Robert de Niro

  • We’re No Angels (1989)

    We’re No Angels (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) On paper, We’re No Angels sounds unusual enough to be interesting. A remake of a 1955 film I’m unfamiliar with, it stars Robert de Niro and Sean Penn as two convicts who, during the 1930s, travel north to Canada but end up in an upstate New York monastery (shot in British Columbia) through a set of unusual circumstances, where they are mistaken for priests and develop a conscience. The big names are on the creative side as well: script from David Mamet, directed by Neil Jordan, with the female lead played by Demi Moore and an unbelievably young John C. Reilly in a minor role. Alas, the result quickly becomes underwhelming. Shot in dull shades of brown to assert that they’re not romanticizing the period, We’re No Angels feels duller, dumber and far less interesting than it should be. It’s not quite a religious film and yet not a religious film either. For a putative comedy, it feels slow, laborious and (fatally) unfunny. It meanders like its characters, vaguely bidding its time until only so many minutes are left before the epiphany that announces the ending. We’re No Angels is too slickly produced to be terrible, but it’s still not all that good.

  • Mistress (1992)

    Mistress (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) Despite the self-aggrandizing nature of such projects, I love it when Hollywood makes a satire about itself. They don’t even have to be all that insightful — as a cinephile, I can appreciate the attempt to tell a joke. In Mistress, we follow a pair of past-their-prime director and producer as, out of the blue, a passion project long left abandoned has a chance of being revived. The only catch (as is the case in 1,000% of film projects) is financing, and the three investors interested in the project each want their mistress to be cast in a prominent role. Much of the film tracks how a purely artistic project ends up compromised by multiple overlapping contradictory requests — while it’s a comedy, the ending is unusually grim (well, not that grim) in that nothing comes out of it. Mistress is fun enough, but it punches above its weight due to some very good casting. Robert Wuhl and Martin Landau are likably pathetic as a bottom-feeding writer-director-producer pair trying their best to exist in a system that doesn’t care for them. Their will is tested by three investors, played by Robert de Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach in three strong performances. But as far as I’m concerned, the most memorable casting here is Sheryl Lee Ralph as a high-powered woman who’ll take advantage of a break but not let anyone walk over her. She does bring a lot of energy to what is, overall, a much more low-key affair. Mistress belongs to the kind of self-deprecating Hollywood comedy that’s probably equally funny and anger-inducing to insiders. Fittingly for a film aimed at professionals, the focus here is more on producing and financing than the shooting of the film itself. It’s watchable enough even today, although I suspect that it was probably released too close to The Player to make waves of its own upon release.

  • Mad Dog and Glory (1993)

    Mad Dog and Glory (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) The frontier between offbeat casting and miscasting can be a matter of opinion, and while I see that many reviews of Mad Dog and Glory praise its daring use of Bill Murray as a mobster and Robert de Niro as a meek crime scene photographer, I’m more inclined to call it a waste of talent. Not that the film doesn’t have other problems: As a story of how a policeman is gifted female companionship by a crime boss eager to express his gratitude after an unlikely rescue, the film already plays with an unwieldy combination of tricky elements. Character drama, offbeat comedy and rescue thriller—Mad Dog and Glory is all of that and more and yet less. The result is especially underwhelming considering the casting. A young Uma Thurman is remarkable as the woman used as currency between two men, with David Caruso showing up as de Niro’s partner. Otherwise, though, the film feels clunky, not quite dedicated to a specific tone and not interesting enough to make us care. Given this, the casting of de Niro and Murray, weirdly enough, acts in Mad Dog and Glory’s favour, even as it doesn’t serve it as best as it could—it’s one of the few reasons to remember the film today.

  • The Irishman (2019)

