by Shawn Levy
There are tiny bits of the film that seem as if they would particularly resonate with De Niro. It depicts a tender but strained father/son relationship: Matt Damon’s Edward Wilson has been abandoned by his own father and then raises a boy of his own, also named Edward, who’s emotionally troubled (he wets himself on Santa’s lap at a Christmas party, leading to a very sweet moment in which the father quietly and caringly cleans his son) and grows up to be skittish, earnest, and eager to follow his father’s path into espionage. There’s an interracial romance and a fascination with secrecy, betrayal, repressed emotion, and, naturally, the details of work. All of this seems suited to De Niro. But it’s hard to see the film as a vehicle of self-expression in the way De Niro’s previous directorial effort was.
Perhaps he nods toward that in his own string of brief appearances in the picture, playing Bill Sullivan, an obvious stand-in for William J. Donovan, the father of modern American espionage. He plays the role seated, because Sullivan suffers from gout, and when he’s last seen, his legs have been amputated—perhaps a joking sign from De Niro that the making of the film took a particularly brutal toll on him. If that feels far-fetched, consider that Sullivan is the only person in The Good Shepherd who doesn’t seem stricken with a crippling case of self-seriousness. It’s a well-wrought movie, but overlong and too quiet and slow; ultimately, it lacks the spark of personal commitment and even obsession that made A Bronx Tale, let alone so many of De Niro’s acting appearances, memorable.
The reviews of The Good Shepherd were by and large respectful, even when critics felt the film was dull or muddled. “For the film’s first 50 minutes,” wrote Newsweek’s David Ansen in a typical response, “I thought De Niro might pull off the ‘Godfather’ of spy movies … but the unvarying solemn tone begins to wear.… Still, even if the movie’s vast reach exceeds its grasp, it’s a spellbinding history lesson.” In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan praised the film’s “smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script” and “De Niro’s careful and methodical direction.” David Denby of the New Yorker was nigh rapturous: “One of the most impressive movies ever made about espionage … long stretches of this [movie] are masterly; swift, terse, but never rushed.” But Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt that the film “has no pulse,” Ella Taylor of the LA Weekly declared it “three slow, sincere and fitfully bamboozling hours,” and Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun said of De Niro and his screenwriter, Eric Roth, “Despite their conviction and intelligence and their game, amazing cast, all they do is eke out a series of straight-faced dramatic reversals and personal betrayals that leave the dramatis personae, and the audience, numb.”
The mostly favorable reviews helped buoy the dense and broody film to almost $60 million in ticket sales (with another $40 million coming overseas), which would have been a nice result had the picture not cost nearly that much to make. It would go down critically and commercially as a noble but ultimately insufficient effort—not enough, perhaps, to encourage De Niro to seek a third directorial project, at least not right away.
DURING THE YEARS that lower Manhattan struggled to recover from the attacks of September 11, 2001, De Niro never lost sight of the work that needed to be done. He had shored up his own financial, cultural, and personal interests, of course, but he had worked doggedly for the good of the greater community, investing his time and money and lending his name and face to any number of efforts large and small to revitalize Tribeca and the surrounding areas. In 2004, he accepted an invitation to join the board of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, a group dedicated to raising half a billion dollars to build a suitable memorial at the site of the new World Trade Center, including, it was said, a performing arts center and museum. The board was packed with heavy hitters from a wide spectrum of fields, including David Rockefeller, Barbara Walters, Michael Eisner, Robert Wood Johnson, and executives of American Express, AIG, the Blackstone Group, Bear Stearns, and other financial entities. De Niro was included for his visibility and as a magnet for fund-raising, as well as in the hope that the Tribeca Film Institute, the not-for-profit wing of his film business, would become active in the proposed arts center. There were a few high-profile meetings—controversially held outside public scrutiny—before Governor George Pataki derailed the process in late 2005 by declaring that the inclusion of a cultural component for the World Trade Center site opened the door to too much controversy. Suggesting that the emphasis should be on the memorial itself, he shut the door on further work, and the board De Niro served on, however briefly, dissolved.
