Those Faces
Taxi Driver costars Jodie Foster, Robert DeNiro at the Cannes Film Festival, a bit less than 35 years ago. De Niro looks distinctly uncomfortable; Foster seems glassy-eyed but more or less accepting. Today’s De Niro is a tad mellower (naturally) but is still the same guarded guy, obviously still thriving and punching even though — let’s be honest — he creatively peaked as an actor years ago. Foster — 13 then, 48 now — has grown into my idea of a steady and together hyphenate, and her peak may be yet to come.
Seriously, when was the last time he gave an honest to God GREAT PERFORMANCE? 1997?
For my money, his last really good performance was Neil McCauley in Heat (’95). And yet he was pretty okay….no, better than okay as the disturbed parole guy in Stone.
yes definitely STONE is one of DeNiro’s benchmarks …. it will be interesting to see now people react the THE BEAVER …. it is not for everybody, and yet it delivers the goods in a kind of hodge-podge sense of cinematic overload; at times it was a truman show or being there kind of experience and then it morphed into pure genre
I always give him a couple more years from the one-two punch of Casino and Heat– I’d definitely include his work in Jackie Brown as one of his classic, impeccable performances. And he’s a hambone riot in The Fan from ’96… He’s kind of WEIRD in Copland, but that “You did NOOOOOOOTHING!” bit is hilarious and classic.
But, yeah, I’d go Jackie Brown as the last “great” performance, with “Stone” the best since ’97. Though he showed encouraging signs of alertness in The Good Shepherd, What Just Happened? and Limitless.
In general I think the dismay over “sell-out De Niro” is always overstated. Really, what more does the guy have to prove? I don’t know what everyone here’s day job is, but when you hit 68 or whatever De Niro is, are you still gonna be hitting the pavement just as hard as some energized lightning-rod maniac? Give the guy a break.
De Niro was great in the under appreciated 2009 film “Everybody’s Fine.” Nothing great since 97? Bullshit…lots of dreck in there, but several great performances such as 2001 in “The Score.”
Lex, I pretty much agree about DeNiro. There’s also this idea that there are all these great leading (or even supporting) roles for a sixtysomething guy and that’s just not particularly true. Maybe it gets overlooked because the situation for older actresses is even worse, but once you’re past mid-fifties, you’re pretty much shifting into character-actor mode, which means (a.) you’re not getting as many showcase parts and (b.) if you can get some thriller leads because you’re more famous than actual character actors, you’re gonna take ‘em, even if they’re not all terrific. I do sigh a little that De Niro has played so many goddamned cops but he’s done plenty of good work since the nineties. With Heat, Casino, and Jackie Brown as givens, I’d also add:
-Ronin, a totally solid genre movie; it’s not a virtuoso performance but he’s cool in it. Similar deal with The Score.
-Great Expectations, he’s pretty awesome in a small part.
-Meet the Parents, the first one: he’s very funny in it. The rest are pretty lousy, but there are a whole lot of talented people who can share the blame for that shit.
-City by the Sea: I found him really affecting as the cop with the wayward son played by James Franco. Frances McDormand is good in this one, too.
-The Good Shepherd: Good movie, and he’s pretty excellent in a supporting role. “A man shouldn’t die from the feet up.”
-Everybody’s Fine: Not a great movie or even quite a good one, but De Niro’s performance is one of the best things about it. He captures a kind of well-intentioned older-parent clumsiness very well.
-Stone: I’m glad some people seem to have seen this and liked it. He’s pretty great in it, actually getting to go up against Norton in a more direct way than The Score. But when I read about how it was his best performance in twenty years or whatever, I was reminded of how when Match Point came out, it went from “Woody Allen’s best in awhile” (maybe true) to “Woody Allen’s best in a decade!” (not true) to “Woody Allen’s best in twenty years!” (insanely horribly untrue). People tend to round up until suddenly the last good thing De Niro did before Stone was… what, Goodfellas?
Have Pacino or Dustin Hoffman really been hardcore killing it for the past decade and outclassing De Niro? Guys get old and the parts aren’t as juicy, especially if you’re not Handsome Old like Paul Newman was.
De Niro is good in the brilliant ‘Heat’ but I think playing Sam “Ace” Rothstein in ‘Casino’ was De Niro’s last truly great performance.
