Requiem for Bobby D



What the hell is wrong with Robert De Niro? Does he have a serious gambling problem? Does he owe some real-life goodfellas or casino goons an astronomical sum of money? Does he have 500 children? There must be some explanation. He’s been in decline forever, but maybe because he was my favorite actor for a longer stretch of time, it’s been less noticeable to me than, say, the spectacular decline and fall of Kevin Spacey. But it can no longer be ignored. As if the one-two punch of Meet the Fockers (in which he reportedly breast feeds a kitty) and those sappy American Express commercials weren’t enough, now there’s this item to consider. I guess it’s not enough to simply suck now, he has to create a vortex of suckage that transcends the space-time continuum, a black hole that obliterates any remaining good feelings we might have for him.

But hey, maybe he’s just doing these crappy projects to keep himself afloat, so he can afford to do small, personal pictures and continue making daring choices. Except if you go to IMDb and check out his filmography for the past ten years, you’ll be at a loss to find any such thing. Actually, the cut-off point seems to be 1997, when he did Jackie Brown and Wag the Dog back to back. Two worthy efforts, followed by, let’s see…Analyze This, which would be okay as a one-off send-up of his image, but no, it was only the beginning of the Self-Parody Era, which would encompass not only the sequel Analyze That and the Focker movies, but the immortal Showtime (teaming him with Eddie Murphy and the master himself, William Shatner) and, of course, Rocky and Bullwinkle. (It was while making the latter that he turned up on the Oscars sporting the haircut that led pundits to compare him to “an angry pineapple” and “a retarded convict.” This, truly, is when I should have know it was all over.)

Of course, there have been some dramatic roles, too. There was Men of Honor, in which he screams at Cuba Gooding in some kind of demented Mississippi-by-way-of-the-Cross-Bronx-Expressway drawl. (I saw this on an overseas flight after I ran out of crossword puzzles.) There was Flawless, in which he was a gruff cop who has a stroke and learns to love life again thanks to a piano-playing drag queen. (Need I mention that this was a Joel Schumacher opus? One of my earliest reviews, too.) And he’s got some crappy thriller opening next weekend, on top of last year’s crappy thriller Godsend.

So, I guess the point is, I’m hoping Scorsese wins a shitload of Oscars for The Aviator and can’t find the time to return De Niro’s calls.