by Shawn Levy
De Niro was concerned that, despite the over-the-top nature of the story, there be an air of credibility throughout, and he sent the script to friends in the New York media, including Tom Brokaw of NBC and Judith Miller of the New York Times, to vet it for plausibility; he also asked for a review from veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke. All three told him that the thing might be overly broad and was defiantly cynical but that there was a vein of realism in it. The film was shot in early 1997, just after the reelection of Bill Clinton, and, being a small movie with big stars, was released in late December, when film award talk was heating up—albeit on only three screens in New York and Los Angeles, to qualify for Oscar consideration.
It’s hard to see how anyone thought of De Niro to play the WASPy, donnish Brean, but he seems to love the role: the shabby, vaguely academic mien and wardrobe, the slippery logic, the nonstop motion and rat-a-tat patter. He plays it low-key and, indeed, low-fi, not trying to create a character so much as slip into the role unnoticed, rather as he had in recent years in the likes of Cop Land and Marvin’s Room. He carries much more of the film, though Hoffman is funnier by far and would be nominated for an Oscar (as, a bit curiously, Best Actor). There’s an ease and likeability to Brean: he appreciates the skill and energy of his colleagues. He relates beautifully to Motss in the way they talk, the way they seem physically relaxed around each other, the way their minds and skill sets meld. In reality, Brean is a bad guy, intent on fooling the public and corrupting the government for the sake of political gain. But De Niro plays him so offhandedly and agreeably that the audience can’t help but want him to succeed. Ultimately, Wag the Dog is remembered best for presaging eerily a real-life political drama, but it’s still, in the main, a film dotted with pleasures, and De Niro’s unaffected work serves it well.
The full release came a few weeks later, on January 11, and it made a respectable $7.8 million. And then, just one week later, a scandal involving Bill Clinton and a former White House intern, a young woman named Monica Lewinsky, stunned the world, leaking first on fledgling Internet-based news sites and then into the mainstream media, creating a long-running furor that ended in the impeachment of the president before the year was out.
It was a perfect instance of life catching up to art: among the commonly seen images of Lewinsky was one in which she wore a beret just like that sported by the underage girl in Wag the Dog. The tiny movie made on a lark had become synonymous with the juiciest presidential scandal since Watergate, and the film went on to play in theaters until spring, earning a healthy $43 million box office and Oscar nominations for Hoffman and the screenplay, and making the phrase “wag the dog” a kind of shorthand for the political use of media to distract the public from unpleasant realities.
DE NIRO CHOSE yet another ensemble role with his next picture, Jackie Brown, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s novel Rum Punch by writer-director Quentin Tarantino. De Niro was cast as Louis Gara, a newly minted parolee who’s back in business with his sometime partner in crime Ordell Robbie. Sloppy and out of sorts, Louis sits in quiet wonderment at the new world that has emerged during his years in prison: the technology, the sexual mores, the cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement. He was once sharp and dangerous, but incarceration has softened and neutered him, and even though Ordell wants to take him back on as a colleague, Louis needs more supervision than the services he can provide would seem to warrant.
Tarantino was an immense De Niro fan, both as a film buff and as an aspiring actor. “De Niro was it,” he once said. “He was who everyone in my acting classes wanted to be.” On British TV in 1994, not long before the release of Pulp Fiction, Tarantino provided introductions to a “Season of De Niro,” including airings of Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Deer Hunter, and Once Upon a Time in America. Getting a personal hero into the film was a coup for the director, but it may have paled in comparison to the fact that his producer, Harvey Weinstein, let him fill the principal roles in the film with two nearly forgotten stars of the 1970s: Pam Grier and Robert Forster.
The mammoth success of Pulp Fiction meant that the follow-up would be gobbled up by the film press and audiences alike. But Tarantino chose, cannily, not to push the wild tenor of his previous films any further. Rather, Jackie Brown would be closer to a character study, the story of an airline hostess (Grier) coerced by law enforcement into turning against Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson) and using her own wiles and the help of a friendly bail bondsman (Forster) to keep herself alive and free.
De Niro, like Bridget Fonda, Chris Tucker, and Michael Keaton, was but a minor player in this deadly roundelay. As a result, he did very little work to prepare for the role. He grew out his hair and a goatee, he made a very few character notes in his script (“Do I smoke?… I’m trying to be hip, black … High now! Feeling good”), and he concentrated mainly on wardrobe. Nothing about Louis is stylish, but he does carry a sort of cool old-school vibe. To that end, Tarantino dressed De Niro in bowling shirts and Hawaiian shirts, some designed for the production, some of them vintage items from the director’s own closet. A few of those items were actually worn by De Niro in the film, but he and his director failed to bond over anything more substantial than shirts; rumors from the set indicated, in fact, that De Niro didn’t care for Tarantino’s manner and found the working environment uncomfortable.
That didn’t affect his performance. There’s humor and wistful sadness to Louis Gara. His post-prison manners are crude and simpleminded—one aspect of modern life after another causes him to revert to a watchful shell. He’s glad of Ordell’s solicitude, of the chance to get back on his feet, of the booze and weed and the minute or two of sex he’s granted by Melanie (Bridget Fonda), but the world outside prison confuses and scares him. Asked to do something simple by Ordell—to accompany Melanie to pick up a stash of money—he is out of his element and flustered; it takes only a few verbal goads for him to turn on Melanie and do something truly stupid and, in fact, unforgivable. His weakness and incapacity finally come to define him, and he becomes another employee Ordell must, in his phrase, “let go.” It’s a measure of the man that Louis used to be that Ordell is practically on the verge of tears when he does so.
What the fuck happened to you, man? Shit, your ass used to be beautiful.
—ORDELL ROBBIE,
giving Louis Gara his pink slip in Jackie Brown
IN 1998, DE NIRO SUCCUMBED TO AN INVITATION TO SIT FOR A live interview as part of the popular Inside the Actors Studio television series, which took footage from a lengthy conversation between a notable actor and moderator James Lipton, with current acting students and members of the public in the audience.
What was curious about the event beyond anything said onstage was its timing in his career. For a few years, De Niro’s acting choices—the actual roles and films and collaborators—had become the subject of cynicism in the critical community. Starting with a Rolling Stone review of This Boy’s Life entitled “Is De Niro Slipping?” (it was a misleading headline: the gist of the article argued, “No, he’s not, or at least not entirely”), there was a regular stream of articles questioning and even lambasting him for letting his status as “greatest actor since Brando” fade. Two antagonists in particular—Tom Carson of Esquire and GQ (the magazines most apt to bust De Niro’s chops for not consenting to proper interviews) and David Thomson of London’s Independent—each went after him more than once in articles entitled “Phoning It In,” “Weight Problem,” “The Buck Hunter,” and so forth. The gist of their arguments was that De Niro was coasting on a well-earned but insufficiently sustained reputation, that his most recent projects weren’t up to the caliber of his talents, and that his talent itself was rusting or withering from lack of proper use, like the muscles of a paralytic. “Robert De Niro is a hack,” Carson wrote bluntly, while Thomson took a more expansive view, trying to put what he saw as De Niro’s dubious choices in the context of his age, his family status, and his business activities.
It was true tha
t De Niro had become more prolific over the years. He’d had thirteen films released in the 1970s, and the same number in the 1980s, but when the 1990s finally ended, he would have made twenty-four in those ten years alone. Granting that some of these represented fleeting appearances (as, to be fair, had been the case in previous decades as well, although less often), it was a significant increase in output. But it was true, too, that the 1990s saw him emerge as a director and producer, and he worked with such estimable collaborators as Scorsese (three times), Michael Mann, Barry Levinson (twice), Quentin Tarantino, John Frankenheimer, Alfonso Cuarón, Kenneth Branagh, Tony Scott, Harold Ramis and James Mangold. True, it wasn’t equal to his stunning stretch of work from 1973 through 1984, which included two Oscar wins and perhaps nine classic performances. But it wasn’t outright hackery, either, and almost every film in the period had something in it that made clear why De Niro had been attracted to it: a challenge in the characterization, an estimable set of colleagues, a story of weight or interest. There would come a time when he turned more toward comedy than to drama, when he seemed to be working for the experience of continuing to work rather than some greater artistic end. But it didn’t come as early in his career as his detractors seemed to believe. Not every film he made was up to the level of The Godfather, Part II or Raging Bull—or even, maybe, True Confessions or Midnight Run. But he hadn’t, as his detractors claimed, settled greedily into remunerative self-parody. The critical dismissals would keep coming, though, particularly as he turned to comedy and actually scored some box office hits. But the true depth of what he was choosing to do and what he was capable of doing continued, at least for a while longer, to be more complex and interesting than their authors would credit.
IN THE EARLY months of 1996, De Niro acquired a copy of the Cliffs Notes companion to Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. He wasn’t taking adult ed courses or seeking self-betterment. He was considering a role in a version of the oft-filmed classic updated for contemporary sensibilities. Ethan Hawke was to play the lead role and Gwyneth Paltrow his dream girl, and De Niro was being courted by producer Art Linson to play the small but vital role of the escaped convict who is aided by the protagonist and goes on to return the favor.
The first drafts of the script came to De Niro while he was visiting London in February 1996, with the prompt to decide soon whether he was interested, as shooting was planned for Eastertime. It turned out that production didn’t begin until the summer, under the eye of the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón, then best known for his lovely children’s film A Little Princess. By that time, De Niro had agreed to play the role of the prisoner Magwitch, renamed Lustig for the adaptation (Hawke’s Pip had been similarly rechristened as Finn, a decision reached on the first day of shooting). It was another cameo—a few days of work, maybe a couple of weeks—and he was doing that sort of thing so often at that point that nobody blinked at it.
The script, by John Belushi’s onetime writing partner Mitch Glazer, who had already modernized A Christmas Carol into Scrooged, was so different from the original that De Niro never did crack his Cliffs Notes. Rather, he focused on the physicality of the character: a hobbled walk, a cagy silence, and, especially, a beard. His production files were filled with scores of images of famous beardos from history: Fidel Castro, Rasputin, Lenin, Trotsky, Ulysses Grant, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and anonymous Orthodox Jews and Russian peasants. And he called in a small favor from Linson: his daughter Drena was cast in a tiny role as an art gallery assistant (Grazer’s Pip/Finn had been reshaped into a painter).
The film appeared in the early part of 1998, to disappointing box office. Just fifteen months earlier, the same distributor, 20th Century Fox, had a massive hit with Baz Luhrmann’s update of Shakespeare, Romeo + Juliet, but Cuarón’s Great Expectations didn’t spark nearly the same heat.
THE SHORT FORAY into the classics, even modernized, struck a chord in De Niro, however. As he was working on Great Expectations, he was producing an adaptation of Moby Dick written by the English novelist Philip Kerr and retitled Ahab to give a sense of its emphasis and the role De Niro saw himself as playing. This was the biggest thing that he and Tribeca had undertaken to date. So far the company had been content to put its name on a couple of De Niro’s films and to work mainly on small, indie-scale movies and TV series, such as TriBeCa and New York Undercover, neither of which had succeeded in holding on to an audience for very long. Ahab, though, was to be a full-scale seafaring epic, with significant water work and special effects. On its own, Tribeca couldn’t come up with anything near the more than $50 million that would be required to make it, so De Niro and Jane Rosenthal courted financial backers, eventually finding a partner in Shochiku, a Japanese film studio, which was willing to provide funds for three projects, including Ahab.
Even so, De Niro was never quite able to pull the trigger. He studied seafaring art from the nineteenth century and watched adaptations of Mutiny on the Bounty, Renny Harlin’s Cutthroat Island, and the two epic films about Christopher Columbus released in 1992. Kerr’s script bobbed around the Tribeca offices throughout 1996, and De Niro even sent it to Steven Spielberg, who knew from large-budget ocean-based movies, to get a reading on the material and the cost. “It’s a very good project with exceptional writing,” Spielberg replied. “I liked it a lot. I honestly don’t know, with all my special effects expertise and experience on the water, whether $50 million is enough to put all of this up there.” Eventually the project simply died.
Even with Ahab a no-go, and as busy as he was now that he had come to live with the idea that he was an actor for hire, he could have been much, much busier if he had had the time or the inclination. His name was attached to dozens of films throughout the 1990s. Some of the parts he rejected would go on to be filled by other actors: the Harvey Keitel role in Spike Lee’s Clockers, the Jack Nicholson role in Danny DeVito’s Hoffa, the Kevin Spacey role in Curtis Hansen’s L.A. Confidential, the Armand Assante role in Arne Glimcher’s The Mambo Kings, the Al Pacino role in Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday, the Jack Nicholson role in Rob Reiner’s A Few Good Men, the Billy Bob Thornton role in Monster’s Ball (Queen Latifah was rumored to be cast opposite him), the Joe Pesci role in Chris Columbus’s Home Alone, the John Malkovich role in Jane Campion’s The Portrait of a Lady, the Michael Douglas role in David Seltzer’s Shining Through, the Paul Newman role in Marek Kanievska’s Where the Money Is, the Nicolas Cage role in George Gallo’s Trapped in Paradise, and the Liam Neeson role (opposite Meryl Streep) in Barbet Schroeder’s Before and After.
The Hollywood trade papers carried word of him starring in biopics based on the lives of boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, Cuban leader Fidel Castro, painters Diego Rivera and Jackson Pollock (the latter, which actually seemed possible for a time, had Barbra Streisand penciled in as the artist’s wife, Lee Krasner), financier Michael Milken, auto maker Enzo Ferrari (with Michael Mann directing), and, with Martin Scorsese, columnist Walter Winchell and Rat Pack icon Dean Martin.
There were rumors of De Niro appearing in another Scorsese film, Silence, based on a Shusaku Endo novel about Jesuit missionaries in Japan,*1 and yet another, a version of Arthur Miller’s View from the Bridge that was to be staged as a play and then shot on film. There was a movie about the Red Scare called 33 Liberty St.; a comedy opposite Dustin Hoffman entitled Gold Dust; The Little Things, a Danny DeVito–directed thriller about the search for a serial killer; Michael Cimino’s adaptation of The Fountainhead; Out on My Feet, a Barry Primus film in which he would play the manager of boxer Mark Wahlberg; a film about espionage in the Middle East; and Stagecoach Mary, a western (!) with Whoopi Goldberg (!).
He even had at least one significant project of his own that went at least as far along as Ahab: Stolen Flower, an adaptation of Philip Carlo’s novel about a Manhattan private eye hired to track down a girl who has been kidnapped and used in a child pornography ring. For that one, he had scripts drafted and spent a while scouting locations in New York and Europe. But it
never came together, joining a pile of unmade films that would have constituted a full career in itself.
HE HAD BARELY finished Jackie Brown when he jumped into another high-style crime film with an ensemble cast. He would spend the winter of 1997–98 primarily in France shooting Ronin, an espionage and heist film filled with stunning car chases and a cast of international faces including the French Jean Reno, the Swedish Stellan Skarsgård, the English Sean Bean, Natascha McElhone, and Jonathan Pryce, and even the German ice skater Katarina Witt. The script by J. D. Zeik, from his own story, had gone through at least six drafts, including a punch-up by David Mamet (writing under the pseudonym Richard Weisz). And the director was the legendary John Frankenheimer, who had been making pictures of this kind when De Niro was still sitting in a classroom bidding Stella Adler good morning.
It was a bit of a gamble, at least from the studio’s point of view. The film involved several long action sequences that would take weeks upon weeks to shoot and push the budget over $60 million. Frankenheimer was in his late sixties, and his last film, the 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau, had been a widely ridiculed flop—albeit one that he had been hired mid-production to rescue from the original director, who’d been fired for being unable to rein in stars Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer, among other sins. But among his many stellar credits (The Manchurian Candidate, The Birdman of Alcatraz, The Train, Seven Days in May), Frankenheimer counted Grand Prix, the 1966 race car film, and Black Sunday, the 1977 film about international terrorism. He had lived in France for a period, and actors loved him. So in some ways he was a natural choice.
