De Niro: A Life

by Shawn Levy

  DURING ALL THIS, while he was figuring out Sicilian and fiddling with old hats and dental implants and a rasp in his voice, De Niro became famous. In August, as he was studying at Berlitz, Bang the Drum Slowly was released to reviews that were largely favorable for the film and almost entirely adulatory for De Niro and Michael Moriarty.

  De Niro’s Pearson builds on elements of Lloyd Barker—the accent, of course, and the feral passions and the dumb grin. But it’s a fuller portrayal, a whole character with a variety of habits and longings and fears and relationships and attitudes, and it’s genuinely moving, his most thoroughgoing performance yet on film.

  Pearson isn’t a great player—he still lacks in some rudiments of catching such as snapping the ball back to the pitcher, and his batting average usually hovers in the .250 range.*3 He’s no good at ragging his teammates, or at the card games in which players and coaches engage outsiders to rob them of beer money. But he participates, when permitted, with the glee of a kid brother following the older boys’ lead, even if he’s not entirely sure what it’s all about.

  In fact, he’s a rube. His greasy pompadour, piled high like meringue, makes him look like Woody Woodpecker or an Elvis imitator. He wears a smiley-face shirt under a white suit to go the ballpark on game day, and white socks with dark shoes when dressed more formally, and the belt on his pants is far too long for him, leaving a long line of slack flopping about. He pees in the hotel room sink; he chews tobacco and spits juice everywhere; he drinks his beer with salt; he mistakes the attentions of a predatory call girl for true love.

  But De Niro invests all of these traits with a grounded realism, making them seem human and true, if not always dignified, and not in the least lampoonish. And because we know, virtually from the start, that Pearson is dying, and because his only friend takes his situation so seriously, there is no license to laugh at him. We watch him carefully for signs of illness, of weakening, and he allows us none. Even when he’s been discovered, he tries to put on a brave face, and a real nobility emerges.*4

  There’s actual gravity in the performance. De Niro has some difficult lines to play: “I got to develop brains,” “Sometimes I don’t know what’s goin’ on sometimes,” “I know I got faults, I always did.” Dialogue like this is, in the contemporary critical phrase, too on-the-nose, but the lines are plausible as played because De Niro makes it seem as if Pearson is revealing things about himself that he’s discovered through a deep inner quest. They’re confessions, sometimes grudging, and they’re presented with sufficient naturalism that it doesn’t matter that they’re not profound.

  Partway through the film, Pearson has a health scare, waking up with night sweats and calling out to Wiggen, “Something’s happening.” As they wait for a doctor, fearing the worst, Pearson lets down all pretenses of macho and beseeches his roommate, “I’m scared. Hold onta me.” Wiggen responds to this wrenching and tender request with a brotherly embrace. It’s a devastating moment, partly because the two actors play it so well, and perhaps even more so because the director doesn’t try to milk even a drop of sentimentality out of it, respecting the intimacy, vulnerability, and sincerity of Pearson’s fear and Wiggen’s honorable friendship.

  But for all this gravity, there is humor and playfulness in De Niro’s performance. He’s quite handy with that chewing tobacco, with a plum-sized bulge of the stuff always stretching a cheek and virtuosic spitting skills. He greets a coach (who doesn’t care much for him) with a laddish “Oh, Joe, how’s the shoooooooow …?” When he’s asked to join a few of his teammates who perform as a vocal group on TV (the Singing Mammoths, of course), he’s stone-faced and almost pitifully unable to keep up with the extremely pedestrian choreography, only to break out into a dance solo that’s charmingly goofy and several degrees defter than might be expected. And when his teammates, who have learned his secret but don’t let him know it, throw a beer blast in his room, he beamingly approves of them all, assuring Wiggen, “They a great buncha boys!”

