Casino - The Mastermind Stumbles

Feb

14

Casino - The Mastermind Stumbles

≡ Category: Drama, Movie Reviews By Country, United States, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: United States
Genre: Drama
Director: Martin Scorcese
Year: 1995

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

Coming five years after Martin Scorcese’s classic Goodfellas, I was hopeful that after the woeful digressions of Cape Rear (oops, Cape Fear) and Age of Innocence, Casino would be a return to glory for Scorcese. After all, Scorcese’s collaboraters included writer/former wise guy Nicolas Pileggi, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and a gaggle of the sort of wonderful character actors that made Goodfellas such a pleasure.

No such luck.

The problems begin from the opening sequence. De Niro and Pesci take turns narrating, chattily informing the audience that their characters had a sweet thing in Vegas before they went and *#&^ed it up. Then De Niro gets into his car, turns the key and a bomb goes off. (This may sound like a spoiler, but it’s only a tiny one, I promise.)

So far, so good. But then we get the title sequence, designed by Saul and Elaine Bass, the folks behind the James Bond title sequences. It begins with a silhouette of Robert De Niro flying through the air, ass over elbows, surrounded by CGI flames. It’s ludicrous and doesn’t belong in the picture. It makes me grateful in retrospect that the credit sequence for Goodfellas was simple.

Flashback to ten years earlier. Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is the best gambler in the United States. If he’s going to bet on a horse, he knows the horse’s ancestry for the last four generations, the contents of it’s droppings, and whether the jockey’s who’s going to be riding him got laid the previous night. This is a guy who leaves nothing to chance. Naturally, the Mob offers him a casino to run. His childhood friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) ends up being his muscle.

Two problems: first off, Nicky is a complete psycho. Second, Rothstein makes the mistake of falling in love with Ginger (Sharon Stone), a hustler who got turned out by her pimp Lester (James Woods) at the ripe age of 14. Rothstein trusts Ginger with his life (or at least his safe deposit keys). Having a gambler who takes no chances bet his life on the biggest romantic longshot in history is a pretty big contradiction to ask the audience to swallow. It may have happened in real life, but that doesn’t necessarily make it believable.

Anyway, in so far as it has an actual story, Casino tells the tale of how Rothstein and Nicky blew the criminal setup of a lifetime. But that’s not actually what Scorcese is most interested in. He’s fascinated by how the setup works in the first place. He’s got a point. Through voiceovers from various characters, we follow how the casinos extract money from the players and how it ends up being filtered to the mob. All of this really is fascinating from an anthropological perspective.

But there are several problems with Casino. First of all, Scorcese doesn’t know Las Vegas like he knows New York. He’s a tourist. So, the scenes that take place in Kansas City or the East Coast have the pungency and detail of truth which the Las Vegas scenes can’t hope to match. And most of the picture takes place in Vegas.

Then, as fun as it is to watch the workings of the casino, it requires nearly constant voiceovers from multiple characters. The constant yapping in your ear gets numbing after a while, like the idiot in the seat next to you giving a running commentary about the plot’s metaphorical significance to his girlfriend. After a while, you just want to tell him to shut up, already. There was probably no way to avoid the constant stream of voiceovers due to the complexity of the information that’s being conveyed, but that doesn’t make it any less of a weakness.

There are also a number of problems with the characters.

To begin with, there’s no point of entry for the audience. In Goodfellas, Ray Liotta was an outsider who wanted to be a gangster, because gangsters get to take whatever they want and flout the laws of society. Hasn’t everyone felt like that from time to time? On the other hand, in Casino, the audience identification character is “Ace” Rothstein, a master gambler who’s obsessive about details. Not exactly universal, is it?

Oddly enough, De Niro’s portrayal of Rothstein is another weakness. Not because of De Niro’s acting, which is very strong in a less showy part than his character in Goodfellas, but because of De Niro’s accent. Rothstein is supposed to be a Jew, and thanks to De Niro’s Bronx Italian accent, he comes off as an Italian. To make matters worse, actors Don Rickles and Alan King, who act alongside De Niro, effortlessly evoke Jewishness. I suppose there are Italian Jews from the Bronx, but that doesn’t change the fact that De Niro’s accent creates a cognitive dissonance with the role.

The character of Nicky is another problem, even though he seems very similar to Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. But there is a difference. Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas was a sociopath, not a psychopath. His motives and reasoning always made sense. But Nicky is just nuts. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to end up pissing off the wrong people. Psychotics just aren’t all that interesting.

The only happy surprise, as far as the lead actors are concerned, is Sharon Stone, who hits the role of Ginger out of the park. It amazes me that Stone manages to embody the reality of a women who has grown up with a pimp as a daddy figure. You forget that you’re watching a privileged, spoiled actress. That woman on the screen is a deeply damaged girl, a glamorous cruise missile set on self destruct. Sharon Stone was nominated for the Oscar that year for Best Supporting Actress. She should have won.

James Wood’s slimy performance as Ginger’s pimp is less of a surprise. It’s always a pleasure to watch Woods slither across the silver screen.

But what about Scorcese’s vaunted filmmaking prowess? I’m glad to report that it doesn’t completely desert him. The scenes detailing the workings of the casino are beautifully woven together with the expected virtuostic camera moves, soundtrack, and overlapping dialog and voiceovers. But the filmmaking isn’t always seamless the way it was in Goodfellas. One of Nicky’s assassinations is overly abrupt and, oddly enough for a picture in which the red stuff flows freely, not bloody enough. When you shoot someone at point blank range in the head several times, it’s going to be messy, even if you’re using a .22 (using a small caliber gun for an assassination doesn’t make much sense, anyway).

Pacing is also a problem. Casino drags in a way that Goodfellas never did. Part of that is the repetitive nature of the story. Writers Pileggi and Scorcese never figure out how to shape the raw material of their true life tale into a coherent story that moves quickly, a major problem for a movie that’s almost three hours long.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed Casino. But it’s just not the masterpiece that Goodfellas was. Not even close.