Self-Sabotage for Success - CASINO

Summer is a time for living dangerously and nowhere is life more dangerous than in the movies about gambling.  Moviemaking is a recklessly expensive venture to begin with (CASINO cost $50 million, enough to build a casino in itself) and no investor/producer ever knows for sure that the film won't bomb and they'll lose it all, baby. It's a roll of the dice. And the mob's been associated one way or another with Hollywood since the beginning, from Al Capone's boys acting as technical advisors on the 1932 original SCARFACE to "this is the girl" in MULHOLLAND DR. Wherever there's big money and trade unions, the mob is there, and Hollywood has both, so rolling the dice on a film about the mob rolling dice on a plan to lure ducats out of America's pockets is so meta it can't fail... it's a sure thing baby, a hot tip, a combo blackjack table and funhouse room of mirrors. 

And thanks to the internet, gambling isn't just limited to Vegas, as online poker lets you live the giddy rush of Vegas from your own home. Things are changing, and the criminal element can't keep up, which is why Scorsese's film looks back to the mobster version of Vegas' heyday, a tangent moment to the Rat Pack's OCEAN'S ELEVEN, which played up the glamour, drunkenness and class, but kept it light. If it's meant as a lark, perpetrated by attractive people, robbing a casino is far less evil, somehow, than the actual operation of one. CASINO is way different: Scorsese knows that to be a big winner in gambling is to  keep your tells in check and your calculation of odds on point, ideally without cheating.

In other words, to be lucky at cards you must be unlucky at love--for love makes those things impossible. No one knows why except that some karmic law of averages is involved. Heartbreak and misery on the other hand, increases your luck. "You don't have a girl pining for you somewhere," a sharpie consoles William Demarest after winning all his schmeckles in LADY EVE, "that often explains it." He does (remember "So long, Lula - I'll send you a postcard.")

It's just the karmic law of averages, baby. So what in the end, is a priority for a wise guy? To keep his love life ever in shambles, intentionally (albeit unconsciously). Thus the career gambler invariably has to continually sabotage his chances at a happy love life, as Robert De Niro's character does in CASINO--marrying a hottie hustler who says up front she doesn't love him--in order to preserve his luck at cards. One hopes it's not just that he's too blind to his own lack of self-awareness, or compassion for others in the process. One hopes in vain. He really seems to think he'll change her feelings, will come around, but all he's doing is buying her off.

I've already covered the delights of Robert Altman's 1974 underseen CALIFORNIA SPLIT (here) but those were happy gamblers - in love with the thrill of riding a streak - and falling into despair as soon as they cash out. CASINO is the opposite, the view from the other side of the one-way mirror -- and the danger and exaltation of living in a 'paradise' designed by shady guys who think comped cocktails, air conditioning, prostitutes in tail feathers and Sinatra nightly constitutes real class. For them, Vegas is a playground where a regular guy can live the gangster arc of winning the world only to lose one's shirt, but on a small manageable scale (without jail or death at the end). Who wouldn't want that kind of rush, even if it's on a scale suited to their small potatoes lifestyle? Why else do we watch films about gangsters, if not for the vicarious thrills, the vicarious paranoia and the final dislodging from vicariousness--when the gangster dies, the credits roll, and we go scurrying out into the light and back to our daily grinds and loved ones, grateful to not be so lucky at cards after all? We're the gangster's fair-weather friends - there to share his glory, gone when it's time to face the music.

Giddy rushes aside, CASINO is fraught with problems, none more glaring than the shadow of its predecessor, GOODFELLAS. From the punchy wiseguy narration to the long tracking shots packed with period rock music and beautiful-ugly old Italian faces, the Scorsese aesthetic we all fell in love with is back, but there's been so many imitations in the interim it seems like Scorsese is just another schmuck imitating himself. Now Joe Pesci is now so typecast as the rabid animal the only way he can outdo his legendary role as Joey (see one of my very first-ever posts on Acidemic, 'That Joey, he's a wild one) is to up the shocking violence ante. Pesci doesn't drop the ball here so much as hold it so tight it deflates. He looks older and stockier, his make-up more orange (to indicate a desert tan?), his belly paunchier, his sneer flash frozen, like a Madame Tussaud piece swollen from being left too long in the vat. When he throws his massive tantrums he's not scary-fun like he was in GOODFELLAS, just alarming. He's as trapped by the irresistible momentum of Scorsese's period gangster rhythm as a fly on an express train. The force of the forward movement broadens him around the edges until he splats.

The Orangeman

With the critics primed to dutifully if joylessly adore her all the while, Sharon Stone takes over the last chunk of the action, turning a sad vixen's shaking the bars of her cage marriage into a shrill and humorless bid for Oscar respectability. She's intense but the whole thing smacks of effort. Do you think Barbara Stanwyck ever 'tried' to blow us away with her raw force? She merely released what was always inside her, the tigress. Stanwyck knew that before she unleashed her raw tigress force her audience needed modulation, dynamics, some wit and warmth amidst the rock formations. Stone just wants us to see how Joan Crawfordianly hard she's trying. But hardness without softness, darkness without lightness, what is that? It might be Great Acting, but it's not riveting, more like watching a strange couple fighting at a restaurant -feeling only a mix of embarrassment, weariness and concern.

Whatever she's supposed to be conveying, it doesn't deserve the acres of tantrum space Scorsese carves out for it in the final act of CASINO. Verhoeven in BASIC INSTINCT and TOTAL RECALL knew how to use Stone's Bette Davis imperiousness and Jane Fonda insecurity combo as part of a comic book tapestry. He knew she was a delicious villainess rather than an 'identifiable' heroine. A director like Sidney Lumet or Nicholas Ray, or George Cukor might have helped Stone reign in some of her less successful ideas and enable her to win an Oscar, but without a genius who loves and can direct powerful women (and Scorsese is about as far from that as a great director can get), Stone falls into the same morass that snared Annette Bening in AMERICAN BEAUTY, the morass wherein female rage against the patriarchal machine comes out as abrasive, ineffectual spite, all while the infantile, unconsciously misogynistic director smiles and nods.

But it's no secret- everyone knows romance and female characters (ALICE aside) aren't Scorsese's strong point. He lives and breathes cigar smoke from the boys in the back room. His films about dangerous hoods work because he truly 'feels' the threat of violence, knows the texture of the mean streets, hires actual Little Italy characters (including his own mother) and makes effective, occasionally sickening, use of cattle prods, spittle, baseball bats and beatings. In the lengthy kinetic montage wherein De Niro's narration takes us through the process of the skim we're off into the blissful realm of pure cinema, and a solid hour of running time evaporates like crack, but we still have two hours to go and by the home stretch of the film, the woman has landed.

Try as I might I can never really give a shit about the fate of her marriage with De Niro's obsessive casino boss, so I spend these scenes admiring the elaborately gaudy outfits she wears, the fringe jacket and smoky blonde hair cuts as she angrily packs her suitcase and calls her old pimp (James Woods, 'lighting up' the screen) for emotional support. We only see the happy Sharon Stone in an initial slow mo montage of her strolling through the casino, tossing chips and duking parking attendants. The rest of the film she's moping by the phone, sobbing hysterically or otherwise chewing all available scenery in coke/booze-amped despair. Scorsese might have allowed us to see her happy and jubilant within the marriage itself once or twice, as opposed to merely doing her job posing like a trophy in public before collapsing into tantrums at home. Instead De Niro's schmuck of a casino manager doesn't even get the wan smile a legitimate john might earn, i.e. she won't even fake liking him. As one who makes a living on gambling, it's kind of odd that--even knowing the outcome from the start--he bets everything he has on Ginger to change her mind, and seems genuinely shocked when she doesn't like him any better even after having a kid.

