by Shawn Levy
There are the makings of a complete performance in those observations, and De Niro’s dossier would go on for pages and pages, noting Burke’s love of ketchup on his food, his preference for Chivas Regal or J&B scotch neat with a glass of water on the side, his workaholism, his inability to relate to women, his love of elevated diction, and especially his singular status as an Irishman working for the Mafia: “Part of my power was Italians needed me. They had the money but I had the connection with the Irish DA and politicians. I being Irish they could trust me. So if I whacked guys from time to time they’d let it go, cause I was too important to them and I knew that.” He also cannily noted another oddity of Jimmy’s status vis-à-vis his Mafia connections: “I did all the shit that the wiseguys wouldn’t and couldn’t do. I just did it! Whatever it was … I’m more of a wiseguy big shot than the actual wiseguy big shots. I got more style than they do.… I act more Italian than the Italians to overcompensate.”
In the course of the film, Jimmy the Gent would age twenty-four years, and De Niro was, predictably, scrupulous in addressing the changes in physique, diction, wardrobe, and especially hair color and hair style that the character would undergo. (During production, he went to a Manhattan nightclub to see the jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott perform and was approached by a woman unknown to him who wanted to know why he looked so gray. “That comes from the aggravation of being a star,” he replied.)
He wasn’t the only actor devoted to verisimilitude throughout the production. Scorsese gave Joe Pesci the go-ahead to fill his prop pistol with blanks for a scene in which he shot an errand boy in a fit of pique, and the loud report of the gun genuinely took the other players in the scene by surprise: “Everyone in the room was shocked,” Pesci recalled. “No one moved. I think they were really scared.”
Pesci also remembered how carefully De Niro observed everything about the film, not just the details concerning Jimmy the Gent. When they filmed the famous body-in-the-car-trunk scene, he said, “I attacked Frank [Vincent] with the knife viciously. After the first take, Bob kept staring at me. I said, ‘How was it? Was I ok?’ Bob said, ‘Yeah, it’s fine.’ But he kept staring like he wanted to tell me something. He said, ‘Well, Joe, your emotions are great, but I don’t see how you can get that knife in and out of the chest area that fast because of the bones and the tendons all around it. It’s such a big butcher knife, it seems you’d have to force it in and force it out.’ That’s Bob. He really wants to help.”
There were even true-to-life details that none of the filmmakers knew about. Cast as Fat Andy, one of the mobsters in the movie’s slow-motion introduction of the Lucchese crew in their nightclub hangout, was Lou Eppolito, a Brooklyn detective who, it later emerged, was an active participant in as many as eight gangland murders, among a number of crimes for which he and a fellow officer were eventually tried and convicted—and sentenced to what was in effect life in prison.
That sort of thing helped infuse the film with the sort of spirit that Scorsese sought. Goodfellas would have a sexy patina that made mob life seem as attractive to the audience as it did to the young Henry Hill, but in the end the violence, disloyalty, and darkness of the life would emerge even more powerfully. “Anyone who wants to live that lifestyle after seeing this movie—it’s beyond me,” the director said. The film was designed to make clear, according to Pileggi, that “the honor code is a myth.… Once Henry’s life is threatened, he has no qualms about testifying. He does no soul-searching because he has no soul.”
DESPITE EVERYTHING THE actor had learned about the real-life Jimmy “the Gent” Burke, the sheer gorgeous style of Goodfellas is the most important determinant in De Niro’s assured, breezy, and unimpeachable performance. The film belongs to Liotta, of course, and Pesci steals it (and was, properly, awarded an Oscar for the job), but De Niro’s every appearance is memorably graced with savvy, showy, well-designed, and well-played moments. He’s playing a fictionalized version of a real character rendered through the memories of another based-on-truth character, and he plays with just the right degree of stylization to fulfill that delicate charge and to enhance the film indisputably.
When he first arrives, in Henry’s memory (which, of course, is the vantage from which the entire film is seen), he is in his late twenties, dark-haired, slick, and voluble, smiling deeply without baring his teeth, sticking C-note tips in people’s shirt pockets, and declaring, with his head cocked at a jaunty angle, “The Irishman is here to take all you [sic] guineas’ money,” the Cadillacs’ boastful R&B hit “Speedoo” his entry music. “It was a glorious time,” Henry remembers; riding Jimmy’s infectious, energetic, and festive vibe, you have to agree.
From there, Jimmy takes on the role of mentoring Henry and Tommy, telling them, like a good coach, when they’ve done well and not and demonstrating with his professionalism and judicious meting out of punishment how the game works. The three are grown men, but Jimmy is the eldest, the most stable, the smartest, the most trustworthy and emulable and wise. He’s also deeply loyal, as he demonstrates by joining in on the beating and murder of a gangster whose offense was a verbal show of disrespect to Tommy (“You insulted him a little bit,” as Jimmy famously points out to the fellow). De Niro leaps into the fray with his patented kick to the body: arms outspread, knee lifted high to bring his full weight to bear on a downward blow with the heel. When next we see him, he’s getting ready to tuck into the scrambled eggs that Tommy’s mother has cooked for the boys, and it’s hard to say which action has more engaged him: stomping a man to the edge of death or spinning a ketchup bottle between his palms to get the contents flowing. He’s got a zest, Jimmy does.
But he’s also extremely vigilant and suspicious, to the point of paranoia and, eventually, murder. After the Lufthansa heist, one dope in the crew after another shows up at a holiday party with an opulent new toy: a fur, a floozy, a Cadillac. And Jimmy dresses them down in what will become an iconic mode of late De Niro temper: “What did I tell you? What … did … I … tell … you?” That face of Jimmy’s coldness is amusing; far less so is the one we see later, when he goes from thinking that he has to whack his crew to save his own skin to knowing that he’ll do it. He’s at the corner of the bar, chatting, smoking, his eyes gelid, moving from the fellow he’s talking to, to whom he smiles insincerely, to the blabbermouth Morrie, the ceaseless irritant of which he plans to relieve himself soon. The camera zooms slowly in on De Niro, Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” on the soundtrack, and his expressions work on two levels: the superficial one of grins and chatter, the subtextual one of psychopathic intent declaring itself. It’s one of the best things De Niro and Scorsese have ever done together.
He has two more standout scenes. Waiting at the diner with Henry for news of Tommy’s initiation into the mob, Jimmy’s all bubbly nerves, eating and laughing at once, clearly relishing life. When he receives bad news instead of good, he rages against the parking lot pay phone and struggles to keep from bursting into tears—one of the best such efforts in De Niro’s career (he never was a very good crier). Later, behind the pair of cheaters he’s taken to wearing in middle age, he seems kindly and caring when telling Karen how to find “some beautiful Dior dresses … down the corner.” In fact, given the circumstances under which they’re meeting—Henry has been busted by the feds and is being leaned on to turn against his friends—Jimmy’s avuncular manner is terrifying. He seems not to have evil intent, but De Niro plays him on a delicate edge in a particularly quiet and attenuated scene, and he thus becomes unreadable. It’s a marvelous trick: nothing in the scene suggests menace … except for everything.
As those reading glasses suggest, De Niro creates a character who spans a couple of decades credibly, graying, giving up a little bit of hairline, and becoming more cautious and more intent on survival with the passing of the years. The film is about Henry Hill, and secondarily about his wife. But Jimmy Conway is the principal third character in that his chronology runs almost as long—though never as deep—as H
enry’s. In a sense, De Niro gets to build an entire character as if he were carrying the film. Rather than mark the transitions, though (save that one from wondering about murder to committing to it), he simply makes them and appears in a slightly older guise: his hair, his clothes, his manner. It’s a performance with flashes in it, and details, but it’s mainly low-key ensemble work, and quite good. It’s only the second time in a collaboration with Scorsese that he hasn’t played the central character, and he’s as engaged in it as in any of the major roles he crafted with the director.
And it was a hit. Goodfellas was released in September 1990 and led the North American box office on its opening weekend with $6.37 million. It wound up lasting five weeks in the top ten, grossing a total of $46.8 million—not a blockbuster but one of the best results its director and his longtime star had enjoyed to that point.
IN AUGUST 1989, virtually as soon as he was done shooting Goodfellas, De Niro found himself in London’s Highlands Hospital, observing and, when possible, interacting with a group of people who’d been living there for more than a half century: patients suffering from the aftereffects of an epidemic of encephalitis, a sickness that had left them immobilized, almost zombielike. He was there in the company of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed British neurologist and author whose 1973 book Awakenings described his work with similar patients in the Bronx in the late 1960s. And he was preparing to play one of Sacks’s patients in a screen adaptation of the book.
Sacks had observed the post-encephalitic patients and theorized that their physical catatonia could in fact be a form of Parkinson’s disease—in effect, their bodily spasms had sped up to a point at which they froze. He experimented with the use of a new drug, L-dopa, which had been developed to slow the spasms of traditional Parkinson’s patients. For a period the post-encephalitic patients responded, unfreezing, coming to life after decades, attempting to merge back into the world, sometimes with alarming results. In the course of time, though, they developed a tolerance for the drug treatment and regressed to their immobilized states.
Sacks’s book had been warmly received in both scientific and literary circles; Harold Pinter had adapted a short play from it, and W. H. Auden had written a poem inspired by it. In 1983, a documentary made for British television told the story and showed Sacks and his actual patients, including some footage from their period of emergence. In 1989, screenwriter Steve Zaillian adapted Sacks’s book as a project for director Penny Marshall, who was fresh off the massive success of Big (which, of course, had nearly starred De Niro). Now she was offering him the role of Leonard Lowe, loosely based on one of Sacks’s patients who was among the earliest—and, when briefly “cured,” the most volatile—of the L-dopa patients. Robin Williams would play Sacks, and shooting would begin in October, meaning De Niro had his work cut out for him in order to segue from the itchy Jimmy the Gent to Leonard, who’d been paralytic for decades.
In order to do so, according to Sacks, De Niro embarked on a serious study of Parkinson’s, paralysis, catatonia, and similar medical conditions. He made particular use of a friend of friends in New York who had a severe case of Parkinson’s. This fellow was responsive to L-dopa and very articulate about what it felt like to be in the throes of his condition and then freed by medication. De Niro interviewed him at length, as he did another Parkinson’s patient, a man whose symptoms resembled those of Sacks’s frozen patients; De Niro had a chance to accompany this fellow to an alternative therapist to see what it was like when his body was, in effect, thawed.
I’ll never forget first meeting him in Penn Station—everyone rushing about at high speed, and there was this real-life, living statue of a man, just standing there still, quite frozen. When we picked our way down the stairs to the train so slowly, I could feel his terrible need for an impetus to move—as if he was flailing in some sort of fog we could both feel. We went to this healer on Long Island who could free him for a while by pressing parts of his body and nerves until Bang! All of a sudden he snapped out of it. He became wildly animated: “We mustn’t miss the train back,” he said, so there we were suddenly jogging along together to the station. He was able to explain to me, articulately, just how he was feeling, and what he was going through. He was a great artist in his own way.
While De Niro observed Sacks’s patients, Sacks observed De Niro, noting how eerily he could slip in and out of various moods—or, more accurately, the expressions of those moods. Watching him rehearse for a scene in which Leonard was particularly exercised, Sacks said, was “like overhearing a man thinking, but thinking with his body … thinking in action.” At other times, watching De Niro play physical crises, Sacks became alarmed at the accuracy of the portrayal, his inner physician emerging from beneath the author visiting the film set: “I forgot he was an actor. I thought he had suddenly lost all his postural reflexes, that there had suddenly been a neurological catastrophe.” He was amazed, too, to see that De Niro couldn’t always turn it off at will; chatting with the actor in his dressing room between takes, Sacks noticed that De Niro’s right foot was turned at a ninety-degree angle, just like the feet of his post-encephalitic patients. He pointed it out, and De Niro replied, “I didn’t realize. I guess it’s unconscious.”
Sacks considered hooking up De Niro to his diagnostic machinery to see if he had actually created a post-encephalitic brain profile in himself, but he ultimately decided against it. Still, ever the neurologist, he developed a theory about De Niro’s technique: “Bob’s method, as far as I could see, was to take in everything he learned about Parkinsonism, absorb it silently, without any external sign, and then let the images sink down into his unconscious and ferment there, uniting with his own experiences, powers, imagination, feelings. Only then would they return so deeply infused with his own character as to be an integral part, an expression of himself”—as good a working definition of Stanislavskian acting as De Niro would have heard in Stella Adler’s classroom or the Actors Studio.
What Sacks didn’t see were the copious line-by-line notes that De Niro made in his script, reminders of virtually every bit of physical acting he wished to do: drooling, twisting his head, fidgeting, rocking, clutching the arms of a chair, shaking, speaking with subtle gradations of looseness and rigidity. De Niro wrote down dozens of questions for Sacks, and continually sought comparisons for the behavior he wished to embody: a sloth, the cartoon Road Runner, various of Sacks’s patients, even Sacks himself.
During the production, De Niro impressed Marshall with his application, his imagination, his versatility: “You say, ‘Bob, comb your hair,’ and he does it several different ways, all amazing to watch.” Even more eye-opening was the day on which Robin Williams accidentally broke De Niro’s nose during a take of a scene in which Sacks was testing Leonard’s reflexes. The blow was so severe, De Niro said, that “we heard a crack—you could hear it on the soundtrack at the rushes.” As Marshall recalled, De Niro turned away immediately, staying in the scene, then turned back to reveal a stream of blood coming from his nose. “Bobby went on with the scene,” Marshall said, astonished. “We did nine more takes.” The next day, after X-rays confirmed the break, swelling and discoloration caused the production to halt for a week so that he could recover. In fact, De Niro was almost grateful for the accident: “I had my nose broken first when I was a kid,” he said, and Williams “straightened it out, knocked it back in the other direction.”
SURELY THE CHIEF appeal for De Niro of playing the role of Leonard Lowe was the chance to perform with his body in a way that he might if he were cast as, say, the Elephant Man onstage: a series of stillnesses, contortions, and spasms that, almost without the need for dialogue, tells the character’s fate. As it stands, Steve Zaillian’s script is painfully pointed and overdetermined (and, almost without saying, Oscar-nominated), and wherever the writing manages to be naturalistic or at ease Penny Marshall imposes a heartless sentimentality, insisting almost fascistically on specific emotional reactions, heavily underscoring her intent wit
h pointed framing and cutting, with reaction shots that are meant to trigger mirrored responses in the viewer, and with a depressingly literal score by Randy Newman.
Still, De Niro is quite strong in the various phases of his role. Leonard is frozen; he thaws; he is restored to normal vitality; he becomes increasingly unable to control his body, first with facial tics and then with waves of spasms; he experiences short freezing spells; finally he returns to the “elsewhere” described by the elderly doctor (Max von Sydow) who first treated patients like him decades before. In all of it, you can see the depth of De Niro’s study and effort, and you are physically uncomfortable with his struggle, just as you might be if you were in the room with him. At times the performance feels a little bit like something whipped up for the workshop, but very often it’s painfully lifelike, and you can’t ignore De Niro for a second when he’s on the screen.
