by Shawn Levy
THERE WAS MORE THAN A CHANGE IN PRICE WHEN HE TOOK on his next role: there was a change in genre, in tone, in commitment to the part. He was cast in a high-concept Hollywood buddy movie—a marketing-driven, studio-funded film of the cookie-cutter sort that he had never really made before. Not that the project didn’t have quality. Midnight Run, as it was finally named on release, was based on a script by George Gallo, a rising screenwriting star whose sole credit thus far was Brian De Palma’s goofball mob comedy Wise Guys. The story of a bounty hunter who nabs a fugitive mob accountant and tries to bring him cross-country to collect a reward, only to realize that he’s saving the bad guys and endangering the good guy, it drew the attention of writer-director Martin Brest, who was red-hot after his 1984 smash hit Beverly Hills Cop.
With that pedigree, and with the marketplace bubbling with films of this tenor, Universal Pictures was willing to spend big, provided it got the right stars. A few years earlier, nobody would have thought of De Niro in such a picture—not only because he didn’t do comedy-comedies, but also because he wasn’t a significant box office draw. But on the back of The Untouchables, and with a taste for work that wasn’t necessarily grueling or stone-serious, he was shopping around for lighter parts. He very nearly went to work for director Penny Marshall in the lead role in Big, a comedy about a boy who gets magically transported into the body of an adult while still retaining his childlike mentality. Marshall’s first choice, Tom Hanks, had backed out of the picture; encouraged to think about casting a heavier-weight performer, she had several meetings with De Niro, who liked the idea of the part so much that he took skateboarding lessons in Marshall’s Beverly Hills driveway in preparation. But the studio felt he was wrong for the film and repeatedly balked at his contractual demands—offered $3 million, he wanted $6 million. Eventually he walked away, and Hanks, impressed that the likes of De Niro would even consider the part, changed his mind and took it for himself—to career-changing results.
So, instead, De Niro did Midnight Run—for which he did, in fact, get a $6 million payday. With one major star involved, Universal wanted Brest to find another, and Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, and even Cher were bandied about as real possibilities. Brest, though, liked Charles Grodin, dry, sardonic, chatty, subversive, and all but forgotten as a comedy star since not quite breaking through as a lead actor more than a decade before in The Heartbreak Kid. As Brest saw it, there was inherent comedy in De Niro playing a gruff tough guy who thinks he’s doing good and isn’t and Grodin playing a passive-aggressive fugitive from justice who’s actually on the side of good. They were an odd couple in the Neil Simon vein, with De Niro as Oscar Madison with a gun and Grodin as Felix Unger with a price on his head. And by casting Grodin and not a huge name, the studio kept the film—which involved a lot of location shooting—to a budget just under $30 million.
Grodin, as he admitted later, was daunted by the challenge of going mano a mano with such a powerful and committed actor. “If we were going to do a movie in which we both play Aztecs,” he said, “Bobby would go and live with the Aztecs. After three weeks he’d come back and I’d say, ‘So what were the Aztecs like?’ That’s the difference between us.… He gains 50 pounds, he loses 50 pounds. If you have a scene on a bus, he’s gonna drive the bus for five hours. You’re worried it’s going to be a depressing experience.”
But this time De Niro didn’t go all-in to play bounty hunter Jack Walsh. He read up on cops and bounty hunters and on searches for fugitives, he rode around with some New York City detectives, and he invented some emotional backstory for his character having to do with a sentimental and even neurotic attachment to a wristwatch. But chiefly he dedicated himself to getting the comedy straight, to preparing for the rigorous physical demands of the script, and to not pouring too much of himself into the character. The cameo roles he’d played in recent years, even the in-depth cameo as Al Capone, had worn away some of his mania for intense preparation. His personal notes on the various generations of the Midnight Run script were the scantiest he’d yet made for any film in which he had a lead role.
