De Niro: A Life (70 page)

C
ASINO
OPENED IN
late November—on Thanksgiving weekend, in fact, a hand grenade stuffed inside the holiday turkey—opposite, of all movies,
Toy Story.
The picture starts with a bang: the aging Ace Rothstein exiting a restaurant, turning the key in the ignition of his Cadillac, and being launched, as if by an ejector seat, into a wall of flame. He has been talking about love and paradise; is he speaking from beyond the grave?

It’s possible. For the next forty-five minutes or so, as Ace (De Niro) narrates in retrospective fashion, Scorsese sweeps us through the world of gambling, posh casinos, and Las Vegas morality with the same assurance with which Ray Liotta escorted Lorraine Bracco through the secret passageways of the Copacabana in
Goodfellas.
It’s breathtaking. Ace explains the games, the systems, the skim, and the connections between the various wheelers and dealers and makers and shakers in the city. Partly he’s being autobiographical, explaining who he is and where he’s from and how he sees and weighs things; but partly he’s offering a travelogue, or, in a way, a biography of the film’s title character. Every human need—physical or spiritual—can be met inside a casino, he would have us believe. No wonder he thinks it’s heaven.

Ace is a dude, a control freak, and a calculator, quick to anger, self-righteous, irritable, obsessive, dogged, cynical, and mean in the sense of being unkind as well as that of being parsimonious. He lives at a lavish rate, with dozens of gaudy but impeccably tailored suits (indeed,
outfits
), a tackily posh home, a big car, lots of deluxe accoutrements. But he can be roused to trickery, anger, even violence at the thought of a nickel escaping his grasp. He’s chilly, he’s selfish, he’s brittle—and he’s the
good guy
among the three principals.

Pesci’s Nicky Santoro is a raw thug, by lifestyle closer to Tommy DeSimone than to Joey LaMotta, but kin to both in his temper, vulgarity, and brutality. Pesci lays a Chicago wiseguy accent onto his lines and has had something done to his eyes to, it seems, put space between them and give him almost a Eurasian cast. He’s more playful than Ace, but it’s also quickly clear that he’s also uglier and much more
dangerous—a psychopath who thinks nothing of putting another man’s head in a vise and making good on the threat to use it.

Stone’s Ginger is remarkably played, the fullest and best role in the film, essayed with real power, daring, and skill. (Deservedly, Stone received the film’s only Oscar nomination, as Best Supporting Actress.) Ginger is a whore, a cheater, a boozehound, a junkie, a wretched wife, and a worse mother, and Stone dives into all those aspects of her with unadorned commitment. She is always, God bless, physically attractive—a golden girl despite everything we know about her. But in her own special ways she is as repugnant as the male leads.

That’s the principal problem with the film. It’s remarkably well made on every level of film craft—photography, editing, music, and, most of all, décor, costumes, and makeup; it’s far more beautiful than
Goodfellas
or even
New York, New York.
But it’s a long slog spent with people who you wish would simply go away, a litany of romantic and legal strife and moral and psychological disintegration, the most horrific bad marriage in Scorsese’s long canon of such relationships, and some of the most nauseating violence that the director has ever put on film—which truly is saying something (“the more greed, the more blood”).

De Niro brings a becoming substance and severity to his role, playing Ace as a ruthless hawk watching over the casino like it’s his hunting ground, treating Nicky warily but firmly, pleading romantically and, in a few brief moments, openheartedly with Ginger, displaying deference to big-shot gamblers and out-of-town mob bosses, disdain to employees, defiance to Nevada politicians. There’s always the wardrobe, a crayon box of astounding suits, shirts, ties, sportswear, and lounging apparel that practically deserves an acting credit of its own.

When he first ascends in Vegas, Ace is admirable and under control and cuts an appealing figure: “the golden Jew,” as Nicky dubs him. As he loses himself—to Ginger, to Nicky, to gaming authorities—he becomes more desperate, whiny, demanding. There’s nothing at all attractive about him, despite the wealthy trappings of his life. The bombing, meant to take his life, doesn’t kill him; we finally learn that he’s not narrating from beyond the grave, as is another of the film’s characters. But he is a shell of what he was at his greatest glory. “Paradise,” he
repeats. “We managed to really fuck it up.” He stares out from behind huge owlish glasses and mutters, “And that’s that.” Indeed.

And the idea of opening on a holiday weekend opposite what would turn out to be one of the most beloved animated franchises of all time? Not a good one.
Casino
debuted in fifth place and earned $42.4 million eventually—not close to paying back its cost.

A
S
C
ASINO
DEMONSTRATED
, sometimes there are stories that seem to will their way into being told, as if the people who tell them are agents of some strange force. The story of Neil McCauley was one of them.

McCauley was a Chicago bank robber, thief, and murderer who spent more than half his life incarcerated (including a stint in Alcatraz) and was as dedicated to crime as the cops on his tail were to stopping him. One of those pursuers was Chuck Adamson, a Chicago detective who one day sat with McCauley over coffee in a luncheonette. Adamson tried to convince McCauley to go straight, to accept that he was on a course toward doom. “You realize,” Adamson said, “that one day you’re going to be taking down a score, and I’m going to be there.” McCauley was unfazed. “Well, look at the other side of the coin,” he responded. “I might have to eliminate you.” The following year, McCauley and his gang robbed a supermarket, and Adamson was waiting outside. A shootout ensued, and Adamson brought McCauley down with a bullet, killing him.

Adamson left Chicago in the 1970s, heading west to Hollywood to break into screenwriting. He met Michael Mann, a writer of episodic TV police dramas such as
Starsky and Hutch.
Mann was also a Chicago guy, and the two began working together. When Mann created
Miami Vice
, he hired Adamson as a writer and technical consultant, and when he produced another cop show,
Police Story
, set in Chicago in the early 1960s, he further mined Adamson’s experiences.

Adamson had shared the story of Neil McCauley with Mann, who was fascinated by it. In 1989, he wrote and directed a TV film based on the story,
L.A. Takedown
, with a cop named Vincent Hanna (Scott Plank) confronting a meticulous bad guy named Patrick McLaren (Alex McArthur) and then killing him in a blizzard of bullets. Then, in
late 1993, he began work on the McCauley story yet again, envisioning a gangland epic about cops and robbers and their working and private lives and the people around them, especially their women and kids. Audaciously he sent the script to two of the greatest screen icons of the time, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, imagining them as the characters Neil McCauley and Vincent Hanna. News that the pair were circling the film thrilled journalists, who recalled that while they’d both appeared in
The Godfather, Part II
they hadn’t shared a scene in it. There had been many awards shows, galas, and parties at which both were present, of course; they were friends. But they had never been cast together in the way Mann was proposing.

What the press didn’t know was that Mann had written the film in such a way that the two characters would have only two scenes together, the key one being in essence a re-creation of Chuck Adamson’s encounter with the real Neil McCauley some thirty years prior. De Niro was especially taken with the idea that he and Pacino would share only one significant chunk of screen time and that it would be a strangely pacific moment of a cop and a crook having coffee and talking. “We have one terrific scene together,” De Niro said, suggesting that anything more would almost be superfluous. With both stars happy, the deals were made, and the picture was a go.

Mann worked on the script extensively throughout 1994, changing the setting to Los Angeles and tailoring the material to his stars. For a time, he worked in the desert east of LA, where a crew of technical advisors taught the cast—which included Tom Sizemore, Val Kilmer, and Jon Voight as bad guys—how to use the high-powered assault weapons that they’d employ in the film’s gigantic bank robbery sequence. By December, he’d put together a 154-page script—enough for an epic of two and a half hours—and had locked his cast in place.

Heat
, as the film would be known, would shoot from February through July of 1995, and De Niro would be on hand for most of that time, barely a month after finishing work on
Casino.
During the break between the films, he joined Mann, Sizemore, and Kilmer on a visit to Folsom State Prison, where they spoke with inmates about their lives in crime and then behind bars; De Niro took home poetry and memoirs written by some of the convicts he’d met. Additional technical
expertise was offered by Eddie Bunker, the career criminal turned author and movie actor upon whom De Niro relied for insights into McCauley’s psyche; De Niro read and took notes on Bunker’s book
No Beast So Fierce
, and Bunker invited De Niro, Sizemore, and Voight (whose character was loosely modeled on Bunker) to his home for dinner, cooking them chicken Kiev and regaling them with stories of his wayward times. Furthermore, some members of the white supremacist prison gang the Aryan Brotherhood were hired by the production to go over the script and confirm details of wardrobe, dialogue, jailhouse tattoos, and convict behavior. (As Ami Canaan Mann, the film’s second unit director and the director’s daughter, recalled, her father implored the crew, “Go as far as you can go. Talk to the most extreme people you can talk to, get as much information as you can.”)

