At last week’s Gotham Awards, actor Robert De Niro amplified his ignorance by twisting together superficial movie history and fashionable political bias. It was another of the actor’s obsessive public denouncements of President Trump, again revealing the madness that has overwhelmed show-business liberals. De Niro was invited by the Gotham Film and Media Institute to present the organization’s Historical Icon and Creator Tribute to director Martin Scorsese and Apple, producers of Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, but De Niro went off-teleprompter in a fit of misguided political animus.
The speech merely confirmed why Killers of the Flower Moon is so obviously bad. (The Gotham prize, usually reserved for indie filmmakers, was an industry suck-up. Another went to Barbie.) Killers of the Flower Moon’s facile historical perspective and grim, anti-patriotic attitude patronized and marginalized its Native American characters. It’s the oddball Scorsese movie — his first political film — that replaces personal reflection with topical trends, a fault made glaring by De Niro’s unsubtle on-screen performance as white racist supervillain “King” William Hale, who orchestrated the murder of Oklahoma’s oil-rich Osage Indians during the 1920s.
Reports from Variety, The Wrap, and other media outlets say that De Niro told the Gotham audience that the presenter’s speech he had written was rewritten by Apple executives. Apple edited out references to the former president, perhaps attempting to deescalate De Niro’s divisive rancor, and that version was uploaded to the teleprompter at Cipriani’s, the Wall Street area restaurant where the awards ceremony took place. “How dare they do that, actually?” he complained.
Undeterred, De Niro read his original rant from his cellphone. As in some of his memorable film roles, De Niro confused small-minded egotism with principle. He went off, displaying the fake piety of showbiz types eager to convince themselves of their moral superiority.
It is De Niro’s recent habit of average-man humility turned wrong-headed obstinacy that makes his speech such an embarrassment — a regurgitation of regime-media clichés, Democratic Party bitching points, and the excessive vitriol of incensed pundits. “History isn’t history anymore,” said the star of an egregiously ahistorical three-hour-plus vanity project that is also a work of historical revisionism.
Angry Bob continued, “Truth is not truth. Even facts are being replaced by ‘alternative facts,’” another dishonest twist of a simple journalistic principle by Trump’s former campaign manager Kellyanne Conway into a partisan dog-whistle. De Niro’s temper is encouraged by whatever opposition film liberals approve, regardless of facts. So he threaded together more rhetorical anecdotes: “In Florida, young students are taught that slaves developed skills that could be applied for their personal benefit.” This distortion is like Killers of the Flower Moon itself, patronizing victims while disregarding their intelligence and self-determination.
The tirade became especially offensive when De Niro pretended to critique film history: “Even the entertainment industry isn’t immune to this festering disease. The Duke, John Wayne, famously said of Native Americans, ‘I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new lands, and the Indians were selfish in trying to keep it for themselves.’”
This one sounds like a late-night bull-session, perhaps De Niro, Scorsese, and Leonardo DiCaprio cheering on their Killers of the Flower Moon condemnation of the U.S., as if finally setting straight Old Hollywood’s racists. De Niro’s own ignorance of American history forces him to demonize John Wayne’s historical pragmatism — the complexities of Manifest Destiny that get in the way of America-hating radicals.
Putting John Wayne on blast is laughable coming from De Niro, who is one of Manhattan’s wealthiest landowners. It’s sad, too, since De Niro seems to be lying to himself: “Lying has become just another tool in the charlatan’s arsenal. The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace in his current campaign of retribution. But with all his lies, he can’t hide his soul.” Yet, it is De Niro’s mysteriously troubled soul that is revealed by such unseemly condemnations and by overlooking all the discriminatory legalisms that Trump currently faces.
De Niro’s undeniable artistry, the compassion he exhibits even when playing lunatics (Travis Bickle, Max Cady), illiterates (Jake LaMotta, Stanley Cox), or sociopaths (Johnny Boy, Young Don Vito Corleone, Jimmy Doyle) — and the rare hero (Sergeant Michael Vronsky in The Deer Hunter) — is what made him an actor to be deeply felt for, more so than almost any other performer of his generation. When he berates President Trump, it is a betrayal of the spiritual generosity and moral intelligence of his own best work. He should know better, despite being applauded by the most weak-minded, hateful, and dishonest colleagues of his profession.
De Niro’s persistent Trump-bashing belligerence is a form of idiotic, bullying cowardice. I don’t think De Niro has ever played that on-screen before. He appeals to mob vengeance by pretending to be political and then proving his political ignorance. When grumbling about President Trump “using ‘Pocahantas’ as a slur,” De Niro kisses up to the liberals who idolize the treachery, dishonesty, and racism of Senator Elizabeth Warren, who exploited Native American entitlement for her own benefit, just like “King” Bill Hale did.
In a savvy joke on TV’s Family Guy, De Niro was understandably satirized as a “great and bad actor.” But De Niro’s Trump Derangement Syndrome recalls that classic claim about Charlie Chaplin’s sentimentality: He likes to think he thinks.