And now for something completely different – uh, that bow tie is ridiculous. He looks like a 10 year old boy wearing his father’s bow tie. And, to top it off, the jacket is too small.
I agree with Lex too. I don’t think De Niro as much left to prove, disappointing though the later half of his career may be. Both De Niro and Brando were absolutely incendiary in the early phases of their careers, and never subsequently lived up to that promise. It would be nice, sure, if they’d managed to maintain a high standard, but absolutely nothing, no amount of dreck, can take away from the brilliance of a Waterfront or a Taxi Driver. Let’s face it, must of us work to pay the bills; if you can redefine the parameters of an artform, make an absolutely protean contribution to global culture, and then settle into working just to pay the bills in middle-age, that’s fine with me.
Should have won an Oscar for The Deer Hunter. Everybody’s Fine was good.
And what about the moustache guy behind, Paul Schrader? Mishima was his peak?
“-Meet the Parents, the first one: he’s very funny in it. The rest are pretty lousy, but there are a whole lot of talented people who can share the blame for that shit.”
Thank you, absolutely right. The sequels are awful but DeNiro is very funny as the classic scary prospective father-in-law times ten. As with Midnight Run, there’s no shame in nailing a comic performance as the icing to your dramatic cake, far from it.
That pic of DeNiro is disturbing. He looks like someone I would cross the street to avoid if he were walking towards me.
“Both De Niro and Brando were absolutely incendiary in the early phases of their careers, and never subsequently lived up to that promise.”
Really? I’ll take Brando’s one-two punch of Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather (two roles about as far apart as can be) over his On The Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire perfs.
And there’s also great and varied later-period Brando work in The Missouri Breaks, The Freshman, Apocalypse Now, The Formula, and yes, Don Juan DeMarco.
How were there only 12 years between that picture and Midnight Run?
Don’t forget he directed THE GOOD SHEPHERD, which is terrific. A highly incisive look at Cold War history through the dark prism of the CIA. Unfortunately, it didn’t do well enough at the BO to let him to the Kennedy-era sequel he is planning. So we are at fault to some extent that he does MEET THE FOCKERS instead of what he should be doing.
Lazarus – you make a good point, but I think the double wammy of Last Tango and The Godfather was pretty much the exception to the rule of Brando’s later career, in the sense that he delivers outstanding performances in movies that were worthy of the performances. He was always capable of doing fascinating work, but the majority of the films he wound up in just weren’t fitting vehicles for a talent of his stature. The sustained quality and focus that produced Streetcar, Waterfront, Julius Caeser, Viva Zapata, and to a lesser extent, The Wild One and The Fugitive Kind, was never replicated in his later career.
If I may flip it for a moment, De Niro has always been one of my favorites, so if I can defend his post-Analyze That paycheck tendencies, let it also be stated that even during the FIREBRAND DE NIRO days we all pine for, he could still wheel out a generic or paycheck turn like nobody’s business. Sure, we all remember the plugged-in street-level maniac who scorched the earth in towering classics like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Godfather, 1900, Deer Hunter, King of Comedy, Midnight Run, Raging Bull, Angel Heart, GoodFellas, etc etc etc….
But let’s not forget, and this is NO disrespect to his work herein or even the quality of the movies, but De Niro could bust out a GoodFellas then do three years’ worth of stuff like Mistress and Night and the City and Guilty by Suspicion that were generic as all hell. Or follow King of Comedy with his sleepwalking turn in Falling In Love. Or do a Last Tycoon or The Mission, where the movie is epic and maybe bordering on greatness, but he’s either miscast or off his game.
Sure, there’s a difference between being “okay De Niro” in Brazil and being “okay De Niro” in The Score, but there’s still more than enough Stanley & Irises and We’re No Angels along the way to suggest he wasn’t a guaranteed force of nature in absolutely everything he did, then suddenly started phoning it in.
“-Meet the Parents, the first one: he’s very funny in it. The rest are pretty lousy, but there are a whole lot of talented people who can share the blame for that shit.”
Thank you, absolutely right. The sequels are awful but DeNiro is very funny as the classic scary prospective father-in-law times ten. As with Midnight Run, there’s no shame in nailing a comic performance as the icing to your dramatic cake, far from it.
