A few words about "Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor"

On July 28, Phaidon will release two new books in its Cahiers du Cinema “Anatomy of an Actor” series, one of which is my own study of Robert De Niro. The oth­er is Amy Nicholson’s look at the work of Tom Cruise, an intriguing excerpt or off­shoot of which appears here. I sup­pose a good num­ber of read­ers out there are famil­i­ar with the series, which exam­ines careers of con­tem­por­ary act­ors via detailed essays on ten indi­vidu­al films. Although we’re still almost two months from the book’s actu­al pub date (and there will be events around the release of the book, and hope­fully some excerp­tions and inter­views here and there pri­or to the big day, which I’ll keep you informed about, both here and on my Twitter feed [@Glenn_Kenny]) I thought it would not be com­pletely use­less to talk a little bit about the book now. 

I now recall that I neg­lected to thank the film­maker and writer Nicholas Saada in the acknow­ledge­ments sec­tion of the book, which is def­in­itely my bad because he appar­ently set the ball rolling, refer­ring an edit­or at the then-newly-formed Cahiers du Cinema imprint at Phaidon to me. I had an appoint­ment with said edit­or around July of 2012, when she was vis­it­ing New York. She showed me a few of the new Cahiers titles, includ­ing Michael Henry Wilson’s mam­moth Scorsese on Scorsese, and asked me if I had any ideas. I imme­di­ately pitched a Richard Quine bio­graphy. “Yes, he is bril­liant, but…” was the response, and then we moved on to the just-launched Anatomy of an Actor series, and I said I’d put togeth­er ten films of De Niro’s that might make for a com­pre­hens­ive or at least intriguing study. The ten films were, and remained:

Bang the Drum Slowly, John Hancock, 1973

Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese, 1973

The Godfather, Part II, Francis Ford Coppola, 1974

Taxi Driver, Scorsese, 1976

Raging Bull, Scorsese, 1980

The King of Comedy, Scorsese, 1983

Midnight Run, Martin Brest, 1988

Awakenings, Penny Marshall, 1990

Meet the Parents, Jay Roach, 2000

Stone, John Curran, 2010

There was some con­cern about my not includ­ing 1995’s Heat, which I do treat in a side­bar; my logic was that his appear­ance in that film, while con­tain­ing a superb per­form­ance, did not con­sti­tute a latter-day career mile­stone, so to speak. From Midnight Run on, a lot of, if not most of, De Niro’s work has to do with exploit­ing his cachet as a movie star, a status that had nev­er really been con­ferred to him pri­or to the Brest film. Awakenings and Meet the Parents, regard­less of what you think of them, rep­res­ent moves on a movie industry chess board, while Heat merely keeps the core con­titu­ency happy. Also, I sus­pec­ted that Karina Longworth would tackle that film in her own Anatomy of Al Pacino, which was close to pub­lic­a­tion as I star­ted work on De Niro. As it hap­pens, I was cor­rect in my sur­mise, and Karina did a ter­ri­fc job look­ing at both act­ors in her Heat chapter. (I should thank Karina here for her words of advice and encour­age­ment on this pro­ject. Over the years in enga­ging her I have been unfor­giv­ably rude and obnox­ious; one of the many good things about tak­ing on this pro­ject was that it gave me an appro­pri­ate oppor­tun­ity to reach out to her with an apo­logy, which she gra­ciously accep­ted, and I am happy to have men­ded fences with her.)

When word got out that I was doing this pro­ject (and it was quite a bit of time before I got the go-ahead), some people asked me if I was going to “take De Niro to task” for such depra­d­a­tions as Rocky and Bullwinkle, 15 Minutes, a half a dozen VODish titles co-starring 50 Cent, etc., etc. The answer then and now is/was “No.”  This is not to say that I lav­ish praise on such efforts. In my intro­duc­tion, after not­ing that in mak­ing Rocky and Bullwinkle and Shark Tale, De Niro was at least in part motiv­ated by a desire to be in some­thing that his young kids could see, I con­tin­ue, “The main prob­lem with Rocky and Bullwinkle, and to an argu­ably less­er extent Shark Tale, is that they ended up being movies that no one should see.” However. I don’t believe it is ever the crit­ic’s job to take an artists “to task” as such, or, for that mat­ter, to offer career advice. I gotta be hon­est, it drives me fuck­ing nuts when I read some­body offer­ing “X really ought to make a chil­dren’s film” or “Y ought to work with Z;” it always strikes me as smug busy­body­ing, the middlebrow answer to TMZ cov­er­age. What I try to do in the book, true to its title, is exam­ine De Niro’s work and his choices, and also to dig up some sat­is­fy­ing answers to ques­tions that seem to tor­ment some of his one-time admirers. But the ful­crum of my thes­is has to do with how we myth­o­lo­gize great per­formers, and how in so doing we’re almost doomed to be even­tu­ally dis­ap­poin­ted in them. 

That said, I am cer­tainly very glad the little-seen Stone exists, because once you get to the con­tem­por­ary sec­tion of De Niro’s career, good per­form­ances in good movies are thin on the ground, there’s no get­ting around it. I would have not really enjoyed delving back into Being Flynn, echoes of Taxi Driver or no; as strong as its cent­ral per­form­ances are, it’s even­tu­ally almost as sen­ti­ment­al as, well, Awakenings. And while in Awakenings the phys­ic­al pre­ci­sion of De Niro’s per­form­ance was a push­back to the sen­ti­ment­aliy, here no such sub­ver­sion is allowed to occur.  If you haven’t seen Stone, I’d sug­gest you seek it out now, even if you don’t plan on buy­ing my book. It is strange, strong, res­ol­utely unsen­ti­ment­al. My chapter on the film con­tains some ter­rif­ic insights from Edward Norton, who was kind enough to grant me an interview.