    The Irishman (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) To anyone closely keeping track of Martin Scorsese’s career, The Irishman arrives as a clear late-career entry – the kind of film that plays as much as a narrative as a reflection of the films previously made under his direction. At first glance, it does look like many of Scorsese’s celebrated crime epics: a multi-decade odyssey through the murky world of east-coast union corruption, organized crime and veteran hitmen. It features Robert de Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, with special effects technology used to portray them from the 1950s to the 2000s. It has flashes of Scorsese’s directing style at its most vivid, with individual sequences playing like virtuoso riffs on the content of the film: There’s a particularly good sequence midway through in which a hitman ponders his choices for an upcoming hit, prepares and executes it despite not exactly going to plan. But, at the same time, The Irishman does play like a pre-retirement capstone, as the director deals heavily in themes that make more sense from an older filmmaker’s perspective. There is a moment where the narration sends nearly every single character to death or retirement, and you’re sure that this is the end of the film. But there are still thirty minutes and an unresolved framing device to go, and that’s when The Irishman strikes out in its own territory – telling us about the uneasy retirement of an accomplished hitman, the estrangement from his family, the gradual disappearance of his friends and the inevitable press of time, transforming a stone-cold killer in a frail old man liable to be taken out by even the slightest health problem. That’s what transforms The Irishman into something special, and something that befits Scorsese’s evolving filmography: he’s not putting together Mean Streets anymore. Of course, there’s a price to pay for such a substantial epilogue: the film is very long and feels even longer as the years go by and we dig ourselves out of no less than two framing devices and various flashbacks. There are a lot of characters to follow, and the way the film fits in history, often in oblique detail, is meant to be interpreted by those who have a decent grasp of post-WW2 American history, and specifically everything about Jimmy Hoffa. Some will argue that The Irishman would have done best as a miniseries, and, curiously enough, I only half-agree with that statement: Scorsese makes movies, not episodes of a TV show, and while that’s a distinction increasingly irrelevant to anyone but purists, it’s still a significant difference in matters of filmography. I enjoyed it, but I was really wishing for faster pacing at times. Still, The Irishman is an important milestone in Scorsese’s ongoing work: while we may wish for him to keep working forever, it does feel like the kind of work that can stand as a capstone.

  • True Confessions (1981)

    True Confessions (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Ideally, movies start with an intriguing hook, then build to a good conclusion. True Confessions doesn’t. Oh, the hook is there all right: taking us back to 1940s Los Angeles, the film quickly sets up a mixture of crime drama (featuring a murder similar to the Black Dahlia case), then complicates it with ties to the Catholic Church and powerful real estate developers, and executes its narrative with none other than Robert de Niro and Robert Duvall as, respectively, a Catholic operative and a police detective with temper issues. So far so good, especially when the film manages a low-budget but decent neo-noir atmosphere. The problem with True Confessions, however, is that it goes nowhere after that. The film plays with its crime story but gradually disengages from it, and never quite manages to reach any dramatic intensity. The ending flops hard, no providing any satisfaction. You can appreciate the film for the performances of now-veteran actors as younger men, but True Confessions does itself no favours by setting itself up to be compared with much-better movies such as L.A. Confidential or Chinatown, and then stripping away all the complexity that its betters embraced. There’s little joy to be found inside the film either, with a slow pacing that doesn’t seem to bring anything to the film. At times, True Confessions feels like a late-period degenerate example of the New Hollywood—gritty and grimy and slow and low-stakes but not building to anything more along the way. Such a disappointment—it’s the first rule in the screenwriter’s handbook that a good conclusion forgives a lot of past sins, and True Confessions can’t even manage that.

  • Joker (2019)

    Joker (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Even a few days after watching Joker, I’m still not sure about what I think of it. There were times where I thought it was a 1970s cosplay; others when I was seriously wondering why it was even related to the Batman universe; yet others when I was ready to dismiss the film as playing awkwardly with elements it didn’t know what to do with. But then there were other moments where I appreciated what it was trying to do. The links with the Batman mythos became more interesting late in the film, and the recreation of the period atmosphere was rather well-done. There’s an interesting provocative intent here in tracking how a mental illness can become a wider social movement, although I think that the film ultimately fumbles the ball in this area. Joaquin Phoenix does turn in an impressive performance, grimy and off-putting. Saying that the film is inspired by Scorsese isn’t much of a recommendation given how I don’t exactly worship either Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy. But it does give Robert de Niro one of his most interesting roles since, what, Silver Linings Playbook? Zazie Beetz is also in the film, although the nature of her character is a bit predictable and weakens the film. As an elseworld story from the Batman mythos, it does an admirable job of bringing the universe into a more realistic appearance, although I’m left wondering if Joker would have been free to do something even more daring had it been wholly original—I’m thinking specifically about how the film abruptly seems to pull its punches after scenes of social unrest that could and should have been pushed to their logical conclusion. But that point may be moot, considering that there’s no way that a 1970s study in mental illness would have received a budget so large had it not been tied to one of the most successful superhero franchises of all time. What we’re left with, then, is bits and pieces of a great movie, some iconic imagery (which isn’t all that easy in a media-saturated universe) and great performances. But there are just as many bits of pieces holding the film back: a refusal to go to the end of its ideas, excessive violence and fuzziness about what it’s about. In other words, I don’t have an easy and pat opinion or rating about Joker: it’s still all over the place for me, and it may take some time before I grow comfortable with it… if I ever do.

