By now, we should be accustomed to seeing favorite performers betray us, risking years of good will and fond memories to express petulant political bias and empty promises. (“I’ll leave America if . . . ”) But the utter disgrace that actor Robert De Niro has made of himself — through profane and irrational outbursts against President Trump and American civility — hurts deeper than most.
Moviegoers have loved De Niro because of his many performances detailing the panoply of American lives — Hi, Mom!; Mean Streets; Taxi Driver; New York, New York; The Deer Hunter; Awakenings; Raging Bull; The King of Comedy; The Fan;, Stanley and Iris; Jackknife; We’re No Angels; Night and the City; Midnight Run; Cape Fear; The Mission; GoodFellas; City by the Sea; A Bronx Tale; Flawless; Mad Dog and Glory; Being Flynn; Dirty Grandpa. This isn’t just a filmography, it’s a national cultural biography. Although De Niro comes from a privileged bohemian background, his film roles personified working-class essence and vernacular.
So why would De Niro transform himself from a great actor — and artist—into a crisis actor? Using his gifts to promote demagoguery and political manipulation impaired his ability to shift mercurial common-man handsomeness into urban sociopathy — against all artistic compassion. He sank to the pits of selling out — lower than those European careerists Arletty and Maurice Chevalier, who risked their reputations by collaborating with the Nazis during the years of France’s occupation in World War II. Yet at least they always entertained.
We used to assume that De Niro was our guy because his performances indicated that he understood our deepest feelings. His role in The Mission suggested that he was following Marlon Brando’s footsteps in the politically aware historical epic Burn! (1969), making art out of what progressives and D.I.E. media hacks exploit as social consciousness, or “lived experience.” But De Niro’s attempt at playing agent provocateur stumbled badly: His decision to stand outside the New York Trump trial cost the actor his credibility.
This is worse than the mobsters De Niro portrayed so convincingly in GoodFellas, Casino, and The Irishman. Those roles, despite the characters’ appalling behavior, struck a nerve because they were so credible. But political stunts such as the appalling moment De Niro came onstage at the Tony Awards having only two things to say (“F*** Trump”) displayed mental defectiveness. They show what it looks like to be deluded in an elitist media bubble. Of course the ideologically biased Broadway community gave him a standing ovation.
The madness peaked in last week’s campaign event in front of the Manhattan courthouse, with De Niro playing a Biden surrogate. De Niro faced pushback from New York’s non-leftist working class. They returned De Niro’s vituperation using the same vulgate he had put on screen. It resembled The King of Comedy, Scorsese’s nightmare about urban pathologies, chronicling how the city’s demons were unleashed through the desperation of forgotten people — the hoi polloi who once inspired De Niro but whom he has now betrayed. Trump supporters called him “Mook”(a colloquial slur that Mean Streets introduced to the national lexicon), even spelling it out. And, in turn, De Niro unironically called them “gangsters,” a romanticized misunderstanding of the underworld behavior, whether in New York or D.C. political chicanery, in his Scorsese movies.
Ex-D.C. police officer and controversial J6 committee witness Michael Fanone, also in attendance in support of the Biden campaign, thanked De Niro for “lending his voice and his celebrity to the cause.” But De Niro’s Trump derangement syndrome contradicts his artistry, making it unreliable — not exactly dishonest since it’s based in psychotic delusion — but, ultimately, depressingly untrustworthy.
In the Seventies, Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Warren Beatty argued that the extra benefit of stardom gave actors the right to use celebrity for political influence. But for De Niro, it’s the worst thing an actor can do to himself. That early sign of De Niro’s talent (playing a cop interrogating a mop in Brian De Palma’s counterculture satire Hi, Mom!) is disgraced.
De Niro told a local New York news show that he called Biden to volunteer, gushing, “I’ll do anything you need me to do.” This partisanship differs from how actors Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, and Charlton Heston risked their careers to participate in the 1963 March on Washington. Their response, in the last days of liberal decency, answered a nation’s need, not elitist tyranny.
A politician or journalist may practice deceit, but a great actor should not. The power of De Niro’s acting transcended play-acting to find universal truths — not Oprah’s “your truth,” but our truth. And that’s what De Niro’s political tantrums have debased.
After De Niro’s astonishing performance as the insolent jazz hipster in New York, New York, Marlon Brando commented, “I don’t think he knows how good he is.” Contemporary film culture lacks the creativity to match De Niro with the kind of roles that defined Brando’s greatness, but the actor’s manipulation by political scoundrels — his naïve credulity in the face of their brazen dishonesty — has disfigured him as both an artist and specifically as an American.
I didn’t care much about real-estate mogul De Niro’s posing as the quintessential New Yorker (inaugurating the Tribeca Film Festival after 9/11 to prove his citizenship). But when I served on a TFF jury in 2005, I met De Niro and found him to be a gracious host, an art-minded, impressively warm individual. (He appreciated my enthusiasm for A Bronx Tale as a people’s favorite, and enthusiastically introduced me to Chazz Palminteri, the film’s author.) Shaking De Niro’s hand confirmed the intimacy I felt with his characters: the desperate, on-the-make collegiate radical, misunderstood ghetto punk, bus-driver father, illiterate short-order cook, anomic wannabe celebrity, frazzled bar-owner, heroic war veteran, frustrated husband-musician, scared macho competitor, etc., his special gallery of recognizable American types. His legacy (insisting that “the working man is not a sucker!” in A Bronx Tale) showed no sign of the irrational sociopathy that was to surface several election cycles later.
Audiences identified with De Niro’s Italian-American working-class types, even the yokel-psychotics, because we all know that kind, too. DeNiro’s face (as when Johnny Boy tells Charlie, “You got what you wanted”) told as much as a page of a novel. He often found a movie’s moral center. Now his compass is off.
Describing how the Trump show trial has degraded America’s legal institution, Representative Byron Donalds said, “Hollywood could not write a script like this,” meaning that the atrocity, which suckered De Niro, was beyond all reason. Our former trust in De Niro’s great artistry was based in his sensitivity — including the insanity, illogic, and meanness that is difficult to countenance in politicians who have gone over to the dark side out of greed and power-madness. But De Niro’s real-life misbehavior comes across as crazed rather than revelatory. And recent crank roles in Killers of the Flower Moon and Amsterdam don’t win back the admiration he has lost. No Hollywood screenwriter could imagine such a downfall. De Niro sunken into lunacy is his scariest role because it shows us America’s psychotic collapse.