De Niro: A Life (22 page)

In two of the most important sequences in the film, De Niro acts wordlessly or nearly so, and wins us over entirely. In the first, Piney Woods, the yokel phenom catcher who is clearly the intended replacement for Pearson, picks up his guitar in the locker room and launches into “The Streets of Laredo,” the song from which Mark Harris’s novel takes its title. Everyone in the room knows it’s a song about a dying cowboy, and they try to dissuade him from singing it, but, unaware of Pearson’s condition, he carries on. The camera comes in slowly on De Niro, who tries to appear unconcerned and even appreciative, picking at the laces of his mitt and looking everywhere except at the singer. It’s an exceedingly brave moment in the face of death, and, as with the rest, De Niro plays it with impeccable reserve.

Not long after, illness starts to take a real toll on Pearson, affecting his ability to catch and throw the ball. He’s in the lineup for a crucial late-season game, and declares, “I just feel a little dipsy.” But his walk becomes increasingly unsteady, and he has to brace himself a bit more each time to get in and out of his squat behind the plate. His teammates are protective of him, though. Then, in the ninth inning, they cover for him when a pop fly that ought to be called for by the catcher gives them the chance for the final out. As the first baseman runs in to make the catch and the celebration of the playoff spot launches, Pearson spins slowly by himself, still looking for the ball, lost, uncertain, beyond help. It’s heartbreaking. Not even the sight of him in the hospital soon after, with his head hanging limp and his fingers not entirely able to button his shirt, is quite so affecting. In a physical gesture—a
dance, in effect—De Niro brings to vivid life the pitiable spectacle of the athlete dying young.

B
ANG THE
D
RUM
S
LOWLY
was well received, with strong notices from such widely read critics as Judith Crist (“a beautiful film”), Hollis Alpert (“an absolute gem”), and Rex Reed (“the best film around this summer”), and from the
New York Times
(“close adaptation of a good book has resulted in possibly an even better movie”),
Playboy
(“projected with rough humor and sizzling conviction”), and
New York
(“a super movie”). Hancock’s tact and taste were very widely praised, as were the performances of Michael Moriarty and Vincent Gardenia.

But the biggest praise, in most reviews, was for De Niro. “De Niro’s doomed bumpkin is wonderfully exasperating, one of the most unsympathetic characters ever to win an audience’s sympathy,” said Richard Schickel in
Time
. “Bruce is plumb simple, but Robert De Niro’s strong comic portrayal keeps him from being a straight man,” wrote John Lahr in
Vogue.
And in
Esquire
, the often persnickety John Simon was rapturous:

There were a few naysayers—Stanley Kauffmann, who hadn’t yet enjoyed a De Niro performance, suggested in the
New Republic
that
“De Niro does all right in outline and design, but he doesn’t fill it out with sufficient flavor and body.” But in the main, this calling-card role was received with genuine enthusiasm, respect, and eagerness for more.

T
HEN, ON
O
CTOBER 2
,
Mean Streets
premiered at the New York Film Festival, and the response of those present was ecstatic. De Niro had been universally admired in the likeable
Bang the Drum
, but in the explosive
Mean Streets
, with the flashiest role he’d had since
Glamour, Glory and Gold
, he was a thunderbolt. Keitel was appropriately acknowledged, and Scorsese was catapulted into the front tier of young directors. But De Niro received virtually unanimous acclaim; even those who didn’t care for the picture praised him (in
Esquire
, John Simon called
Mean Streets
“this year’s most overrated film” but acknowledged De Niro’s “bravura performance”).

From the first we see of Johnny Boy Civello, he’s an unknowable conundrum. Walking along in his $25 Dobbs hat and neat red sweater, he tosses, for reasons only he kens, a firework into a U.S. postal box, destroying all the mail inside—an act of wanton anarchy played just for kicks, to which he responds with a gleeful giggle. (That the scene is clearly shot not in lower Manhattan but rather on a sunny, hilly Los Angeles street only adds to the air of incomprehension.) Is he a protester? A vandal? A psychotic? There is no point of reference, no backstory, no explanation of any sort.

He next appears making an entrance into the neighborhood bar owned by Tony Volpe (David Proval). Charlie has learned that Johnny Boy is ducking another friend, Michael, from whom he’s borrowed money. Charlie, who’s already in a state of soul-searching, asks God for a sign. In slow motion, in comes Johnny with two girls, chewing gum, grooving, joking, gazing around knowingly but with a feral quality, the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” capturing the spice of his audacity, volatility, ferocity. Johnny jokingly checks his pants along with his hat and coat, then, fully clothed once again, introduces the girls to Charlie and Tony (“He owns the jernt,” De Niro explains in Brooklynese) and orders them drinks: “Have a 7 and 7: it’s good for
bothayuz.” Charlie invites Johnny into a backroom to discuss a private matter; Johnny doesn’t like it, but he and Charlie defuse the tension by turning the moment into an Alphonse/Gaston routine: “After you.” “No, after you.”

What follows is a throwaway conversation that makes little linear sense but introduces the two characters, their milieu, and their relationship through a series of misunderstandings, evasions, concessions, promises, and untruths, largely improvised (in rehearsal, then honed for the actual filming), much of it irrelevant to the story, a jokey tennis rally that plays a bit like an Abbott and Costello routine and a bit like an FBI wiretap transcript of a pair of mobsters trying to avoid being
too
precise in discussing their crimes.

Charlie wants to know what Johnny has been doing with the money he’s earned on the crummy job that Charlie’s uncle has secured for him, and Johnny—slick, slippery, jivey, a defiant liar—comes clean but only in ways that, if anything, further muddy matters. “I’m so depressed about other things that I can’t worry about payments,” he explains, and it’s easy to see why: earning $110 a week, he owes $700 to Jimmy Sparks, $1,300 to Frankie Bones, an unspecified but larger sum to Michael, another unspecified debt to Joe Black, and two tabs at Tony’s bar. De Niro plays it with a conspiratorial intimacy; Johnny knows that Charlie is buying the story sympathetically, and he milks it, biting his knuckle with frustration and focusing on irrelevant details. The sense imparted is that Johnny Boy is desperate, self-destructive, conniving—a real loose cannon—but that his bond with Charlie is sincere (it’s based in part on a youthful incident in which Johnny Boy took a beating that Charlie managed to escape). What’s more, De Niro is quite funny, tossing off Italian American slang and hand gestures with saucy verve, grinning broadly in that soon-to-be-world-famous fashion that makes his whole face pinch up like an asterisk. The viewer, like Charlie, is on his side.

But just as that exploding mailbox ought to have signaled, Johnny Boy is not to be trusted. He’s dangerous. We see him next in a car headed to help collect a debt for a friend from a pool hall operator who refuses to pay. Right away, Johnny Boy is less a diplomat than an instigator. When the disagreement turns into a fight, Johnny Boy is the first
of his group to dive in and the first to grab a pool cue as a weapon. Ultimately, he’s beset by four of the other mob, and even the intervention of the police doesn’t put a lid on his attitude. The matter seems settled, but then Johnny Boy threatens to set it off once again: “Don’t fuckin’ touch me, scumbag!” he snarls at the reluctant debt payer, as if he had some sort of moral high ground in the matter of welshing on a bet.

The pool hall fight is only the first episode in a massive, event-filled day that includes the unveiling of a caged tiger in the backroom of Tony’s bar, a random revenge shooting, a mock gladiatorial battle with garbage can lids, and finally Johnny and Charlie crashing in Charlie’s bed. Throughout, at play De Niro gives Johnny Boy an almost rubbery physicality—a huge gaping laugh as he ices a swollen eye, a belly-out gesture of macho authority, a compulsive lurch toward the suggestion of a card game. He’s an unbridled id, subject to wild impulses, civilized only in appearance, and only barely.

