director
Martin
Scorsese
screenwriters
Nicholas
Pileggi
Martin Scorsese
based on
the book by
Nicholas
Pileggi
producer
Barbara De Fina
cinematographer
Robert Richardson
editor
Thelma Schoonmaker
cast
Robert De Niro (Sam 'Ace' Rothstein)
Sharon Stone (Ginger McKenna)
Joe Pesci (Nicky Santoro Sr.)
James Woods (Lester Diamond)
Don Rickles (Billy Sherbert)
Alan King (Andy Stone)
Kevin Pollak (Phillip Green)
L.Q. Jones (Commisioner Webb)
Dick Smothers (Senator)
Frank Vincent (Frank Marino)
John Bloom (Don Ward)
Catherine Scorsese (Mrs. Piscano)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 178m
u.s.
release: 11/22/95
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
other martin
scorsese films
reviewed on this website:
- the
aviator
- bringing
out the dead
- gangs
of new york
- kundun
|
What
few people know about Martin Scorsese is that he has never made
a gangster film. No, really. Mean Streets wasn't about
gangsters, it was about Catholic guilt. GoodFellas wasn't
about gangsters, it was about the American dream as seen in a
cracked mirror. Casino, Scorsese's new movie, isn't about
gangsters, either. Taken together, these films (all set largely
in the '70s, when Scorsese came to prominence) form a trilogy
of rise-and-fall stories, lovingly crafted and intricately detailed,
addressing all the key American themes: money, sex, power, love,
death, religion, family, above all ambition -- the hot
desire to move up, move out, move ahead. (Scorsese's camera expresses
the motion of motivation.) Casino, a true epic, pulls
it all together and yet leaves us with chilling food for thought
about what it all means. The movie is about business. There's
business, and then there's everything else. Eventually there
is nothing else.
Scorsese is working again with Nicholas Pileggi, who co-wrote
GoodFellas based on his fascinating piece of journalism
Wiseguy. After GoodFellas, Pileggi threw himself
into researching the web of mob connections in Las Vegas; his
work has yielded a just-published book and now this script. Pileggi
lets his subjects talk in their own voices, with little authorial
intrusion, and both GoodFellas and Casino are densely
journalistic. The characters narrate while Scorsese's images
underline (and sometimes contradict) their words. At one point
he even provides subtitles translating the code phrases they
use to foil the feds. People talk and talk about how Vegas works,
and Scorsese's camera sprints to keep up. He's like an energetic
tour guide making sure we understand everything.
Casino revolves around two hollow men. Sam "Ace"
Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a bookie with a scientific genius
for picking winners, positions himself as the boss of the mob-run
Tangiers hotel. Ace is cool and rational and shrewd -- the perfect
man to oversee a casino, because he knows it's in his best financial
interests to keep the mob bosses back home happy, and the bosses
know he won't get stupid about the fortunes rolling in. He dresses
flamboyantly, in a variety of dandyish pastels ranging from peach
to pistachio, but under the suits he's perhaps the most unflamboyant
man Scorsese has ever put on the screen. Ace's opposite number,
and boyhood buddy, is Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), who comes out
to Vegas looking to carve himself a niche. Nicky offers his services
as Ace's unofficial muscle, and quickly gains a rep as a mercurial
sociopath. Ace may shake his head at Nicky's savagery, but Nicky
is great advertising: To mess with Ace is to mess with Nicky,
and you don't want to mess with Nicky.
Scorsese knows these guys; he's comfortable with them. But every
director has an Achilles heel, and Scorsese's has always been
women. He can see them only from the outside, and the third leg
of Casino is weak. Ginger (Sharon Stone), the glamorous
hustler whom Ace marries and Nicky has an affair with, has no
visible inner life. De Niro narrates, Pesci narrates, even Frank
Vincent (as Nicky's right-hand man) gets to narrate a quick anecdote,
but Stone never gets a turn. That's a shame, because this is
Stone's breakthrough performance -- vibrant, alive, operatic
in its extremes of mink-fur bliss and bottom-dog torment -- all
the more so because she's working against a script that barely
bothers to humanize her. Ginger is the wild card, the untrustworthy
junkie bitch who brings chaos into the boys' club. Ace, usually
the epitome of caution, throws caution to the wind and falls
deeply in love with her, or so we're told; we don't really understand
why. (The book isn't much help either.)
Luckily for Scorsese, Casino doesn't rest its full weight
on this ill-starred love triangle (or it would collapse). Its
real meat is the tragic theme of the hothead prevailing (with
disastrous results) over the cooler head, a Biblical theme (think
of Cain and Abel) that links the movie with Mean Streets
and GoodFellas. Ace keeps his pulse steady unless something
threatens his bottom line: an incompetent slots manager, an inattentive
cook in the casino kitchen. (One of the funniest moments in the
entire Scorsese portfolio to date occurs here when we get to
watch Robert De Niro going ballistic over the amount of blueberry
in a muffin.) Nicky, on the other hand, is a back-home street
thug with his eyes on the prize. Power to him means being feared.
He doesn't use his head, and after a while the bosses back home
start to wonder if he's worth the trouble. Joe Pesci may seem
to have already gotten an Oscar for this performance, but Nicky
is different from his other psycho, Tommy, in GoodFellas.
Tommy had fun being a hard-ass -- that was what made him scary
-- but Nicky, mesmerized by the gold in the desert, doesn't have
much fun. Money is serious. The more you have, the more you have
to worry about losing it.
The men in Casino have calcified far beyond the Ray Liotta
character in GoodFellas, who got off on the sensual pleasures
of being a hot-shot. These Vegas men, lured long ago by the siren
song of money, have long since crashed on the rocks. Ace derives
no pleasure from his grandly successful casino or even from his
family. De Niro plays his one note skillfully, sometimes introducing
a second note -- Ace's conflicted feelings for Ginger, which
bring out a frightened vulnerability De Niro hasn't shown in
a while. But ultimately only one thing matters to Ace, and it's
not until he loses everything that he is restored to himself:
he goes back to picking winners. It's a classic Scorsese finish
-- redemption by self-destruction. Casino has been criticized
for being cold, and unfairly compared with GoodFellas,
as if the collaboration of De Niro, Pesci, and Scorsese made
it an unofficial sequel. Scorsese takes risks based on the nature
of his material. Love and honor mean nothing in this movie because
in Vegas, nothing means anything except money. As Michael Corleone
said, "It's not personal. It's strictly business."
Casino is Scorsese's personal epic about business, and
he seals it with a devastating joke. The mob loses its grip on
Vegas, and at the end, we see the new casinos -- shining castles
built by corporations, the mob of the future. |