De Niro’s chief research into McCauley, however, was conducted between himself and Mann. In January, just as production began, the two sat in Mann’s office and spoke for hours about McCauley’s state of mind, his prison experiences, his methodical mind, his sense of caution, his disconnection from the world. Mann spoke in lengthy paragraphs, throwing out literary references and allusions to psychology, sociology, and history, and De Niro took it all in, muttering agreement or acknowledging his understanding in brief replies. The conversation was transcribed by Mann’s office and sent to De Niro, and he highlighted various passages of it to remind himself of Mann’s thinking. A few weeks later, Mann sent De Niro a four-page memo detailing everything that could be known about the character: his upbringing as a ward of the state, his initiation to a life of crime, his adult imprisonment and jailhouse education (per Mann, McCauley had read Marx and Camus), and his relationships with his fellow inmates, his criminal associates, the women in his life, and his pursuer, Hanna. “
Neil and Hanna are the smartest men in the movie,” Mann reminded De Niro.

In June, the crew were ready to shoot the great scene between De Niro and Pacino. Mann and his production designer, Neil Spisak, chose as the setting Kate Mantellini, a Wilshire Boulevard restaurant that served as a kind of clubhouse for the movie world—not a fussy place at all. “
The background is as monochromatic and as minimalist as I could get it,” Mann said later, “because, boy, I did not want
anything to take away from what was happening on Al’s face and Bob’s face.” In his script notes, Mann compared the pair to “
islands in the gathering storm of the picture”; he made a point of reminding Pacino that Hanna was “a hunter, rapid eye movement … aggressively going after data” and of telling De Niro to approach the encounter with the thought that “there’s something for me in knowing the man, but I’ll give him nothing.” Reflecting later on the qualities of his two stars, he said that De Niro “
sees the part as a construction, working incredibly hard, detail by detail, bit by bit, building character as if he were I. M. Pei.” Conversely, he said, “Al … is more like Picasso, staring at an empty canvas for many hours in intense concentration. And then there’s a series of brush strokes. And a piece of the character is alive.”

Heat
finished shooting in mid-July, and Mann, with the discipline of a veteran TV hand, had it ready for theatrical release before Christmas. In fact, it was out just three weeks after
Casino
was released, meaning that the nation’s multiplexes were hosting almost six hours of new—and pretty darn good—De Niro films at the same time.

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businesslike mien, appearance, and moral code are central to De Niro’s approach to the character, which is professional, spare, and even muscular without ever succumbing to a show of strength, purpose, or emotionalism. Indeed, it’s almost
too
clean a job of acting. It’s not that De Niro doesn’t indicate McCauley’s inner life sufficiently; it’s that he and Mann have determined that the character is so entirely focused on his work ethos that his life and personality are lost to it. He has buried all emotions save those that give him some kind of intuitive sense of the job he’s working. De Niro’s body, post–
Cape Fear
, is lean and sharp; his hair is slick; his goatee is impeccable; his home is spare; his gaze reveals nothing; he is a model of control. Even his furtive romance (with a sweet but thinly drawn girl played by Amy Brenneman) is more colored by his cold, appraising nature than by a need for affection, companionship, or lightness. The remoteness
suits
the character, mind, but it leaves the viewer cold.

If De Niro represents a cold heat, Pacino represents the hot kind. Divorced multiple times, and as defined by his work as by his relationships
with women, he roars and preens and sasses. De Niro speaks his character’s inner life in couched tones and undertones: “The last thing I am is married”; “I am never going back”; “I know life is short; whatever time you get is luck.” On the other hand, when Pacino tears insanely into a line like “ ’Cause she’s got a
great ass
 … and you got your head all the way up it!!!” there’s no need to weigh the words to get at their true meaning. In fact, the two characters aren’t drawn nearly as differently by the script as the actors make them out to be. Indeed, in a way the two can even be said to be playing each other, much as Nicolas Cage and John Travolta soon would in John Woo’s
Face/Off.
De Niro’s McCauley is kin to Michael Corleone; Pacino’s Hanna could be the cousin of Johnny Boy Civello.