When Johnny Boy falls out of the story, the film feels less energized, less likely to explode. When he comes back, he’s once again in anarchic mode, up on a rooftop firing a pistol in the sky, at war with his very surroundings. His antics are designed, he says, to “wake up the neighborhood,” and when an errant shot hits an apartment, he declares, “I hate that woman with a passion, a vengeance,” as if personal animosity could excuse his recklessness. Soon he’ll make a fuck-you gesture to the Empire State Building, a sawed-off King Kong in a final act of defiance before his fall.

And fall Johnny does. When all his lifelines are denied him, Johnny turns on his last friend. “I ain’t smart,” he says, taunting Charlie. “I’m stupid, remember? I’m a
strunz.
I’m so stupid you gotta look out for me. Right? Right?” He mocks Charlie’s even-temperedness in singsong, until Charlie has had enough and slaps him.

There’s a final act of self-immolation in Tony’s bar, where Johnny Boy offers Michael a mere $10 toward his debt. Michael refuses the money, and Johnny Boy explicitly mocks him: “I fuck you right where you breathe, ’cause I don’t give two shits for you, or nobody else.… Fuck face. Dunce-ski. Asshole.” (This is the stuff that enraged Romanus.) He pulls out his pistol and is disarmed; when it’s revealed that the gun has no bullets in it, Johnny, his pallor ghostly, flashes a bitter
grin at Charlie and tells him, “You got what you wanted.” Johnny Boy has become a sin-eater, devouring the misdeeds that Charlie has thus far assumed as part of his fraternal obligation to his friend, in a cack-handed effort to be a man of respect.

It’s a remarkable performance: charismatic, unpredictable, streetwise, mercurial, appealing, appalling. De Niro is not, despite his name, a genuine Little Italy hoodlum, but he has alchemized his observations of them—their clothes, their slang, their mien—into a character that’s indistinguishable from the genuine article. It’s Charlie’s movie in terms of weight, focus, and theme, and Keitel is very strong, but De Niro’s Johnny Boy is easily the most memorable thing on the screen.

And the idea that you could leave a theater showing
Mean Streets
and walk into another showing
Bang the Drum Slowly
right afterward is simply staggering. As an actor’s breakout, it’s like a boxer throwing a combination of punches too fast for the eye to see: the result is a knockout that there’s simply no way of explaining. De Niro completely and credibly transformed himself into two utterly distinct people with virtually nothing in common and had done so simultaneously and without preliminary fanfare. It was simply dazzling.

I
T WAS ALMOST
as if film critics were in competition to discover and praise
Mean Streets.
Pauline Kael, in a famous review in the
New Yorker
, anticipated the puzzlement of the wide movie audience by declaring, “This picture is so original that some people will be dumbfounded.… By the end, you’re likely to be open-mouthed.” In the
New York Times
, Vincent Canby wrote, “Some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter. Such a film is ‘Mean Streets.’ ” And Jon Landau of
Rolling Stone
declared it “the most original American movie of the year.” (This was the sort of thing that likely compelled John Simon’s backlash.)

The acting was widely praised. “There have rarely been performances of the caliber of De Niro’s and Keitel’s,” said Stuart Byron in the
Real Paper
of Boston. “They don’t seem to act their roles but live and breathe them.” In the
New York Times
, Frank Rich said that De
Niro was “rapidly becoming the movies’ foremost embodiment of sublingual schleppiness.” Paul Zimmerman of
Newsweek
opined, “Beautifully realized in all his self-destructive flamboyance by Robert De Niro, Johnny Boy is a parody of the cool mafioso.” And
Variety
predicted that the performance “should finally move [De Niro] out of the ‘promising’ category into which he has been regrettably stuck for five years.”

There was a dismissive second notice in the
New York Times
by freelance writer Foster Hirsch, who relentlessly chided both Scorsese and De Niro for a lack of originality: “Like the movie in which it’s the glittering centerpiece, the performance is too studied, too influenced by too many movies.” And Stanley Kauffmann in the
New Republic
found a decidedly left-handed way of complimenting the rising star: