celebrity gossip, academic style

A rare De Niro Candid

Do you realize how difficult it is to find pictures of Robert De Niro? Obviously I could find dozens of De Niro as Travis Bickle, or De Niro as Jake La Motta, or De Niro as Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents. Unlike 95% of stars and famous actors, De Niro not only shelters himself (and his family) from paparazzi attention, but poses for precious few profile photos, period. Indeed, nearly all of the images readily available were screen caps, publicity stills, or a small handful of un-posed shots from Tribeca and other mandatory public appearances.

An even rarer De Niro Paparazzi Shot

In other words, sticking with our understanding of a star as an actor whose private life has become equally, if not more, important to his/her image as his/her actual film roles, De Niro is no star. He’s perhaps our greatest living actor, but his private life has always been — and remains — almost wholly unknown.

Of course, his biography can be recited — it’s right here on Wikipedia, filled with details of his childhood, his early theater roles (his first role was as the lion in The Wizard of Oz), his subsequent work with the Actor’s Studio, and the eventual move to film and long-term collaboration with Scorsese. But apart from the fact of his parents’ occupations and the milieu of his childhood, the available details are all work posturing as intimate knowledge. We know nothing of De Niro other than the facts of his marriages (he has had two), children (apparently he has fathered four and adopted one, although the details are unclear). His first wife, Diahnne Abbott, had appeared in Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. He had a son in 1998. But again, these are facts, not stories. He owns a large amount of real estate in TriBeCa; he co-owns hot-spot restaurants Nobu and TriBeCa Grill; he started the up-and-coming TriBeCa film festival. He has directed two films, both to moderate praise (A Bronx Tale and The Good Shepherd). He is said to spend a fair amount of time dining in his restaurants and Jay-Z even name drops him in the recent hit “Empire State of Mind.”

De Niro’s image, then, is built on a series of highly iconic roles and business decisions. He has a distinct “picture personality,” to borrow from Richard DeCordova — as in very early cinema, before the studios realized they could up the demand for their actors by releasing tidbits of their private lives, audiences strung together their conception of De Niro through knowledge of his various roles. In other words, our knowledge of his supposed ‘personality’ is predicated on his actual ‘pictures.’ You, dear readers, support this very conclusion: when I queried my Facebook and Twitter followers as to their immediate associations with De Niro, the answers either explicitly invoked film roles, (“You Talkin’ to Me?”/The Godfather/shooting Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown/Ben Stiller rolling off a roof/Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas/A Bronx Tale), his financial moves (Tribeca), and his physical appearance (short guy/’yummy’/DILF/mohawk/Italian).

Interestingly, one reader responded with “smirking. smarminess.” I find this particularly fascinating in light of the clip below, which purports to be an outtake from a promo shoot for Tribeca. (Thanks to Peter Alilunas over at Manvertised for directing me to it.)

As you can see, the persona reproduced here matches well with the ‘new De Niro’ — as if the psychosis and abjection of his early characters (especially in the Scorsese films) had been sublimated into the agitated portrayals of middle-class, middle-age men (in Meet the Parents in particular, but one could also argue for Analyze This and Analyze That as well).

This rare glimpse of the ‘real’ De Niro seems to authenticate the image of him gleaned from his roles — unlike a similar glimpse of the ‘real’ Christian Bale on the set of Terminator (and the alleged ‘abuse’ of his mother/sister) which usurped his image as a class-act/family man/forever-Laurie from Little Women. The clip is two years old and has been viewed under one million times, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work — it simply means that its existence is no revelation (it confirms, as opposed to compromises, our established understanding. Scandal — or massive YouTube hits — erupts when what we thought was true turns out to be false.)

Which brings us to the idea of De Niro as caricature. Several respondees (granted, most of them cinephiles or media aficionados more generally) indicated that De Niro primarily signifies as a parody or caricature of his former self, as he’s poured all his energy and resources into profiting off his mere presence in films co-produced by Tribeca Productions, most notably Hide and Seek, Righteous Kill, and What Just Happened. Righteous Kill was particularly (un)remarkable, as it paired De Niro with another acting legend of a similar age — Al Pacino — to lackluster effect and dismal reviews (21% on Rotten Tomatoes). The pairing could have been explosive (think of their few shared moments together in Heat) but this was the wrong movie, with the wrong script, wrong dialogue, and a premise that depended too heavily on both De Niro and Pacino’s iconic images.

Importantly, these ‘late’ De Niro roles are working with a subdued and defanged version of his early characters. Think of his role in Goodfellas as Jimmy Conway, when he’s been unnaturally aged — silver haired, reading glasses. That was 1990, and he was made to look the way he does now in films. But something violent and precarious undulated beneath Jimmy Conway’s aging exterior: when he attempts to show Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) a warehouse full of furs, you are terrified of what he might or might not do.

De Niro as an older Jimmy Conway in Goodfellas

I would argue that part of the magic of De Niro’s early performances was rooted in his cult of anti-stardom. Because we didn’t know anything else about him, he very well could have been as fearsome as the characters he so fully inhabited. Looking at his papers in the Harry Ransom Center here at the University of Texas, I’m struck by a man so devoted to his characters that he would edit an entire version of a script (as he does in the files for Casino) as if Ace Rothstein himself were reading the script and commenting on his own portrayal. (I’m also interested in the motivation for the donation of his papers to the HRC in the first place — apparently he was inspired by Scorsese’s donation of his personal files to Wesleyan, and he received no payment, unlike, say, Paul Schrader. He’s even funding a number of research fellowships, and apparently loves the idea of students thinking through his performances. It’s as if he acknowledges that those roles are out for public consumption, and people can know about his acting and ‘work’ as much as they’d like. It’s the non-acting side of his life he keeps close.)

In some ways, the mystique of De Niro’s anti-stardom has been evacuated by these late roles. But then again, what are his choices? One can only imagine the tremendous toll of thirty years of playing the likes of Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, and Max Cady (terrifying in Scorsese’s Cape Fear). While I obviously know nothing of De Niro as a man — other than what I have been able to glean from the very work-centric papers at the HRC — I imagine that these late roles are a mellowing of sorts. Look, for example, to the trailer for his forthcoming family drama Everybody’s Fine with Drew Barrymore, Kate Beckinsale, Sam Rockwell, and Melissa Leo, in which he plays a widower attempting to reconnect with his grown children:

Who’s to say this role is any less method acting than that of, say, Jimmy Doyle in New York, New York? He may not have learned to play the saxophone for the role, but I oftentimes think we’re too keen to award and overvalue acting that is either bombastic, ugly, manic, or different in some ways. Playing serial killers, social misfits, and general victims = good, hard acting. Playing normal guys with subtle problems = not work. The files on De Niro’s latest films have been slowly trickling into the HRC, and it’ll be fascinating to see how his process manifests differently on Hide and Seek (a horror film with Dakota Fanning), his voice work on Shark Tale, or when he’s behind the camera on The Good Shepherd.

Ultimately, I do agree that De Niro’s ‘picture personality’ has changed. But he’s supposedly working with Scorsese again, and I look forward to seeing him act off Rockwell and Leo. I like old, sad men — and what can De Niro do with quiet grief? It could be disappointing, but it could also be beautiful.

I suppose that with so many voices saying he’s washed up, I still find him — and his choices, including his continued anti-stardom — fascinating and compelling. When and if he comes to the HRC, his aura will overwhelm me, no matter how many Little Fockers he makes. Some stars stop working altogether and arrest their images, whether by choice (Garbo) or by death (Dean, Monroe). But even those who do not — who, like Brando, appear in Superman for a ludicrous sum of money and retreat to their South Pacific island — remain powerful in our minds. De Niro and Brando are very different, especially since Brando’s personal life became such a fundamental part of his star image in later years. I can’t imagine the same happening in any way for De Niro. But both men offered performances that remain touchstones of American cinema and dramatically altered our understandings of what masculinity and a masculine body and mind could resemble. So let De Niro pay for his kids’ college funds and cultivate film and filmmaking in New York. I’ll be watching Everybody’s Fine with the subconscious fear that he’ll pull a Rupert Pupkin (from The King of Comedy) and kidnap Jerry Lewis and highjack late night television at any moment. Such is the power of past performance — I’m not thinking of who his kids are, or what jacket he wears when he goes jogging, but of his actual body of work. And it’s something, especially when we think about the division between ‘actors’ and ‘stars,’ and whether it’s possible to maintain that division in an increasingly intolerant market for actual acting and storylines, for us to consider.