My initial query had to do with GREATNESS, not just inoffensive, fair-to-middling performances in generic ensemble dramas. Saying “he was surprisingly alert in Limitless!” is just damning him with faint praise. Of course he doesn’t have a god damn thing to prove to anyone, and he has a family to feed and mortgages to pay, etc … but it’s so disheartening to see him churning out these soulless rote autopilot performances instead of stretching himself. He’s a living legend. His potential is unlimited.
Jackie Brown was his last GREAT PERFORMANCE. Totally against type yet he made it his own.
I agree with the above points taking a break from the “De Niro sellout” talk. What do you expect? He’s not getting any younger. He may have appeared in bad movies over the last decade, but he’s scarcely given a performance that could be called bad except for Godsend. And he’s shown ambition with The Good Shepherd, one of the best (and most overlooked) adult historical dramas of the aughts. Also compare him to other similarly aged actors: it’s not like Anthony Hopkins is getting a whole lot of good roles.
De Niro isn’t a sellout at all. The Good Shepherd could have been a masterpiece if he’d trimmed out some fat here and there, but as awesome as it’d be to see him mature as a director, that job’s gotta be a hell of a lot more stressful than the usual acting gig.
I like how everybody responded to the De Niro part and not a single person is disputing Jeff’s description of Jodie Foster. Now, I think it’s safe to assume that ‘Little Man Tate’ and “Home for the Holidays’ are movies that Jeff absolutely hated, just based on everything he’s ever said or written about those sorts of movies, so it’s pretty funny that Jeff is so far in the tank for Gibson that he’s now describing Jodie Foster as “a steady and together hyphenate” (instead of a great actress who can’t direct for shit), solely because of ‘The Beaver’, which looks even worse than the two released movies which she directed.
Jodie Foster RULES ALL and is the best actress in the world (or top 2 with Helen Mirren.) And The Beaver looks awesome.
Now that Bobby mentions it, Foster’s career definitely peaked with Silence of the Lambs.
Foster has foundered somewhat lately, but I loved her in Contact — her “ok to go” scene pretty much brought the most raw emotion I’ve ever seen into a sci-fi movie. And she always seems to be a smart, forceful personality in movies. She has a long way to go to become an Eastwood- or even Redford-level “actor-turned-director,” though.
She remains fantastic in Silence, which just gets better and better the more it ages. Probably a career high for her, Hopkins, and Demme.
How many “you talking to me”‘s does Sean Penn, Phil Seymour Hoffman, Brad Pitt, Colin Firth have?
‘Nuff said.
Wells was right all along. STONE is near-great, and DeNiro really brings it.
Lex – I was not being sarcastic when I said she was a great actress. But she’s very specifically *not* a good director. He’s only mentioning her as a director because of ‘The Beaver’; De Niro has directed two movies, and they’re both significantly better than the two she’s had released (and ‘The Beaver’ certainly looks to complete the threepeat).
and, to be fair, every single person involved with it peaked with ‘Silence of the Lambs’ except for Frankie Faison (because he went on to be in ‘The Wire’).
Foster is an interesting case. I don’t think there’s any denying she’s an exceptionally strong cinematic presence, but hasn’t she kinda done that well-educated, aloof (has she ever had good sexual chemistry with anyone onscreen?), strong ballbuster in a male-dominated world (Inside Man, Flightplan, The Brave One, Panic Room, obviously SotL) to death? It’s almost as though she had a more interesting career as a child actress because the range of roles doesn’t seem quite as limited.
But I feel like an asshole for even saying this because if the right part came around outside of these parameters, I’m pretty sure she’d be able to knock it out of the park. The problem seems to be twofold now in the sense that a) through no real fault of her own, she’s been typecast in a way where she’s almost consistently playing “strong” yet emotionally closed-off characters (which, make no mistake, is infinitely more interesting than weak basketcase women), and b) she’s reaching the age where even Hollywood doesn’t know exactly what to do with her.
What she really needs is a great director who grew up on her early work to have the confidence — and the clout to tell the studios to fuck off — to cast her against type a la De Niro in Jackie Brown.
Having not yet seen The Beaver, I have to say the dichotomy between Foster’s acting resume and her directorial efforts is pretty stark. In the former, she seems almost entirely cut off from her feelings, while in the latter, that seems to be the only thing she’s concerned with.
Again, not really disparaging so much as observing because after all these years she’s still fun as hell to watch do the “calculating bitch” routine…I thought she was a riot in Inside Man. But I do feel like she really needs a P.T. Anderson-type to write a great, fully-fledged character for her, and soon.
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