De Niro: A Life (55 page)

De Niro certainly took a serious tack. He spoke at length with veterans who were dealing with post-traumatic stress, read up on PTSD and the impact of Agent Orange, and, more mundanely, shopped for his own wardrobe in the sort of Main Street clothing store he felt his character would patronize. Having spent the first years of his film career playing a series of men who were in some way affected by the war, he felt the gravity of returning to see how they were faring a decade later: “
When I was doing ‘The Deer Hunter,’ ” he reflected, “I spent a lot of time with veterans, too. But that was like 11 years ago. They didn’t talk about certain things then, the feelings. Now other things are coming to the surface. So in a sense, this movie is like a continuation of the other, like what might happen to the guy after he was home for a while.… They suffer in silence. But one thing I can tell you is that they don’t like being portrayed as crazy all the time. And I have sympathy with that.” In his publicity appearances for the film, which were relatively extensive, including a premiere to benefit children born with birth defects caused by their fathers’ exposure to Agent Orange, he kept returning to the idea that a great deal of the emotional pain caused by Vietnam was only now becoming clear: “
There’s a feeling veterans have, and Americans have, that something happened, that they were involved in a failure or whatever. A lot of veterans were hurt, mentally or physically.”

His character, Megs, was drawn as a live wire, and in his extensive script notes for the film—far exceeding the work he did for
Midnight
Run—he reminded himself to keep his energy up, to always act peppy, upbeat, even half-cocked (“
think of Leonard Melfi,” he wrote, referring to a famed underground playwright and boozer of 1960s New York, “always laughing, drunk, maybe fighting in bars”). As he described him in an interview, the character was “a dog. A stray dog. A kind of mangy dog mutt.” The film was released to very little commercial impact and tepid, although never less than respectful, reviews.

And almost immediately after shooting a movie in Connecticut about Vietnam veterans, he found himself embroiled in a dispute
with Vietnam veterans in Connecticut about another film that he was shooting, this one with Jane Fonda, the longtime bane of supporters of the war and, especially, of the men who fought it.

He and Fonda were making a film based on the novel
Union Street
by the British author Pat Barker. The script went by that title, then briefly by
Letters
, and finally, during production, was named after the lead characters,
Stanley and Iris.
Adapted by celebrated screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, a married couple who’d broken into the movies in the 1940s and had worked together for almost all of that time, creating such films as
The Long Hot Summer
,
Hud
, and
Conrack
, it deals with the romance of a baker and would-be inventor who falls in love with a woman who comes to work at his cake shop a few years after the death of her husband. The baker is a mystery to the woman—affable but remote. Only after they start to become close does she learn the embarrassing secret that he has been hiding for years: he cannot read or write. What looked like a low-key love story about a pair of blue-collar lonelyhearts was, at another level, a film about the not-as-uncommon-as-one-might-think condition of adult illiteracy.

Directing would be Martin Ritt, a longtime member of the Actors Studio and a survivor of the Hollywood blacklist who had made such pictures as
Hud
,
The Long Hot Summer
,
Hombre
,
Norma Rae
, and
Sounder.
Ritt was known for getting big stars to give credible performances as ordinary people and for championing themes of social justice and responsibility in his films. He wasn’t a big moneymaker, but he was respected.

None of that mattered, though, to veterans groups around Waterbury, Connecticut (which was standing in for western Massachusetts in the production), when word reached them that Fonda would be living and working in their midst for a few months. When a casting call for locals was held in April, a rally was organized to disrupt it, with more than one thousand protesters organized in opposition to Fonda by representatives of the American Legion (in this case, mostly World War II and Korean War veterans). Fonda met several times with veterans groups in the coming months, and she and De Niro participated in a fund-raising event in Middlebury, Connecticut, for Vets Who Care, an organization dedicated to helping the handicapped children of
Vietnam vets exposed to Agent Orange. The combination of apologies, conversations, and charitable efforts went a long way toward mollifying the hostility, but the production would be haunted by small clutches of protesters throughout the late summer and fall, when shooting took place.

De Niro was protected from the controversy because he’d had a long-standing association with Vietnam veterans. During the making of
Jackknife
, he involved himself in charitable efforts aimed at supporting their causes, and he was among the celebrities who read aloud the letters written home by servicepeople in the documentary
Dear America
, which was produced by the HBO cable network and was received well enough to get a theatrical release, a rarity. His continued association with veterans groups resulted in his receiving an honor from VETCO, a theatrical forum for actors who had served in Vietnam, and such was his respect for the group’s cause that he showed up in person to accept, something he was generally loath to do.

So while Fonda dealt with controversy, De Niro was free to immerse himself in a part that, like those in
Midnight Run
and
Falling in Love
, required no external transformation. Instead, he dove into study of the phenomenon of adult illiteracy, watching hours of personal stories that were videotaped for him by a research assistant. He learned little tricks of hiding the condition—pretending to leave one’s reading glasses at home; asking waiters to suggest items from the menu; taking extreme care with household chemicals; pretending to dislike board games, which often involve a lot of reading; being extremely careful about using public transportation and following road maps; and so on. (And he explained that videotape, as opposed to actual conversation, was now his preferred mode of research because it meant not only less work but less engagement with the work: “
I could just play it back and pick up a lot of nuances that way,” he said, “and it was at my leisure, and I didn’t have to worry and extend so much of myself.”)

The chief thing he took away, something he underscored more than once in his notes, was the sense of shame, of secretiveness, of having only partially grown up, of being always on the edge of making an embarrassing mistake or, worse, of being revealed. “There are many examples that I can think of for myself,” he scribbled in his script (in
part he compared it to his very limited knowledge of Italian). He came to realize that an adult hiding an inability to read was self-isolating, both in the ordinary things of life and in the deepest emotions, and that became the key to his character—a constant bluffing, defensiveness, and low-level anxiety.

The videotapes were also useful as a road map to the western Massachusetts accent he wanted to use for his character. Other than that, it was simply a matter of finding the right clothes—he went to the same shop in the town of Meriden, Connecticut, that he’d patronized while making
Jackknife
—and working on the emotional truth of the scenes with Fonda, because this was, in effect, only the second full-fledged love story of his career.

Shooting finished in October 1988, but MGM didn’t believe very strongly in the film and held it for release until February 1990, when it would be neglected not only by Oscar voters but by general audiences.

B
Y THE TIME
Stanley and Iris
made its way meekly through distribution, De Niro had already come and gone from theaters in yet another box office disappointment.
We’re No Angels
was a project that he himself had instigated back in 1987, when he and his new buddy Sean Penn decided that they wanted to work together. “
I like Sean,” he remembered. “I have a lot of respect for him, and I know he’s a serious actor. We were talking, and I said, ‘Let’s get together and try and do something.’ Then we got Art Linson.”

Linson, demonstrating the classic producer’s ability to forget past slights if there’s a new project in the air, discussed with David Mamet an idea he had for a story about prison escapees hiding among holy men at a monastery, based loosely on the largely forgotten 1955 Humphrey Bogart comedy
We’re No Angels.
As in that film, the characters in the tale Linson had in mind would turn from fugitives seeking only to save their hides to Samaritans actually doing some good in the world for others.

“
When Art called I knew it could bode no good,” Mamet half joked. “But he’s fairly persuasive.” Mamet set the first draft of the screenplay in the 1930s in a town on the U.S. side of the Canadian border, and
he forged two characters—hard-boiled Ned and simpleminded Jim—based on what he saw to be the comic personalities of De Niro and Penn, respectively. The script was revised in 1988 to a level that got Paramount Pictures, still tallying the take of
The Untouchables
, involved, and shooting was scheduled for February through April of the following year in British Columbia, which was becoming a go-to spot for Hollywood productions seeking to save money on wages, taxes, and other expenses.

The savings were important, as the film wound up being a more ambitious undertaking than its casual genesis might have foretold. The producers built an entire 1930s town in the woods: two dozen buildings, actual roads, and so forth, at a cost of U.S. $2.5 million—the largest set ever constructed in Canada. Orchestrating it all was the Irish novelist and screenwriter-director Neil Jordan, who’d broken out in the business with 1986’s
Mona Lisa
but run into trouble with his follow-up, the expensive ghost story
High Spirits
, which had tanked at the box office. He was a little chary of American Method actors, but he loved the setting and he loved the script, the first he’d ever directed that he hadn’t written. “
The script has all the things I like—Madonnas, deaf children, a whore with a heart of gold, and low-grade characters who are redeemed,” he said.

One of the key characters, as Jordan alluded to, was Molly, the town washerwoman and prostitute whose connection to Ned becomes a significant element in the story. Linson and company went through a copious list of possibilities in casting the role: Julia Roberts, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Amy Madigan, Kathleen Quinlan, Diane Lane, Rene Russo, Beverly D’Angelo, and Ann Magnuson, among others. The part finally went to Demi Moore, who possessed a toughness of voice and demeanor that, it was felt, suited the period of the film.

That sense of a bygone era, Linson argued, was one of the film’s great assets, especially as embodied in its stars. “
Sean and Bob,” he said, “don’t have faces, they have mugs.… These guys are not going to be modeling clothes in a department store when their careers are over.” (De Niro, hearing of this description from a reporter, considered it for a while before declaring, “I can live with that.”)

De Niro tried as much as was practical to get into the low-key energy
of the production, forfeiting the right to stay at a five-star hotel near the set and instead traveling back and forth from more modest accommodations. He read extensively on what prison conditions had been like in Vermont in the 1930s, making contact with a former warden who wrote him a detailed account of the daily lives of his charges. And, he later confessed, he struggled a bit with the tempo of the comedy and the responsibility to play a tough guy of the 1930s as Mamet had written it. One scene in particular vexed him:

In May, when filming ceased a few weeks later than it had been scheduled to, De Niro got a letter from Paramount president Sid Ganis: “Congrats on the wrap … From what I gather, it was a rough one—with all kinds of day-to-day stuff to deal with … but to me and the gang here at Paramount it feels and looks like something very special, very funny and very touching.”

It wasn’t, however, a feeling that they were able to convey to audiences.
We’re No Angels
opened just before Christmas, a curious choice for such offbeat fare. If it proved, finally, too big a production for its intimate and often funny script, it’s saved by the performances, particularly by Penn’s as a street-flavored simpleton, a kind of Stan Laurel to De Niro’s hard, cynical, and selfish Oliver Hardy.

De Niro’s Ned truly does feel like he’s been sharing a jail cell with Humphrey Bogart or George Raft—there’s a distinctly old-time air to
his coarseness, his calculation, his energy. He gives a clever performance of a man giving a performance—a hardened convict attempting to behave as he thinks a priest might, even when events around him drive him to the sort of fury that got him into prison in the first place. (In one of the film’s little in-jokes, he must listen to the confession of an adulterous sheriff’s deputy, played by Bruno Kirby, who, of course, was the young, carpet-stealing Clemenza in
The Godfather, Part II.
) The film is, to borrow Andrew Sarris’s useful rubric, lightly likeable, if never quite profound, not as kinky as the best Neil Jordan, not as caustic as the best David Mamet, not as soul-baring as the best De Niro or Penn. But it continually offers up small delights. It certainly deserved better than its almost complete dismissal at the box office, where it recouped only slightly half of its budget.