Thus the only explanation for putting all his eggs in such a shitty basket might be that De Niro unconsciously figures being unlucky in love means being lucky at cards, so deliberately sabotaging any chance at happiness in his personal life ensures continued winning streaks.

Maybe he's right. 

While Scorsese too is on a winning streak, for that great opening hour or two, in the end it's his do-no-wrong reputation that brings him low. Like the master gunfighter in the western where every hotshot snotnose with an iron on his hip wants to challenge him in order to build their own legends, every young punk out there imitates Scorsese, and as a result he's as insecure and second-guessing about his own genius as Malick or Kubrick, slowly losing touch with his nitty gritty acumen through  the thick fog of his adoring legions, none of whom would dare point out when a scene is going to hell.

That's why CASINO is De Niro's last brilliant film, as well as the first of his bad ones. You can feel the gambler's luck turning halfway through, right around the time De Niro fires Joe Bob Briggs, nephew of a Nevada gaming commission bigwig, and refuses to even hire him back "somewhere farther down the trough," though the politician makes it clear De Niro's going to wind up losing his license if he doesn't comply.  How did someone so smart get suddenly so stupid... twice? Why would De Niro fuck up a good thing with the gaming commission just by insisting on firing a dopey relative of a high end Nevada politician? De Niro then seems surprised when he loses his license appeal, just as he's surprised when Ginger tries to run away. It just doesn't fit that a schmuck this dumb would be smart enough to get so far in the first half of the film. He been takin' stoopid pills? He go to Vegas to get stupid? 

By the same token, why did Marty think his next project after GOODFELLAS (and before CASINO) should be AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993)? I'm not saying one should never wander from his own back yard (though technically I guess he didn't), but if you can't find anything new to talk about within it, maybe your just not looking hard enough. The man who found Shakespeare within the language of a Brooklyn gangster movie doesn't need to do actual Shakespeare. What does he find, then, except that his fan base can be pushed just so fur and no further?

For a director who suddenly could do any project he wanted to decide to film some creaky Edith Wharton tale in a Merchant Ivory-just-with-more-elaborate-tracking-shots style is telling of Marty's deep-rooted insecurity and doomed drive for bourgeois respectability. Sure the film is great in its way, Daniel Day Lewis rocks it, but why not let the Brits do that posh shit?  What made the clans of mobsters in early Scorsese so fun was their boorish blue collar philistinism version of wealth and power. Imagine if the first thing Henry Hill did with his newfound success was buy a box at the opera, a polo pony, and a subscription to The New York Times? Yuck. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to an artist of the streets is success amongst the hoi polloi, resulting in the sudden ill-advised need to break into the one class of people who momentarily welcome you into their inner circle the way gangsters might a flush chump to their upstairs poker game. Like Sinatra angling for the slumming rich girl virgin instead of the adoring floozy in SOME CAME RUNNING, his grass-is-greener class envy is showing.

I can only presume that karmic law is still at work, sometimes the worst that can happen to a gambler is to win so big that no future jackpot can ever measure up. Surrounded by imitators trying to duplicate your winning formula, you eventually wind up imitating them and your comfort zone shrinks around you like a soaking wet straitjacket. Soon even the moon looks like just another cracked poker chip, and the electric pop style you invented through hard work and termite art genius seems as derivative as hell. CASINO is the proof Marty can't go home again. I can't even watch my old GOODFELLAS DVD anymore as it seems derivative and played to death (not unlike SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) thanks to BLOW, SNATCH, MASTER OF WAR, TRAINSPOTTING, AMERICAN GANGSTER, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, MIDDLE MEN (see "Gotta get the papez, get the papez" or Johnny Two TImes, Because He Said Everything Twice)

And that's that.

Johnny Two Times, because he said everything ad nauseum

That dumb-looking movie released this week, MIDDLE MEN (2010, above) is clearly--just from the preview which is all I ever want to see--modeled on the now-classic GOODFELLAS (1990), i.e. Rags to riches to rags with a male voiceover spoken in disaffected regular guy English ala "We were just a buncha regular guys, hustlin' to make a buck like everybody else." and "I mean we had 24/7 cocktail jet plane lunches, villas, private pools -- it was all there for the taking, and we f**ked it up." All this while period bling flies by in short overlapping crosscuts with slow-mo walking scored to rock or soul classics through nightclubs where everybody knows your name: "All Along the Watchtower" or "Superfly" depending on the race of the protagonist-- overlapped and smash-cut in one movie-length montage that indicates the editor considers this a crazy ass trip - but your mileage is bound to vary.

Off the top of my head, the Fella imitations include: BLOW (2001), LORD OF WAR (2004), to a lesser extent AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), even 2005's DOMINO, though the last basically gets it right, probably thanks to its real-life subject acting as advisor. I'm sure there are others I haven't seen, like CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, which I also saw the preview for, and remember its use of the now horribly cliche'd "Watchtower" playing over a slow mo walk around a red-lit club as Tom Hanks narrates in the "It was a time when anything could happen... and often did" vein, at least in the preview.

The main ingredient missing, which most director copycats don't understand, is drug culture accuracy. You either know the culture and the effects--and I mean beyond casual using--or you get the details second hand from other films, and any hep person can see the difference a mile off. You don't even have to do the drugs depicted to feel high watching, real detail always shines through: TRAINSPOTTING (1996)  with heroin and GOODFELLAS with coke --you feel that shit, whether you've ever done either -- but most of these imitations forget about the veracity of the culture depicted or the druggy elements inherent in that sort of momentum-based editing and instead just copy the format- becoming like those college campus-sponsored parties where you can't smoke and they don't serve alcohol, and everyone pretends like it doesn't matter and that the party's not lame and they're not losers just acting a role of party goer for each others' illusory benefit. They prefer to ignore the minutiae of the drug world they long to depict, beyond what they read in Rolling Stone.  But boy they long to depict it.

To narrow it down, lets focus on two GOODFELLA-wannabes that I have seen (not always by choice, but by being a second string film critic): LORD OF WAR is "fiction based on true events" which means it's not even based on a true story, the way, say, GOODFELLAS was based on real life mobster Henry Hill's actual memoir (and he acted as 'trip' advisor). BLOW--based on a dealer's memoir written in minimum security prison--lacks any connection with the cocaine and marijuana dealing world it longs to depict. Its director clearly loves GOODFELLAS and proves the point that if you're an L.A. phony who never stepped outside the movie set bubble, your details are going to ring false no matter how many coke parties you've been to. And both BLOW and LORD OF WAR ring as false as loudly GOODFELLAS rings perennially true.

What makes Marty Scorsese's lower rung Italian mob films work so well because, for one reason, he grew up watching wiseguys across the street from his house while he convalesced with a string of respiratory illnesses as a child. When he strays from working class Italian New York, however, he strikes out as often as he connects, i.e. his last four films with his new life partner, Leo DiCaprio (THE DEPARTED excepted, of course, your highness). If he partners with Nicholas Pileggi or Jake La Motta or some tru-baller like that, Marty can make a film so authentic you go into a kind of swooning trance, but with a thug-lite like Leo it's just the Hollywood bubble filming itself through a reflection. The film Marty needs to make would be about Leo: a drama about a once-great actor squandering his romantic lead gifts in order to ape De Niro in roles that he's just too purty fer.

LORD OF WAR on the other hand rests on the conceit that it's a dark political satire. It's important! 60 Minutes-style important. But I left the theater feeling ripped off. Even the little details--Cage laying out a line of coke on the leather car seat each time he drops brother Leto off at rehab; the Darfur-type arms dealer halving a payment of blood diamonds with a machete after conscience-stricken Leto blows up half the arms delivery; the hot models at the Chelsea Piers 'arms convention', winding up in bed with them--ring false and poorly thought out, like writer-director Andrew Nicol is 'trying' to come up with funny little details to mesh into his skeleton framework, like he's quietly sneaking peaks at Robert Mckee's Story while trying to be 'true' to half-remembered facts from some article in Time magazine story he read at the doctor's office. They could have filmed Brecht's Mother Courage and been much better off, or even used it as a reference! Compared to LORD, Mother Courage is a bedrock of gritty authenticity. I know, that's like saying Godard's re-enactment of Vietnam in PIERROT LE FOU is more gritty and authentic than PLATOON.

To lay out the LORD premise: Nic Cage is a Brooklyn Russian-American diner worker who decides he wants to get into arms-dealing. Knowing nothing about it, he goes to an armory convention with his better-looking younger brother (Jordan Catelano, above). The first thing they spy are two hot convention models posing by a big tank, wearing camouflage short shorts. Cage goes up and tries to worm his way into a conversation with someone he recognizes as a top flight arms dealer. Next scene - Cage and brother wake up sleeping next to the hot models in their hotel room. Ta-Daa! Not only does it seem Nicol knows nothing about arms dealing, he doesn't even know anything about conventions, or at any rate, being at a convention when you're just a working class Ukrainian-American shlub trying to break into the big time weapons dealing with no capital instead of just being the guy who made GATTACA (1997). Instead wasting all his money on what are assuredly very expensive ladies. It's important to Nicol that our two Latvian brothers wake up next to these broads to prove they are two wild and crazy guys... but we know the truth - the writer is incapable of penning believable seduction scene or even a prostitute monetary negotiation, let alone fathoming how some connection-less schlub might con his way into arms dealing.

What does it matter? Cage is now "officially" an arms dealer. Later he magically has a Ukraine military General uncle anxious to unload a bunch of discontinued Russian tanks and armaments. How fortunate! If this had been the first step to Cage's rise to power it would make sense. But even this opportunity is blown. Nowhere is there that kind of authentic "shop talk" you would find in, say, THE GODFATHER or THE FRENCH CONNECTION or THERE WILL BE BLOOD or any movie by Robert Altman, Howard Hawks, or Sam Peckinpah, where you soak up the strange lexicon of a particular lifestyle. Going in to see LORD you know just as much about the international arms trade as you do coming out. Hell, IRON MAN tells you more about the international arms trade.

In the end, the GOODFELLAS difference is that Marty knows the minutiae personally - he has a keen eye for authentic Italian detail: the thin slicing of garlic for the sauce while in jail; the way a coked-up Henry gets obsessive about stirring the sauce and breading the veal: "I'm gonna cook all this... I'm gonna cook all this meat!"; the slow peripheral way his own wife becomes a coke head; the snotty babysitter drug mule cutting vegetables; or how each of the mob cronies is a unique character unto himself, like "Johnny Two Times, because he said everything two times."

In Hollywood's GOODFELLA-ripoff cycle, it's now Johnny 20x, who says less each time, but with more money and a voiceover that doesn't even try to hide the fact that it's borrowing even the inflection of words from Ray Liotta. Any good writer would be smart enough to embed him or herself into the sleazy milieu they wish to write about, or interview--in depth--someone who lived through this kind of stuff. (Howard Hawks famously had real mobsters from Al Capone's gang on hand during the shooting of SCARFACE.) But any smug trust fund idiot who saw GOODFELLAS (200x!) thinks he can "do a movie like that" even if he doesn't have a mom like Tommy's, who makes paintings (at right), where "one dog's looking one way, one dog's looking the other way, and this guy's goin; "Whadda ya want from me?"

Another way you can always tell when the filmmakers aren't Marty Scorsese is because all the mobster's clothes look like they're fresh out of the costume department: pure black, ironed and empty of lived-in detail. Nobody smokes or drinks, unless it's 'crucial' for character development, and then it's just one scene, one cigarette, held onto like a kid holds onto the candy version, or one sip of a drink which is then left behind, half-full. A Scorsese character meanwhile smokes until his fucking fingers are yellowed, his curtains dingy, his ashtrays scratched by careless maids.

You can tell even in bar scenes: a guy in a bar in a Scorsese film orders a drink the way a real man orders a drink, "A Cutty and watta" = a Cutty Sark (a scotch) cut with water; "gimme a seven and seven" - that's a Seagram's Seven (blended whiskey) and 7-UP, on the rocks. A guy in a movie like LORD OF WAR says: "Gimme a drink," and the bartender magically knows what that means. In real life, even "Gimme a beer" is total bullshit. Dude, you can't just order 'a beer' at a bar. Be specific! Has anyone ever gotten away with being so vague? Do you want a pint or a half pint, a bottle or a draft? A Bud or a Heineken? We also have 150 microbrews on tap... and if you can't answer her because all you do is watch movies in a plastic bubble, well now you're looking like a grade-A idiot, the kind all the liquor ads pitch to, the young man of means stepping into the post-21 bar tourist class. And how come after drinking a whole drink of presumably straight liquor your face is not flushed, your voice not slurred? Where is the music on the jukebox that makes you have to shout to be heard by the person next to you? Scorsese wouldn't let details like that slide. Scorsese must have actually been to a bar at least once in his life. Imagine that.

As for BLOW (left, 2001), I don't remember hating it quite as much, but I still felt like I was watching someone try to tell the same story as GOODFELLAS without any of the skill, expertise, experience, or patience. I realized early on it would be too weird for my date to suggest we sneak out and duck into something else, so I just made the best of it and marveled that anyone as dumb as the protagonist played by Johnny Depp could even survive one drug run, let alone dozens, before getting busted. The only real part for me was when he's fighting with his bratty-hot Latina wife (Penelope Cruz) while being pulled over for speeding, and in a blind rage she tells the cops he's holding. I had a chill because I could have easily imagined my then-wife, a high-strung but very statuesque Argentine filmmaker, doing just that! Luckily by then I was safely embedded in AA and long since out of 'the biz.' Dude, they should hire me as a drunk/druggie technical advisor. I'd demand everyone finish their drinks and have to talk loud over the jukebox. And no one would get away with ordering "a drink." La putre madre forro! 

You can look all over these other films and you'll never find another moment that even approaches the giddy highs of GOODFELLAS. Even CASINO--Scorsese's own ripoff of GOODFELLAS--never really brought it home (though it's still compulsively re-watchable and hypnotic). So there it is, the way Hollywood steals the thunder but ignores the rain, then wonders why their version of the storm rings so false and no one goes home soaked. We asked for spaghetti and we got cold noodles and ketchup.

 Now you can't even smoke in bars. Or dance (in NYC). Next up, volume limits. Cops with decibel measurers, next a guy going around making sure the ice isn't too cold that it might hurt your widdow toof.

Perhaps part of this horrible sanitizing is the curse of the information age - computer screens take the place of night clubs and all conversations aren't at bars but on IMs. In short, as filmmakers struggle to make stories about the internet into films, we can relax and know that, at least in this decade, being stuck at home in witness protection may not be so bad. We didn't have the internet when GOODFELLAS came out --a lot has changed. Marty now has Leo and screenwriter William Monahan to steer him away from his Italian neighborhood and into the uncharted terrain of Boston accents and shadowy conspiracy, so he's out of "real" details himself. And Johnny Two Times will never get "the papez, the papez" because he hangs frozen on a hook in a meat truck for all our sins. Johnny Two Times! Thank god you never lived to see the papez replaced by the kindles... the kindles.


NOTES:
This post is dedicated to my dear buddy, David Maxwell, who introduced me to Goodfellas and thus changed my life forever - he tried to introduce me to Kindle, but I gots to hold out a little longer.