  In two of the most important sequences in the film, De Niro acts wordlessly or nearly so, and wins us over entirely. In the first, Piney Woods, the yokel phenom catcher who is clearly the intended replacement for Pearson, picks up his guitar in the locker room and launches into “The Streets of Laredo,” the song from which Mark Harris’s novel takes its title. Everyone in the room knows it’s a song about a dying cowboy, and they try to dissuade him from singing it, but, unaware of Pearson’s condition, he carries on. The camera comes in slowly on De Niro, who tries to appear unconcerned and even appreciative, picking at the laces of his mitt and looking everywhere except at the singer. It’s an exceedingly brave moment in the face of death, and, as with the rest, De Niro plays it with impeccable reserve.

  Not long after, illness starts to take a real toll on Pearson, affecting his ability to catch and throw the ball. He’s in the lineup for a crucial late-season game, and declares, “I just feel a little dipsy.” But his walk becomes increasingly unsteady, and he has to brace himself a bit more each time to get in and out of his squat behind the plate. His teammates are protective of him, though. Then, in the ninth inning, they cover for him when a pop fly that ought to be called for by the catcher gives them the chance for the final out. As the first baseman runs in to make the catch and the celebration of the playoff spot launches, Pearson spins slowly by himself, still looking for the ball, lost, uncertain, beyond help. It’s heartbreaking. Not even the sight of him in the hospital soon after, with his head hanging limp and his fingers not entirely able to button his shirt, is quite so affecting. In a physical gesture—a dance, in effect—De Niro brings to vivid life the pitiable spectacle of the athlete dying young.

  BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY was well received, with strong notices from such widely read critics as Judith Crist (“a beautiful film”), Hollis Alpert (“an absolute gem”), and Rex Reed (“the best film around this summer”), and from the New York Times (“close adaptation of a good book has resulted in possibly an even better movie”), Playboy (“projected with rough humor and sizzling conviction”), and New York (“a super movie”). Hancock’s tact and taste were very widely praised, as were the performances of Michael Moriarty and Vincent Gardenia.

  But the biggest praise, in most reviews, was for De Niro. “De Niro’s doomed bumpkin is wonderfully exasperating, one of the most unsympathetic characters ever to win an audience’s sympathy,” said Richard Schickel in Time. “Bruce is plumb simple, but Robert De Niro’s strong comic portrayal keeps him from being a straight man,” wrote John Lahr in Vogue. And in Esquire, the often persnickety John Simon was rapturous:

  The film profits immeasurably from the performance of Robert De Niro, a Northerner who completely transformed himself into the Georgia cracker with the fatal crack running through him. De Niro accomplished this partly through patient research, and partly through sheer inspired acting. The way Pearson wraps his knowledge that he must die in forgetfulness, so that life can go on while it can; how amid all those spurious kindnesses, he is saved not only by his insight but by his obtuseness; these things are beautifully conveyed by a certain slowness, tentativeness, or excessive alacrity—a rhythm that is always a bit off. And there is a half-comprehending gaze that remains a little clouded, but amiably so, like an overcast day about which one notices less the lack of sunshine than the merciful absence of rain.

  There were a few naysayers—Stanley Kauffmann, who hadn’t yet enjoyed a De Niro performance, suggested in the New Republic that “De Niro does all right in outline and design, but he doesn’t fill it out with sufficient flavor and body.” But in the main, this calling-card role was received with genuine enthusiasm, respect, and eagerness for more.

  THEN, ON OCTOBER 2, Mean Streets premiered at the New York Film Festival, and the response of those present was ecstatic. De Niro had been universally admired in the likeable Bang the Drum, but in the explosive Mean Streets, with the flashiest role he’d had since Glamour, Glory and Gold, he was a thunderbolt. Keitel was appropriately ac
knowledged, and Scorsese was catapulted into the front tier of young directors. But De Niro received virtually unanimous acclaim; even those who didn’t care for the picture praised him (in Esquire, John Simon called Mean Streets “this year’s most overrated film” but acknowledged De Niro’s “bravura performance”).

  From the first we see of Johnny Boy Civello, he’s an unknowable conundrum. Walking along in his $25 Dobbs hat and neat red sweater, he tosses, for reasons only he kens, a firework into a U.S. postal box, destroying all the mail inside—an act of wanton anarchy played just for kicks, to which he responds with a gleeful giggle. (That the scene is clearly shot not in lower Manhattan but rather on a sunny, hilly Los Angeles street only adds to the air of incomprehension.) Is he a protester? A vandal? A psychotic? There is no point of reference, no backstory, no explanation of any sort.

  He next appears making an entrance into the neighborhood bar owned by Tony Volpe (David Proval). Charlie has learned that Johnny Boy is ducking another friend, Michael, from whom he’s borrowed money. Charlie, who’s already in a state of soul-searching, asks God for a sign. In slow motion, in comes Johnny with two girls, chewing gum, grooving, joking, gazing around knowingly but with a feral quality, the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” capturing the spice of his audacity, volatility, ferocity. Johnny jokingly checks his pants along with his hat and coat, then, fully clothed once again, introduces the girls to Charlie and Tony (“He owns the jernt,” De Niro explains in Brooklynese) and orders them drinks: “Have a 7 and 7: it’s good for bothayuz.” Charlie invites Johnny into a backroom to discuss a private matter; Johnny doesn’t like it, but he and Charlie defuse the tension by turning the moment into an Alphonse/Gaston routine: “After you.” “No, after you.”

  What follows is a throwaway conversation that makes little linear sense but introduces the two characters, their milieu, and their relationship through a series of misunderstandings, evasions, concessions, promises, and untruths, largely improvised (in rehearsal, then honed for the actual filming), much of it irrelevant to the story, a jokey tennis rally that plays a bit like an Abbott and Costello routine and a bit like an FBI wiretap transcript of a pair of mobsters trying to avoid being too precise in discussing their crimes.

  Charlie wants to know what Johnny has been doing with the money he’s earned on the crummy job that Charlie’s uncle has secured for him, and Johnny—slick, slippery, jivey, a defiant liar—comes clean but only in ways that, if anything, further muddy matters. “I’m so depressed about other things that I can’t worry about payments,” he explains, and it’s easy to see why: earning $110 a week, he owes $700 to Jimmy Sparks, $1,300 to Frankie Bones, an unspecified but larger sum to Michael, another unspecified debt to Joe Black, and two tabs at Tony’s bar. De Niro plays it with a conspiratorial intimacy; Johnny knows that Charlie is buying the story sympathetically, and he milks it, biting his knuckle with frustration and focusing on irrelevant details. The sense imparted is that Johnny Boy is desperate, self-destructive, conniving—a real loose cannon—but that his bond with Charlie is sincere (it’s based in part on a youthful incident in which Johnny Boy took a beating that Charlie managed to escape). What’s more, De Niro is quite funny, tossing off Italian American slang and hand gestures with saucy verve, grinning broadly in that soon-to-be-world-famous fashion that makes his whole face pinch up like an asterisk. The viewer, like Charlie, is on his side.

  But just as that exploding mailbox ought to have signaled, Johnny Boy is not to be trusted. He’s dangerous. We see him next in a car headed to help collect a debt for a friend from a pool hall operator who refuses to pay. Right away, Johnny Boy is less a diplomat than an instigator. When the disagreement turns into a fight, Johnny Boy is the first of his group to dive in and the first to grab a pool cue as a weapon. Ultimately, he’s beset by four of the other mob, and even the intervention of the police doesn’t put a lid on his attitude. The matter seems settled, but then Johnny Boy threatens to set it off once again: “Don’t fuckin’ touch me, scumbag!” he snarls at the reluctant debt payer, as if he had some sort of moral high ground in the matter of welshing on a bet.

  The pool hall fight is only the first episode in a massive, event-filled day that includes the unveiling of a caged tiger in the backroom of Tony’s bar, a random revenge shooting, a mock gladiatorial battle with garbage can lids, and finally Johnny and Charlie crashing in Charlie’s bed. Throughout, at play De Niro gives Johnny Boy an almost rubbery physicality—a huge gaping laugh as he ices a swollen eye, a belly-out gesture of macho authority, a compulsive lurch toward the suggestion of a card game. He’s an unbridled id, subject to wild impulses, civilized only in appearance, and only barely.

  When Johnny Boy falls out of the story, the film feels less energized, less likely to explode. When he comes back, he’s once again in anarchic mode, up on a rooftop firing a pistol in the sky, at war with his very surroundings. His antics are designed, he says, to “wake up the neighborhood,” and when an errant shot hits an apartment, he declares, “I hate that woman with a passion, a vengeance,” as if personal animosity could excuse his recklessness. Soon he’ll make a fuck-you gesture to the Empire State Building, a sawed-off King Kong in a final act of defiance before his fall.

  And fall Johnny does. When all his lifelines are denied him, Johnny turns on his last friend. “I ain’t smart,” he says, taunting Charlie. “I’m stupid, remember? I’m a strunz. I’m so stupid you gotta look out for me. Right? Right?” He mocks Charlie’s even-temperedness in singsong, until Charlie has had enough and slaps him.

  There’s a final act of self-immolation in Tony’s bar, where Johnny Boy offers Michael a mere $10 toward his debt. Michael refuses the money, and Johnny Boy explicitly mocks him: “I fuck you right where you breathe, ’cause I don’t give two shits for you, or nobody else.… Fuck face. Dunce-ski. Asshole.” (This is the stuff that enraged Romanus.) He pulls out his pistol and is disarmed; when it’s revealed that the gun has no bullets in it, Johnny, his pallor ghostly, flashes a bitter grin at Charlie and tells him, “You got what you wanted.” Johnny Boy has become a sin-eater, devouring the misdeeds that Charlie has thus far assumed as part of his fraternal obligation to his friend, in a cack-handed effort to be a man of respect.

  It’s a remarkable performance: charismatic, unpredictable, streetwise, mercurial, appealing, appalling. De Niro is not, despite his name, a genuine Little Italy hoodlum, but he has alchemized his observations of them—their clothes, their slang, their mien—into a character that’s indistinguishable from the genuine article. It’s Charlie’s movie in terms of weight, focus, and theme, and Keitel is very strong, but De Niro’s Johnny Boy is easily the most memorable thing on the screen.

  And the idea that you could leave a theater showing Mean Streets and walk into another showing Bang the Drum Slowly right afterward is simply staggering. As an actor’s breakout, it’s like a boxer throwing a combination of punches too fast for the eye to see: the result is a knockout that there’s simply no way of explaining. De Niro completely and credibly transformed himself into two utterly distinct people with virtually nothing in common and had done so simultaneously and without preliminary fanfare. It was simply dazzling.

  IT WAS ALMOST as if film critics were in competition to discover and praise Mean Streets. Pauline Kael, in a famous review in the New Yorker, anticipated the puzzlement of the wide movie audience by declaring, “This picture is so original that some people will be dumbfounded.… By the end, you’re likely to be open-mouthed.” In the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “Some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is ‘Mean Streets.’ ” And Jon Landau of Rolling Stone declared it “the most original American movie of the year.” (This was the sort of thing that likely compelled John Simon’s backlash.)

  The acting was widely praised. “There have rarely been performances of the caliber of De Niro’s and Keitel’s,” said Stuart Byron in the
Real Paper of Boston. “They don’t seem to act their roles but live and breathe them.” In the New York Times, Frank Rich said that De Niro was “rapidly becoming the movies’ foremost embodiment of sublingual schleppiness.” Paul Zimmerman of Newsweek opined, “Beautifully realized in all his self-destructive flamboyance by Robert De Niro, Johnny Boy is a parody of the cool mafioso.” And Variety predicted that the performance “should finally move [De Niro] out of the ‘promising’ category into which he has been regrettably stuck for five years.”

  There was a dismissive second notice in the New York Times by freelance writer Foster Hirsch, who relentlessly chided both Scorsese and De Niro for a lack of originality: “Like the movie in which it’s the glittering centerpiece, the performance is too studied, too influenced by too many movies.” And Stanley Kauffmann in the New Republic found a decidedly left-handed way of complimenting the rising star: