Aging gracefully not a concern
Judi Dench, now 82, with macular degeneration, has signed for an all-star remake of Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express, while 86-year-old Clint Eastwood recently unveiled his newest movie,
Sully. Meanwhile, 76-year-old Patrick Stewart and 77-year-old Ian McKellen appear in an acclaimed stage revival of Harold Pinter’s No
Man’s Land. Add people such as Robert Duvall, Woody Allen and Maggie Smith to the roster of artists who continue to thrive in the autumn of their careers.
Then there’s the depressing example of Robert De Niro, twotime Oscar winner and the man once hailed as the greatest actor of his generation.
De Niro is only 73, and recently appeared onscreen in The Comedian — playing an aging standup comic who figures he can get laughs by making incest jokes and reworking comedy legend Eddie Cantor’s signature song, Making Whoopee, into a dirty ditty called Making Poopee.
To be sure, the perilous and mysterious art of creating comedy can be worthy of pungent examination on film. That’s why De Niro’s own 1982 movie, The King Of Comedy, in which he brilliantly portrayed a demented wannabe comic who kidnaps Jerry Lewis, was such an unsettling experience.
But there’s a huge gulf between that film, directed by Martin Scorsese, and the travesty of De Niro’s latest. And what’s truly dismaying is the seeming indifference this legendary actor shows as he continues to shred his once lustrous reputation.
Well, perhaps not totally indifferent. During an interview in Britain a couple of years ago, De Niro blew up when asked how he avoided being on “autopilot” when doing a scene. Complaining of a “negative inference,” an angry De Niro stormed off. Daily Telegraph columnist Ed Power didn’t mince words, saying that his tantrum merely “called
attention to one of the most dazzling declines in modern cinema history.”
The question obviously touched a nerve. This is an actor who was once so meticulous that in order to understand the mind of Al Capone during filming of The Untouchables, he wore silk underwear from the same store that once served the notorious gangster’s needs. Long gone are the glory days of
Godfather ll and Raging Bull, (the two movies that earned De Niro his Oscars), Taxi Driver, Mean Streets,
Goodfellas and The Untouchables. Power accused De Niro of “devoting the sunset of his working years to films that seem to have existed only to taint his legacy.” Powers added, the closing phase of De Niro’s career is strewn with “more smoking clinkers than a Volkswagen emissions lab.”
For anyone who cares about cinema, De Niro’s decline is a saddening spectacle. In 2012, he received his first Oscar nomination in more than 20 years — a supporting-actor citation for his performance in
Silver Linings Playbook. But immediately afterward, there was a return to dreck: Big Wedding, Killing Season, The Family, Las Vegas, The Bag Man — and, most notoriously, Grudge Match, in which De Niro and Sylvester Stallone attempted a geriatric send-up of their Raging
Bull and Rocky images, and the execrable Dirty Grandpa, which offered up an aging De Niro masturbating while watching porn.
In 1993, American film historian Douglas Brode described De Niro “as our greatest screen actor, on the level of a Guinness or Olivier.” And the verdict today? “One of our greatest working actors has lost himself in crummy, mindless comedy,” says
Los Angeles Times film critic Betsy Sharkey.
Still, there’s hope. In May, HBO will unveil The Wizard Of Lies, in which De Niro reportedly gives a sizzling performance as the notorious Bernie Madoff. The movie has A-list credentials, with Michelle Pfeiffer as co-star and Barry Levinson as director.