As he explained later, the special brand of comedy in the film was the chief attraction for him: “It’s not a yuk-yuk comedy per se, with pratfalls in it. It’s not that kind of buddy-buddy film. It’s based in reality, which is the kind of comedy—if you can call it comedy—that I like.” (He was quick to add, however, that the boy who loved Three Stooges movies was still inside him, however unlikely to emerge: “I even sorta like the pratfall kind of comedy if you can do it well and if the timing is right. It’s an art in itself. I wouldn’t mind being able to do it if I could take two years, maybe three years to work on it. Maybe longer.”)
The film shot through late 1987 in various locations in California, Chicago, Arizona, Nevada, and even New Zealand, where the stars and key crew members flew to shoot a river scene in warmer water than was available to them in the Northern Hemisphere at that time of year. In December, De Niro flew from the Arizona location to Washington, D.C., where Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting for a summit and had requested the presence of the star, whom he’d met at the Moscow Film Festival earlier in the year. But even that didn’t constitute an interruption: the studio chartered a jet to take him back and forth overnight.
Indeed, for all the tricky sequences of action that the film posed, the comedy was the hardest thing for De Niro to tackle—and not because he wasn’t able to ratchet himself up into a funny character. In fact, it was quite the reverse: “Sometimes, when I do something that I think is really funny, I break up and start laughing, because it feels so good,” he explained. “Then I get so mad at myself for breaking up, because the rhythm felt so right—I was right there—and if I’d held out just a little longer and not broken up, I wouldn’t have ruined the take.”
In Midnight Run, he felt, he finally learned to conquer that tendency. In a famed sequence in the film, Grodin’s character is trying to get a rise out of De Niro’s, and the words in the script weren’t making it happen. Brest encouraged Grodin to improvise a line that got De Niro going, and he came up with a pip: “Have you ever had sex with an animal?” Flustered or not, De Niro managed to stay in the moment, racing through anger to a confession that revealed the human depths of his character.
Midnight Run was meant to be a big summer movie for Universal, but when it opened in July 1998, the studio got a nasty surprise: despite largely favorable reviews, and despite a publicity campaign that included De Niro appearing at a press conference at the Plaza Hotel in New York and sitting for a full-scale interview in Rolling Stone, the film sold only $5 million worth of tickets in its opening weekend, a pitiful result in a summer dominated by Die Hard, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Coming to America, and even Cocktail. Its final gross of a mere $39.4 million put it at twenty-ninth in the year’s tally, right behind a rerelease of Bambi, and almost $140 million less than Rain Man, the year’s winner as Best Picture at the Oscars and a film that in more than a few ways resembled Midnight Run.
De Niro always relished playing blue-collar roles; he would even see the criminals and gangsters in his filmography as ordinary working stiffs. So the role of Jack Walsh, honest ex-cop turned crafty bounty hunter, is a natural fit for him. He wears workingman’s clothes—the same outfit through the entire film, in fact—and has a craftsman’s way with burglar tools, surveillance equipment, false credentials, and so on. The man has become his job, just as Wizard explained to Travis Bickle more than a decade prior. Walsh has forged a hard shell around himself, a device of self-preservation forced on him by the loss of his position on the police force, the dissolution of his marriage, the near decade he has gone without seeing his daughter, and his constant exposure to the worst sides of humanity. “There’s bad everywhere,” he says. “Good I don’t know about.” He has stories that he tells himself to ease the pain: he’ll get back together with his wife, he’ll leave off bounty hunting and open a coffee shop. But the truth is he exists almost solely in and for his work.
; This is a lot to bring to bear on a buddies-on-the-run comedy, one of the most cliché-ridden and routine of Hollywood genres. But De Niro respects the character enough to infuse him with credible humanity and realism. Walsh is smart, resourceful, brave, professional, and true. He lacks civilized polish, yes, but he is an honest man, and De Niro takes that quality almost as a challenge to give the character some depth. More than once, past and present, Walsh has turned down the chance to make himself financially secure in favor of keeping his integrity intact. And nothing said or done by the Duke (as Grodin’s character is dubbed), the FBI, the mob, or a rival bounty hunter puts him off the completion, as it were, of his appointed rounds. He will get his man, and he will get him back to where he has to be by the time at which he has to be there.
But, of course, Midnight Run is a comedy, and although there were comic moments in many of De Niro’s roles before now, ranging from the shocking insults of Raging Bull to the faux superhero antics of Brazil, the film marks the first time that he is deliberately playing a funny human being in a script written, at least in large part, to make people laugh. He threatens the Duke with a case of “fistophobia” if he doesn’t comply with directions; he does a little jig with his fists, almost salivating, at the thought of “a little surf-and-turf action” as his in-flight meal; he tears into a duplicitous business acquaintance as a “slimeball in a sea of pus”; and he tries to end a contentious conversation with a malapropism: “Here are two words for you: ‘Shut the fuck up.’ ” Grodin is nominally the comic actor of the pair, and he has plenty of good, droll moments. But De Niro is no mere straight man; he gets as many laughs as his co-star.
And yet there are grace notes that elevate the performance and the film. De Niro interacts beautifully with the young girl (Danielle DuClos) who plays his estranged daughter: a kind of embarrassed wonder at how much she has grown in the nine years since he’s seen her, an almost sheepish refusal to accept her help when the girl, very dearly, offers him her babysitting savings to abet his getaway. He has another nice moment when reunited with another specter from his past: the Chicago mob boss (played by Dennis Farina) who cost him his position long ago. Enduring the man’s insults, knowing he’s a sitting duck for some sort of deadly double-cross, he stands erect and proud, unafraid of and even eager for a confrontation. Finally, in the film’s dénouement, he makes the decision to sacrifice a big payday to do the truly proper thing. He checks his dodgy watch and sees that he would have succeeded in his mission with time to spare, a self-satisfaction that he can share with nobody. And when the script’s final surprise is sprung on him, he greets it with a wonderful line reading: “I knew you had money, but I didn’t know you had money”—a sadly ironic statement considering how poorly the film, which decades later would acquire a reputation for quality and entertainment, did at the box office.
De Niro’s bold turn toward formula comedy was, somewhat unpredictably, welcomed by critics. “Like most fine actors,” wrote Vincent Canby in the New York Times, “Mr. De Niro has never given a good performance that wasn’t in some way illuminated by humor.… He brings to Jack Walsh’s double-takes, slow burns, furtive smiles, and expressions of mock surprise the same degree of intensity with which he played Jake LaMotta in ‘Raging Bull’ and Travis Bickle in ‘Taxi Driver.’ Yet he’s no Metropolitan Opera star trying to squeeze his tenor voice into the latest Michael Jackson hit. The laughter he prompts is big, open, and genuine.” In the Washington Post, Desson Thomson wrote, “De Niro is one extended pleasure in ‘Midnight Run’—a real actor putting his considerable talent to work in a well-scripted comedy.” And in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert opined, “Whoever cast De Niro and Grodin must have had a sixth sense for the chemistry they would have; they work together so smoothly, and with such an evident sense of fun, that even their silences are intriguing.”
IF HE HAD COASTED through Midnight Run as a way of stretching to a role that didn’t call for him to stretch—and to acquire his largest-yet payday in the process—his next film brought him right back to the sort of small, searching independent productions on which he had cut his teeth at the dawn of his career. Jackknife, adapted by screenwriter Stephen Metcalfe from his own play, Strange Snow, deals with the troubled friendship of Megs and Dave, a wild card and a troubled alcoholic, respectively, who first met as young men fighting in Vietnam. The film, shot on location in Connecticut on a minuscule budget (De Niro appeared for $1.2 million—20 percent of his Midnight Run price), was being directed by David Hugh Jones, who’d spent years in English theater and had made a ripple in movies with Betrayal and 84 Charing Cross Road, a pair of high-minded (and well-received) adaptations from the stage. He seemed an odd choice for a piece of small-town Americana having to do with the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but the presence of De Niro, Ed Harris, and Kathy Baker in the central roles indicated the sober tone of the project.
De Niro certainly took a serious tack. He spoke at length with veterans who were dealing with post-traumatic stress, read up on PTSD and the impact of Agent Orange, and, more mundanely, shopped for his own wardrobe in the sort of Main Street clothing store he felt his character would patronize. Having spent the first years of his film career playing a series of men who were in some way affected by the war, he felt the gravity of returning to see how they were faring a decade later: “When I was doing ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ” he reflected, “I spent a lot of time with veterans, too. But that was like 11 years ago. They didn’t talk about certain things then, the feelings. Now other things are coming to the surface. So in a sense, this movie is like a continuation of the other, like what might happen to the guy after he was home for a while.… They suffer in silence. But one thing I can tell you is that they don’t like being portrayed as crazy all the time. And I have sympathy with that.” In his publicity appearances for the film, which were relatively extensive, including a premiere to benefit children born with birth defects caused by their fathers’ exposure to Agent Orange, he kept returning to the idea that a great deal of the emotional pain caused by Vietnam was only now becoming clear: “There’s a feeling veterans have, and Americans have, that something happened, that they were involved in a failure or whatever. A lot of veterans were hurt, mentally or physically.”
His character, Megs, was drawn as a live wire, and in his extensive script notes for the film—far exceeding the work he did for Midnight Run—he reminded himself to keep his energy up, to always act peppy, upbeat, even half-cocked (“think of Leonard Melfi,” he wrote, referring to a famed underground playwright and boozer of 1960s New York, “always laughing, drunk, maybe fighting in bars”). As he described him in an interview, the character was “a dog. A stray dog. A kind of mangy dog mutt.” The film was released to very little commercial impact and tepid, although never less than respectful, reviews.
And almost immediately after shooting a movie in Connecticut about Vietnam veterans, he found himself embroiled in a dispute with Vietnam veterans in Connecticut about another film that he was shooting, this one with Jane Fonda, the longtime bane of supporters of the war and, especially, of the men who fought it.
He and Fonda were making a film based on the novel Union Street by the British author Pat Barker. The script went by that title, then briefly by Letters, and finally, during production, was named after the lead characters, Stanley and Iris. Adapted by celebrated screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, a married couple who’d broken into the movies in the 1940s and had worked together for almost all of that time, creating such films as The Long Hot Summer, Hud, and Conrack, it deals with the romance of a baker and would-be inventor who falls in love with a woman who comes to work at his cake shop a few years after the death of her husband. The baker is a mystery to the woman—affable but remote. Only after they start to become close does she learn the embarrassing secret that he has been hiding for years: he cannot read or write. What looked like a low-key love story about a pair of blue-collar lonelyhearts was, at another level, a film about the not-as-uncommon
-as-one-might-think condition of adult illiteracy.
Directing would be Martin Ritt, a longtime member of the Actors Studio and a survivor of the Hollywood blacklist who had made such pictures as Hud, The Long Hot Summer, Hombre, Norma Rae, and Sounder. Ritt was known for getting big stars to give credible performances as ordinary people and for championing themes of social justice and responsibility in his films. He wasn’t a big moneymaker, but he was respected.
None of that mattered, though, to veterans groups around Waterbury, Connecticut (which was standing in for western Massachusetts in the production), when word reached them that Fonda would be living and working in their midst for a few months. When a casting call for locals was held in April, a rally was organized to disrupt it, with more than one thousand protesters organized in opposition to Fonda by representatives of the American Legion (in this case, mostly World War II and Korean War veterans). Fonda met several times with veterans groups in the coming months, and she and De Niro participated in a fund-raising event in Middlebury, Connecticut, for Vets Who Care, an organization dedicated to helping the handicapped children of Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange. The combination of apologies, conversations, and charitable efforts went a long way toward mollifying the hostility, but the production would be haunted by small clutches of protesters throughout the late summer and fall, when shooting took place.
De Niro was protected from the controversy because he’d had a long-standing association with Vietnam veterans. During the making of Jackknife, he involved himself in charitable efforts aimed at supporting their causes, and he was among the celebrities who read aloud the letters written home by servicepeople in the documentary Dear America, which was produced by the HBO cable network and was received well enough to get a theatrical release, a rarity. His continued association with veterans groups resulted in his receiving an honor from VETCO, a theatrical forum for actors who had served in Vietnam, and such was his respect for the group’s cause that he showed up in person to accept, something he was generally loath to do.