De Niro continued to make himself a face of good works, taking part in telethons intended to raise money for the victims of the 2004 South Asian tsunami and 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. But he remained on the lookout for ways to invest—in all senses—in the culture of New York City. A new such opportunity presented itself in May 2006, when the cheeky weekly newspaper the New York Observer was going through one of its periodical financial crises, and its owner, Arthur L. Carter, was looking for a buyer. De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and her husband, venture capitalist Craig Hatkoff, considered putting on white hats and saving the paper. In fact, Tribeca Enterprises, the for-profit division of De Niro’s empire, was one of as many as a couple of dozen entities approached by Carter to consider taking an 80 percent stake in the paper. A few weeks of due diligence ensued, generating a bit of buzz in the New York media terrarium. But in July, the Tribeca group backed away when a more substantial buyer, New York real estate heir Jared Kushner, stepped in and bought the Observer, leaving it free to join other New York papers in its seemingly endless exercise in cracking wise about De Niro, his films, his real estate holdings, and his private life, as had long been its practice.
HE CERTAINLY HELPED feed them fresh material, however unwillingly. On a June day in 2005, De Niro entered the Manhattan Criminal Court Building through a rear door usually used to deliver packages or to transport inmates and rode a judge’s elevator to where a grand jury was convened. Wearing a ball cap, a blue blazer, jeans, and boat shoes with no socks, he spent a total of five minutes in front of a Manhattan district attorney, examining a pair of diamond earrings and confirming that they were a gift he’d given to his wife. Then he made his way out the back door of the courthouse.
A few hours later, the grand jury delivered an indictment of one Lucyna Turyk-Wawrynowicz, a thirty-five-year-old Polish immigrant who lived in Queens and had been employed by the De Niros for only a few weeks. In that time, the diamond earrings, valued at $95,000, a $1,000 pair of shoes, and a $500 belt all went missing, and Grace Hightower was certain that Turyk-Wawrynowicz, who was earning $1,000 a week to clean the house, was behind it. Hightower had retained the maid’s impressive list of previous employers, which included the actresses Candice Bergen and Isabella Rossellini and the cultural trend guru Faith Popcorn, as well as a Rockefeller and a Rothschild, and she called them, asking if they had had any valuables go missing when Turyk-Wawrynowicz was in their employ. Several of them had, and Hightower immediately called the police to tell them about her suspicions and her discoveries.
When detectives arrived at her home to question her, Turyk-Wawrynowicz put on a brave front at first, claiming that a costly jacket they discovered in her closet was just some old thing: “Anybody can buy a jacket like this at Century 21,” she said, referring to a popular discount store. Soon, though, she was casting aspersions on Hightower: “She is mean.” After another couple of hours, she broke down and admitted to police that she had the earrings, telling the cops, “The diamonds are in the bathroom.” Sipping a skim latte that had been fetched for her during the interrogation, she stopped defending herself and thought only of her husband, Jaroslaw, a construction worker who also was from Poland: “I am evil and guilty, but my husband did nothing. You can cut my hands and head off, but I can tell you he did nothing wrong.” Explaining her theft from the De Niros, she initially suggested that she was encouraged by their butler, but then recanted that charge. Instead, she blamed her vi
ctims for her crimes: “If she [Hightower] had treated me better, with more respect, I probably wouldn’t have done this. I didn’t steal from Isabella Rossellini because she treated me well. I only stole from people who didn’t treat me with respect.”
Besides Hightower, Turyk-Wawrynowicz had stolen from Bergen, who confronted her about a jacket and a pair of cameras that went missing only to have the maid turn on her with a threat of blackmail: “If you have me arrested, I will go to the press and tell them the reason I was fired and accused of these crimes is because your husband sexually harassed me and I refused his advances.” Another former employer had caught Turyk-Wawrynowicz using a stolen credit card to rack up $1,000 in purchases at Barney’s and was told by the brazen maid, “I didn’t think you would notice.”
The victims had, in fact, noticed, and spurred by Hightower, they all agreed to cooperate with the district attorney’s office, which initially filed charges of grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, coercion, and forgery against Turyk-Wawrynowicz. She had to forfeit her passport upon arrest, and bail was set at $150,000 bond or $75,000 cash; when Jaroslaw showed up with the cash, though, it was refused, as he was unable to prove that it wasn’t the proceeds of criminal activity. As a result, Turyk-Wawrynowicz remained in a cell at Rikers Island for more than seven months, during which time prosecutors discovered that she had forged her Social Security and resident alien cards. In February 2006 she pled guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to one to three years in prison, with credit for time served; it was reckoned she’d be free by the end of the year, at which point she would be handed over to the Department of Homeland Security for deportation to Poland—at her own expense, a banal dénouement to a banal crime.*
WITH The Good Shepherd behind him, De Niro resumed working at a hectic pace and making choices that didn’t always pay off in either economic or aesthetic terms. But in most cases, the intent of the projects at least seemed pitched higher than had been the case in recent years.
He once again marched into a recording studio as a voice for hire, this time to dub the English-language dialogue for Arthur and the Invisibles, an animated feature by the French writer-director Luc Besson; De Niro, if anyone noticed, provided the voice of the king of an invisible race called the Minimoys.
Almost as if frustrated with what was in front of him, he next took on a completely surprising role in Stardust, director Matthew Vaughn’s film of a fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman. De Niro played the small role of Captain Shakespeare, leader of a band of pirates whose ship floats through the air, and keeper of secret passions and predilections: the good captain is, in fact, a cross-dresser. (The part was barely a sketch in Gaiman’s novel; Vaughn, who said he hoped the tenor of the film would recall that of Midnight Run, expanded the character with screenwriter Jane Goldman.) It was a charming film unjustly overlooked by the public, grossing a mere $38.6 million in its late-summer 2007 release even though the reviews were generally favorable.
Less of a leap was What Just Happened?, a movie about the movie business based on a book-length memoir by Art Linson, with whom De Niro hadn’t worked in more than a decade, and directed by Barry Levinson, another collaborator of more than ten years prior. It was a shaggy dog story about the life and works of an independent Hollywood producer trying to launch a big-budget film starring Bruce Willis (as himself) and/or Sean Penn (also playing himself). It was droll stuff, with lots of in-jokes about the movie biz, celebrity, the expensive high life of Hollywood insiders, and those scratching and scrambling to claim a place among them. De Niro’s character is always on the verge of either making it big or losing it big, and as the title indicates, he’s not always entirely able to say which way he’s headed.
As De Niro knew, the script had a lot of truth in it: “This is as close as it gets to what it can be like to be in the middle of this stuff,” he told a reporter. “The fear factor is always there—everything from losing tens of millions of dollars on a film that doesn’t work to not being able to get a good table in a top restaurant because your last movie flopped.” (Asked if anyone had ever denied him a good table, De Niro demurred. “If they have, I haven’t noticed,” he said, then smiled and added, “I also bought my own restaurants.”)
The film shot in Cannes, Connecticut, and Hollywood in the spring of 2007 and debuted the following year at the Sundance Film Festival to a relatively flat reception. Released into theaters in October 2008, it grossed barely $1 million.
By then, De Niro had appeared in a film that, at least on paper, marked an even more promising reunion: Righteous Kill, a dark and moderately bloody policier by director Jon Avnet that put De Niro alongside Al Pacino. It had been a dozen years since Heat, and in that film the pair had appeared in only two scenes together, which served at once to make the film feel special and to make the audience feel slightly bamboozled. Righteous Kill, on the other hand, would give the impression of a cheat for other reasons. De Niro and Pacino shared the screen plenty, yes, but why?
It wasn’t that the script, by Russell Gewirtz, was that much easier to dismiss than those of other films recently starring De Niro or Pacino. It wasn’t that the budget (some $60 million) was beneath them, or that their fellow cast members (who included Brian Dennehy, John Leguizamo, Carla Gugino, Melissa Leo, and the rapper Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent) weren’t a good match. Rather, it was that the whole enterprise—a strictly by-the-numbers crime movie—was such an obvious comedown from Heat, not to mention The Godfather, Part II, the first film on which they’d shared billing.
The film was released by a small new independent distributor, Overture, in September 2008 without even being previewed by film critics in many American markets. There was once a time when the debut of a film with De Niro and Pacino in it was an event to be circled on a calendar. Righteous Kill, on the contrary, was escorted into the marketplace almost as if it were something shameful.