  • New York, New York (1977)

    New York, New York (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) My working theory at the moment is that all 1970s movie musicals were terrible and/or depressing, and New York, New York only adds more fuel to it. There’s some logic to that theory—the 1970s were marked by excess, as Hollywood found itself freed from the constraints of the Production Code and compelled to look again at past Hollywood successes. But in typical Hollywoodian/American fashion, they went too far with their newfound freedoms and the result feels incredibly dated rather than timeless to twenty-first century audiences. There are other very specific problems with New York, New York: Director Martin Scorsese wanted to go big in an homage to musicals, to New York City, to jazz standards… and was largely (ahem; reportedly) fuelled by cocaine throughout the shooting of the film, upsetting the fine control a director should have over that kind of production. But then again, the project was flawed from the start: the entire thing revolves around an abusive, depressing relationship between rather unlikable characters. Robert de Niro is miscast here—while he’s fine as an explosive terrible man (essentially rehearsing Travis Bickle), there’s no world in which he feels right as a saxophonist. Liza Minelli does better because she can sing and her character is meant to be more pitiable, but her long wig here does nothing to make me like her more than usual. (I used to think that her short hair was what I didn’t like about her, but at least this film proves me wrong.) As for the rest, New York, New York is a depressing exercise, as it charts a doomed romance between two volatile characters. The tale’s darkness definitely fits the 1970s, but also limits the film’s more exuberant goals. The “Happy Endings” number is a blunt lie considering the rest of the movie, and for a film that tries to celebrate classic Hollywood musicals, it’s a self-limiting move. But it’s not a complete loss, and I don’t loathe it nearly as much as Cabaret—For better or for worse, this is a Scorsese film and it does have lavish sequences, striking images, untapped potential as a stylized musical, and it coasts a long way on its rousing rendition of the classic “New York, New York.” But as far as homages to classic musicals go—no. New York, New York is far too long, loose, glum and rarely as purely likable as the best of the genre that he’s trying to honour. What 1970s Hollywood hadn’t yet figured out in its rebellious adolescent phase is that sometime, happy funny romance is exactly what audiences want.

  • The Fan (1996)

    The Fan (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2020) I’ve written elsewhere about the spate of good mid-1990s thrillers, but there were a lot of not-so-good ones too, and The Fan definitely qualifies as one of those, although not necessarily a bad one. Considering that the film features Robert de Niro, Wesley Snipes, a young Benicio del Toro and a non-annoying early turn from John Leguizamo, this may be more a case of inflated expectations than anything else. Still, the troubles start at the script level, which chooses to follow a deranged San Francisco sports fan as he begins stalking a baseball star, then violently murdering perceived opponents. While mid-1990s audiences may have found this implausible (well, maybe not), the age of social media has uncovered plenty of deranged fans with weapon fetishes and difficult personal relationships who turn to violence for affirmation—it’s a pathetic choice for a viewpoint character, and the execution does nothing to make it any more interesting. To see de Niro in the lead role is a waste of talent when his usual screen persona by the mid-1990s was closer to mob boss than crazy cuckoo à la Taxi Driver. Coming from director Tony Scott, it’s no surprise if The Fan’s execution is bombastic, filled with dated music video stylistic tics and an aggressive rock soundtrack. The ending doesn’t manage to elevate the material, and leaves viewers with an undiluted sour and unpleasant feeling.

  • The King of Comedy (1982)

    The King of Comedy (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, December 2019) The tricky paradox of dark comedy is that you can manage to handle everything perfectly from a technical viewpoint, only to have audiences shrug and dismiss the result. It’s part of the deal—dark comedy pushes people out of their comfort zone and they don’t have to like it. That’s how I feel after watching The King of Comedy: I can’t fault director Martin Scorsese’s work here—he gets the material’s ironic darkness, executes it as well as it can be, and delivers a pretty good New York City movie as part of it. Robert de Niro is at his iconoclastic best as a psychopathic loser who hatches a plan to get his spot on a major TV show. Jerry Lewis and Sandra Bernhard also do well in the other main roles. But at the end, The King of Comedy plays its cards: the audience feels their heart sink as they realize that the psychopath is actually pretty funny, and that he gets rewarded for his actions. That may be just a bit too much to take, and perhaps just as dispiriting now than it was forty years ago. Great movie—but I’ll use my reviewer’s right to shrug and dismiss the result.

