The acting icon flaunts his own sickness in The Alto Knights.
Marlon Brando assessed Robert De Niro’s peak late-’70s period, right after Taxi Driver and New York, New York, telling an interviewer, “I don’t think he knows how good he is.” The same could be said about De Niro in his newest film, The Alto Knights, another gangster opus but this time without the directorial guidance of Martin Scorsese, De Niro’s usual guru in American male psychopathology.
Now, De Niro self-diagnoses, and it’s only his own bravado that keeps The Alto Knights interesting for his stunt of playing two simultaneous roles, rival Mafia kingpins Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. This double dose of slightly different modes of masculine aggression seems overly familiar. De Niro can make recognizable traits seem fresh — that’s his gift — but director Barry Levinson doesn’t give The Alto Knights the ethnic essence and cinematic flair of a Scorsese flick.
De Niro’s study of two Italian-American crime bosses, former friends who succumb to jealousy and enact a series of betrayals and defenses, follows a specious history by screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi (who also wrote GoodFellas, Casino, American Gangster, and The Irishman) that is merely generic, rather than fresh. Pileggi can’t write outside of his own sandbox, which means that DeNiro indulges the usual nefariousness. In the epic-length story, as both Costello and Genovese grow older, De Niro spins subtle gangster clichés. Yet The Alto Knights never reveals the behavioral secrets that are Scorsese’s special insight into how ethnic habit informs men’s private and public character. Those secrets created De Niro’s glorified and most memorable street hoodlums and now befuddle his current crazy-man public image.
Levinson, a Hollywood hack best known for Rainman and less remembered for Bugsy, repeats the latter film’s style of middling biopic that lent prestige-movie airs to an inappropriately romanticized biopic of gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. There, it was screenwriter James Toback’s existential angst that got desiccated. Levinson’s sense of ethnicity in Diner, Liberty Heights, and Avalon always felt deracinated. He approaches Costello and Genovese as flashy historical figures rather than social reprobates. This is less compelling than the tediously repetitive Casino and less credible than the dim fantasy of Heat, which never gauged persistent lawlessness as a moral scourge; it was merely a tale of crime and more crime. If Levinson weren’t so humorlessly pretentious, this film would be a parody of De Niro’s own virtuosity.
The best part of watching De Niro observe criminal lives through his own Duck Soup mirror is that it almost distracts us from the disaster of De Niro’s recent, misguided political misbehavior. Perhaps some key to his creative integrity can be found in this endeavor that plays out the clash of his recently lost artistic instincts and his all-too-public political psychosis.
Differences between Genovese and Costello come down to their marriages (the former to Kathrine Narducci’s Anna, the latter to Debra Messing’s Bobbie) and the physiognomy of make-up for the men’s superficial contrasts. But Levinson and Pileggi never capture the depths of men at war with their own sense of masculinity or who are battling their distorted view of morality.
Scenes of Costello testifying before the Estes Kefauver hearings that exposed the workings of the Mafia to the American public give De Niro another opportunity to show temperamental excess (he uses separate vocal tones for Costello and Genovese), but this is less impressive than the doubles act that Tom Hardy brought off when he played the twin psychos Ron and Reggie Kray in Legend, a movie that captured clubland culture in ’50s London as much as individual pathologies. Costello’s self-destructive testimony forces viewers to debate whether De Niro himself is in touch with legality, or the morality of politics. We can’t help it. An odd digression into the origins of Mormonism recalls the specious race-and-crime history in Killers of the Flower Moon, which gave us DeNiro’s most repulsive characterization to date, a portrait as revealing as Dorian Gray’s.
The Alto Knights is titled after a local Mafia social-club hangout, as if suggesting an ode to bygone camaraderie. It’s another facile gangster history, but so detached from political-cultural turmoil in the era of its making that it calls into question De Niro’s sense of right and wrong and his artistic schizophrenia. For whatever reasons, De Niro once again misplaces his sense of American virtue. He doesn’t realize he has betrayed his promise.