Frankly, it wasn’t even that good. Built around the concept of cops chasing a serial killer who they suspect might be another cop, it presents the spectacle of a beefy De Niro and a spray-tanned Pacino playing scene after scene together with the energy you might expect of a gin rummy game. De Niro gets to disport himself sexually with Gugino, and Pacino has some nice moments in conversation with a psychiatrist. But there’s nothing memorable about either of their performances or the combination of their auras or energies, and the garish and shallow film eventually devolves into a chain of plot twists that are neither engaging enough nor clever enough to ignite it. Watching it, you can’t help but think that tens of millions of dollars could have been saved if someone had just filmed De Niro and Pacino having dinner together or going on a cruise around Manhattan—and that it would have made better entertainment to boot (and might even have grossed more than the $40 million that Righteous Kill managed).
And while he was doing this kind of thing, he passed on several films of much better quality. In the decade-plus after Meet the Parents, he was offered the roles of the chief villain in two Martin Scorsese films: 2002’s Gangs of New York (which would have required him to work several months in Rome, where old-time Manhattan was rebuilt on stages at Cinecittà) and 2006’s The Departed, which would have been his first appearance in a film nominated as Best Picture since 1990 (he skipped that one to make The Good Shepherd); the parts went instead to Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson, and they delivered memorable performances. De Niro and Scorsese also talked about adapting the musical Chicago (De Niro would have played the role that Richard Gere eventually took on-screen) and the gangster picture I Hear You Paint Houses. But no go.
He turned down the role Denzel Washington played in Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, the one Ray Winstone played in Martin Campbell’s Edge of Darkness, and, before Tim Burton was involved, the one Johnny Depp played in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He came close to working again with Michael Mann on the gangster film The Winter of Frankie Machine. And he was spoken about in connection with a number of other potentially engaging pr
ojects: biopics about Vince Lombardi, Bernie Madoff, and Enrico Caruso; a remake of the 1955 crime-and-show-biz story Love Me or Leave Me, with De Niro and Jennifer Lopez playing the roles originated by James Cagney and Doris Day; an adaptation of Robert Ferrigno’s bestselling crime novel Horse Latitudes; a remake of the Japanese kidnapping drama Chaos for Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer; and reteamings with Sean Penn (The Mitchell Brothers, about the California pornography pioneers) and Meryl Streep (First Man, about the husband of the first female U.S. president).
It wasn’t, of course, possible to say if any of these would have turned out worthwhile, but most of them carried at least a spark of promise that wasn’t so readily apparent in, say, Showtime or Hide and Seek. He was immensely busy. Would that he had been equally selective.
* * *
* The De Niros had rotten luck with domestics. In 2009 they were sued by a nanny who had been taking care of Elliot. The nanny claimed that she was owed $40,000 in back pay for more than 750 hours of overtime and ten days of vacation. The matter was settled out of court.
BY THE MIDDLE OF THE 2000S, DE NIRO’S TRIBECA REAL ESTATE empire had come to resemble a little fiefdom. There was the Tribeca Film Center at 375 Greenwich Street, anchored by the Tribeca Grill, which had long since been canonized as a classic New York restaurant. There was TriBakery next door; on the same city block were Nobu and Nobu Next Door on Hudson Street. He himself lived on Hudson Street still, at number 110. At number 112, where his longtime assistant Robin Chambers owned her own place, De Niro owned a piece of the Fourth Estate newsstand and coffee shop, and he owned or leased the vacant lot next door and the empty storefront on the other side of it. And, of course, in establishing the neighborhood as a celebrity redoubt, he had drawn a full contingent of restaurants, clubs, boutiques, and goods-and-services businesses to what once had been a moribund industrial neighborhood. Old-timers (the ones who could still afford to live there, anyhow) griped about the limousines and the late-night caterwauling in the street, but when they referred to his portion of the district as “Bob Row” it wasn’t entirely in hostility; he really had created something out of nothing. (Still, there was often an edge: “When something happens in the neighborhood, Bob gets mentioned, pro or con,” acknowledged Jane Rosenthal.)