There’s a fabulous story buried inside this box office disaster. A Mafia boss rats out his colleagues so he can enjoy retirement. Instead of dwelling on this and the dramatic opportunities it opens up, instead we are given an info-dump. The betrayal meant that the United States woke up to the fact that the Mafia was a nationwide organization and not, as proposed by J Edgar Hoover, merely a localized east coast outfit.
I wasn’t particularly bothered by the gimmick – though it’s surely “enough already” for fly-by-night technical tricks – of Robert De Niro playing two gangster rivals, Frank Costello who runs the empire handed on a plate to him by Vito Genovese while the latter was in exile. Two simple pieces of prosthetics, false nose for Frank, false chin for Vito, plus the more rudimentary disguise of hat and spectacles for Vito makes this notion work without any need to call it into question. The fake chin stiffens the actor’s lips and once he dispenses with the arm-waving that is key to the De Niro screen persona, the characters are portrayed with measurable differences.
What needs called into question is the ramshackle construction. Voice-over for me is lazy. You can’t fit information into the story in dramatic fashion? Then too bad, drop it. You can’t just shoehorn it in and hope for the best. And all this shifting about with timelines, WTF? It’s crazy to try and condense a history of the Mafia up till the late 1950s when the movie would work much better dumping the historical malarkey and concentrating on the main story.
Vito returns to New York after a long absence and wants to reclaim his kingdom. Frank is naturally reluctant to give up an empire he has expanded and controlled for so long. Frank is more temperate, Vito distinctly temperamental. The fact they were boyhood buddies and made their bones together should have merited a single line of dialog rather than drawn-out montages and a bucket of voice-over.
Frank is happily married to Bobbie (Debra Messing) with no kids. Vito marries Anna (Kathrine Narducci) then bumps off his wife’s ex-husband for the kind of slight a paranoid is prone to. Majoring in violence, Vito rebuilds his empire and for the last piece of the jigsaw organizes a hit on Frank. The hitman misses. That should have cued all-out warfare. Instead, Frank tries to keep the peace. His solution when all else fails and planned retirement is jeopardized is to tip the nod to the New York cops that representatives of every nationwide family is going to assemble in a particular place all at the same time. Cue the cops solving Frank’s problem by imprisoning Vito and tons of his (relatively-speaking, of course) innocent compadres.
But instead of sticking to the bones of what’s an interesting (and ironic if irony is your thing) narrative – insane hunger for power and revenge – the story bounces around like it’s been chucked inside a lottery drum only for bits and pieces of a longer and more complicated but less interesting story to fly out at different times.
The movie does make the point that without battalions of crooked cops and politicians on the take the Mafia would never have mushroomed. There are a couple of outstanding sequences, the cocky Frank volunteering to testify rather than, like all the other gangsters, taking the Fifth at a Senatorial Inquiry and a marvellous scene about the golden Bible of the Mormons that stands alongside the “You Talkin’ to Me?” and “You think I’m funny?” scenes from previous gangster classics.
De Niro gets one thing wrong in his impersonation of the gangsters. It’s virtually impossible for an 81-year-old actor to carry off the physicality of the 66-year-old Frank and the 60-year-old Vito. At least there’s no attempt to portray gangsters as mythical characters.
Not the swansong director Barry Levinson (Rain Man, 1988) was hoping for. Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas, 1990) wrote the script.
Nobody’s going to bet $45 million on Robert De Niro again, no matter how many roles he plays.
The Magnificent 60s 