  • Angel Heart (1987)

    Angel Heart (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I wasn’t expecting much from Angel Heart other than a mild curiosity as to why what looked like a neo-noir murder mystery was doing playing on a hard-core horror Cable TV channel. Well, as it turns out, one of the least of Angel Heart’s qualities is the way it shifts from neo-noir investigation to something quite more horrifying. Mickey Rourke turns in a good early-career performance as Harry Angel, a Private Investigator asked by a mysterious client to find out what happened to crooner Johnny Favourite (no apparent relation with the lead singer of the Canadian Jazz band). The mystery client is joyfully played by Robert de Niro, whose devilish behaviour (along with impeccably clawed fingernails) clearly suggests that he’s enjoying playing the part. Quite a bit of the Angel Heart’s second half features Lisa Bonnet shredding her former nice-girl image with a few unusually intense nude scenes. Much of the film’s initial appeal is going back to 1950s New York noir archetypes, albeit played with more bloodshed than the classics. Things take a turn for the much, much worse once our private investigator travels to New Orleans where (as is movie tradition) everyone seems steeped into some variant of voodoo magic. But that’s not the half of it, and even if you know where things are going, the film as a few more unpleasant surprises in store right until the end. Director Alan Parker does quite well with Angel Heart, creating unnerving sequences when it counts, delving into visual symbolism that’s at least one level deep, and taking great care with the musical atmosphere of the film in between the scares. The unusual coda keeps going throughout the credits. It all amounts to a bit of a surprise—the film isn’t unknown, but I had completely missed it and got to discover something more interesting than anticipated along the way.

  • A Bronx Tale (1993)

    A Bronx Tale (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2018) Yes, trivia fans, it is true: Robert de Niro once directed a movie. Not only that, but he directed A Bronx Tale, written by fellow actor Chazz Palminteri and based on Palminteri true-life childhood stories. Surprising no one, it’s about growing up in the Bronx during the 1960s, and having to deal with the neighbourhood gangsters. De Niro himself has a secondary role as the bus-driving father of the young protagonist while Palminteri plays the local mobster. The movie quickly sets up a dynamic in which the hero has to choose a father figure between two men, one of them law-abiding and dull, while the other definitely isn’t. It’s a story with gangsters rather than a gangster story: the point is to show the realities of growing up in that neighbourhood and being tempted by The Life. As a period piece, it’s nicely done and somewhat successful: the nostalgia is effective without being overpowering, while the music sets a tone that the film follows. A Bronx Tale is likable, perhaps not a classic but a worthwhile companion piece to many other all-out gangster films.

  • Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

    Once Upon a Time in America (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2018) There are obviously some grandiose intentions at play in Once Upon a Time in America, from the sweeping title to the expansive running time to the intention of presenting a crime saga throughout the decades. The similarities to the Godfather movies are numerous, and they start with having Robert de Niro play a gangster. You can imagine writer/director Sergio Leone gleefully embarking on this project, wind in his sails from having completed the Man with No Name trilogy and Once Upon a Time in the West. He certainly brings a somewhat… European sensibility to the project, making his protagonist a very lusty lad (there are two rapes in the film, one of them played for laughs) in addition to the usual graphic violence. The film is famous for a decade-long development process and for being incredibly long especially with its preferred director’s cut. (Today, it would have been made as a prestige miniseries). Much of this editing shows—not all of the film is coherent, and the rhythm of the film constantly stops and go. While ambitious, Once Upon a Time in America isn’t quite as successful as it thinks—it’s long, it takes forever to start, it lacks the moment-to-moment watchability and overall control to truly succeed. Missed opportunities and all that.

  • Analyze That (2002)

    Analyze That (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, September 2018) I saw Analyze That in theatres during its first run, but somehow didn’t write any review of it since then. As oversights go, this is about as minor as the film actually is—as a sequel to the better-known Analyze This, it lazily reteams Billy Crystal with Robert de Niro as a psychoanalyst helping a mob boss deal with his repressed issues. This time, the dynamics are a bit different as de Niro’s character is out of jail and under Crystal’s custody in an attempt to flush out a mob rival. The film also gets slightly auto-referential in making the de Niro’s character become a consultant on an over-the-top mob TV series, which is good for a few inside jokes about the film industry. Still, much of the fun remains the same—Crystal playing his neurotic character against de Niro’s then-unusual mockery of his own persona. Given that de Niro has done little but keep going in that vein for the past fifteen years, that aspect of Analyze That has definitely lost some of its lustre. The film’s biggest problem, though, is that it’s immediately forgettable—I kept watching the film, occasionally doubting that I had, in fact, seen it until I got to the end and was reminded that “ends with a crane and a money-truck heist” was a correct recollection of the film (but not to be confused with Mickey Blue Eyes). It’s entertaining enough (de Niro’s self-mockery still feels more vital here than the copies-of-copies of the same parody he’s been doing since then) but don’t expect a magical experience. Or even to remember much of it moments later.

  • Heat (1995)

    Heat (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, November 2017) I distinctly recall seeing Heat on video in the late nineties, but couldn’t find any review of it anywhere in my archives. Oh well—it’s a good excuse to revisit one of the best crime movies of its decade. As it turns out, I had forgotten a lot about the film and had the pleasure of rediscovering it again. Sure, I remembered the dinner conversation between de Niro and Pacino. Of course, I remembered the downtown LA shootout. But it turns out I didn’t remember half of it, and nearly nothing of the rest of the movie. Long but impressively dense, Heat compares well to the best of Hong Kong crime cinema in showing policemen and criminals as two sides of a similar coin, and finding humanity in stock characters. It’s a sprawling story with roughly a dozen subplots, and I have a feeling that it would best be presented today as a Netflix miniseries rather than a movie. Still, what we see on-screen in slightly less than three hours is mesmerizing enough: A convincing take on mid-nineties Los Angeles, featuring a variety of characters with rich lives. The script has moments of street poetry, and the action sequences hit hard. It surely helps that the casting of the film is amazing. Beyond having Robert de Niro and Al Pacino as co-leads, the cast is rich down to small roles played by then-obscure Danny Trejo and Natalie Portman. Take a look at the cast list and see Val Kilmer, Jon Voigt, Tom Sizemore, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Wes Studi, Dennis Haysbert, William Fichner, Tom Noonan, Hank Azaria, Henry Rollins, Jeremy Piven … it just doesn’t stop. Still, Pacino and de Niro get most of the glory here, with roles seemingly tailor-made for them—their dinner face-off is crackling good, and still exceeds the entirety of their movie-long reunion in Righteous Kill. Pacino is particularly in his element here, and his verbal excesses match the script. (Fans of TMZ will recognize that the “GREAT ASS!!!” meme/clip comes from here.)  Otherwise, it’s Michael Mann’s show. While I’ve found many of his more recent movies to be pretentious, overlong and underwhelming, Heat is where nearly everything he’s got is used at its best advantage. Los Angeles looks brilliant, the direction is weighty in a way that matches the film and the actors all do their utmost best. I can quibble about a few lengths (especially late in the film, with a drawn-out final face-off), but I find that my first-viewing appreciation of the film has been replaced by a much more positive assessment after this re-watch.

  • The Wizard of Lies (2017)

    The Wizard of Lies (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Of all the things I didn’t really want to see, a sensitive, almost exculpatory look at celebrity fraudster Bernie Madoff is way up there. (If there was any justice in the world, Madoff should have fuelled a few more years of Occupy Wall Street.)  It does take a while for The Wizard of Lies to overcome this prejudice, especially at it seems to spend its first hour explaining how, aw shucks, Madoff kind of, you know, stumbled into massive pyramid schemes as a business model. But, slowly, the movie does get better. It helps that Madoff is played by Robert de Niro (finally acting, for a change) and that capable actors such as Michelle Pfeiffer and Hank Azaria (under the watchful eye of director Barry Levinson) are there to keep up their halves of dialogues. The script struggles under the weight of the accepted biopic standards, allowing itself a few fanciful moments to break the monotony. But The Wizard of Lies hits its strides during its last act, as the weight of Madoff’s criminal acts finally catch up with him well after incarceration. His name now synonymous with fraud, his wife leaves him to rot in jail and his son commits suicide. At more than two hours, this made-for HBO film is a modest success but it may not be as good as it could have been. Madoff’s warm portrayal can be infuriating, but the film does lack a bit of extra energy, especially at first, to make it compulsively watchable. Still, it’s a fairly worthwhile entry in HBO Films’ long list of biopics … and it deserved its Emmy nominations.