the star of such essential works as Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), The Deer Hunter (1978), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), and a much-deserved Oscar winner for The Godfather Part II (1974) and Raging Bull (1980) - he now heedlessly peddles his talents to the highest bidder. He is a hack-for-hire. A walk-through artist.

Just take a look at the recent evidence. The comedies, like Meet the Parents (2000), Analyze This (1999) and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle (2000), feature De Niro hamming it up with an endless stream of tough-guy mannerisms, and exploiting the volatility and rage of his past great performances (especially Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) for cheap parodic fodder. Meanwhile, dramas like Ronin (1998), Flawless (1999), 15 Minutes (2001) and now The Score (which opens today nationwide) find De Niro in his laconic mode, striking tough-guy poses that are also parodies (albeit unintentional ones) of his earlier work. (His worst performance of recent years, as the master chief in last year's Men of Honor, actually combines the over-the-top shtick with the rigid self-seriousness; the sight is not a pretty one to behold.)

It helps little that all of these films are utterly mediocre, that De Niro hasn't had a halfway-decent script to play since Wag the Dog (1997). Or that De Niro seems to care not a whit that he is stomping on his own legacy. His performances used to be harrowing, fascinating explorations of inner emotional terrain. The tension came from seeing how far inside himself the actor would burrow, and how much raw viscera he'd throw up on the screen for our analysis.

The only tension now comes from wondering how much De Niro was paid to sell out.

Writing about De Niro in Mean Streets, the film that first brought him national attention, the critic Pauline Kael said, "While an actor like Jeff Bridges in The Last American Hero hits the true note, De Niro here hits the far-out, flamboyant one and makes his own truth. . . . [T]his kid doesn't just act - he takes off into the vapors."

Kael's may be the most succinct description of what made De Niro so great in the 1970s and 1980s. He was certainly of the Method tradition - an actor who sought to occupy his characters from the inside out. But far more so than a James Dean or a Montgomery Clift, De Niro was a showy Method actor. His most famous scenes - the "You talkin' to me" bit in Taxi Driver, his final monologue in Raging Bull - are certainly over-the-top, and self-consciously actorly. But De Niro so deftly and completely conveys the interior lives of these characters - the paranoid fears, the masochistic tendencies, the petty jealousies - that the acting out seems just another aspect of the character he's playing. The result is the kind of subtle flamboyance that comes when an actor is completely in sync with his material.

De Niro was so good and so vivid that the inevitable obstacle arose: How does so indelible a performer keep it fresh, and keep surprising his audience? His great performance as Rupert Pupkin, the talk-show-obsessed kidnapper in Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy (1983), showed De Niro pushing his outlandish character right to the point of caricature. It seemed a kind of summation of his career to that point, and it seemed like the perfect launching point for De Niro to head into completely new directions.

In certain films, it looked as if he were going to do just that. He played freewheeling farce in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), romantic yearning in the underrated Falling in Love (1984), and elder-statesman melancholy in Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas (1990). But in other films, he took his first steps toward self-parody.

His supporting role as Al Capone in The Untouchables (1987) marked the first time the actor deliberately played upon his own persona as an outlandish menace. He got away with prostituting himself that time, but then he tempted fate again and again - delivering essentially the same "De Niro does De Niro" performance in Angel Heart (1987), Midnight Run (1988) and We're No Angels (1989).

And at some point De Niro made a fatal turn for the worse - probably around the time of Cape Fear (1991). Maybe the worst film Martin Scorsese has ever made, Cape Fear - a remake of the 1962 thriller about a man who terrorizes a small-town attorney - actually borders on camp. But there's a humorlessness in the material - and particularly in De Niro's relentless performance as the evil Max Cady - that's revolting. Scorsese rubs the pulp in our face, as De Niro wildly chews the scenery. But there's never any sense of levity or play; and at times De Niro is so virulently over-the-top that he seems to be acting on another planet.

De Niro inexplicably got an Oscar nomination for Cape Fear. Around the same time, however, his truly extraordinary performances were being widely ignored. Few moviegoers have even heard of, much less seen, David Hugh Jones' wrenching post-Vietnam drama Jacknife (1989), but it deserves to be regarded as one of De Niro's finest hours. He plays a veteran who falls in love with the sister (Kathy Baker) of an old army buddy (Ed Harris). The push-and-pull between the three actors is extraordinary. And in his scenes with Baker, De Niro displays a tender, haunted vulnerability that he had never quite captured before.

De Niro also gave strong performances in such flawed but worthy projects as Guilty by Suspicion (1991) and Night and the City (1992), but they flopped as well. Cape Fear, on the other hand, grossed nearly $80 million. Did the failure of his more ambitious works, among both audiences and Oscar voters, wear the actor down?

It certainly seems as much. At some point De Niro simply gave up trying new things. His performances, and the films themselves, began to look like vague facsimiles of one another. Casino (1995) treaded unsuccessfully on GoodFellas terrain; the pathetic The Fan (1996) haplessly tried to strike Cape Fear box office gold. If not for his effectively underplayed work in Heat (1995) and Wag the Dog, the last decade could almost be written off as a complete wash for the actor.

De Niro's latest film, the Frank Oz-directed heist thriller The Score, is so rote, and the actor's performance is so bland, that it barely seems worth mentioning. In 10 years, it will no doubt be looked upon as one of a dozen or so interchangeable films - trifling Hollywood product that mostly had the effect of making us long for the challenging performances from the first part of his career.

Maybe it is inevitable that such iconic talent will eventually undermine itself. De Niro rose to prominence in the 1970s, alongside such actors as Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino. Pacino has been coasting on his "Hoo-ah" spitfire shtick for years; Nicholson managed to coast his way to a third Oscar by doing his devilish crazy guy shtick in As Good as It Gets (1997). But both of those actors have proven they're still capable of greatness (Pacino in 1999's The Insider and 1997's Donnie Brasco, and Nicholson in this year's The Pledge), while De Niro drifts ever closer to becoming a national joke.

"Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime," the actor, as Rupert Pupkin, says in The King of Comedy. In the last decade, De Niro seems to have decided otherwise: He'd rather be a (well-paid) schmuck for Hollywood than the king he could have been for a lifetime.

Christopher Kelly is the film critic for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. His work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Premiere, Film Comment, Salon, Film Quarterly, Out, and Time Out New York. Christopher is a graduate of Dartmouth College. He was born in Staten Island, New York in 1974.