Dir.Martin Scorsese, 1995, USA, 179 mins
Cast: Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, Joe Pesci, James Woods, Don Rickles, Alan King,
Kevin Pollak, L. Q. Jones, Dick Smothers
Review by Martyn Bamber
Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein (Robert De Niro) has it all; as the man who runs a major casino in Las Vegas for the mob, Ace has money and power, which buys him influence and respect. But when Ace – a sensible gambler who covers his bets in and out of the casino – becomes infatuated with the beautiful Ginger (Sharon Stone), he introduces an unpredictable element into his highly organised life. Add his wildly volatile childhood pal Nicky (Joe Pesci) into the mix and Ace’s carefully constructed world starts tumbling down.
Released five years after the classic Scorsese gangster film Goodfellas (1990), Casino was viewed as the weakest of Scorsese’s ‘mob trilogy’, which started with Mean Streets (1973). Casino is a slick film that may seem obsessed with the glitzy surfaces of Las Vegas, but Scorsese is not seduced by the bright lights and promise of wealth. In fact, Casino stands as the equivalent of Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983), another lengthy gangster film that focuses on gaudy excess, encapsulates an era, and chronicles the rise and fall of a charismatic gangster.
The opening scenes of Casino are dense with voiceover and exposition, as we are plunged into the world of 1970s Vegas and are given a primer by Ace and Nicky on its inner workings, and an insight into what they think of the various events around them. After this heady introduction, the characters and their interrelationships come to the fore and start to develop, and we see how Ace, Ginger and Nicky played a part in bringing the glory days of mob rule in Vegas to an end.
The constantly moving camera and overlapping, competing voiceovers bombard (but never overwhelm) the viewer with a welter of visual and aural information. This is an imaginative way for Scorsese to convey essential exposition about the workings of Las Vegas and the machinations of the various characters, and is something that could have been plodding in less skilful filmmaking hands.
While there’s been never been any doubt that Scorsese is a serious filmmaker, Casino sees the director at his most playful, both directorially (with his gliding, confident but never pointless or show-offish camerawork) and with his humorous jabs at gangster life. While Scorsese acknowledges the mob’s code of honour and the warmth they express towards friends and family, he also shows that their ultimate loyalty is to the bottom line. As the film goes on, Pesci’s violent outbursts and reckless criminality, along with Ace’s eccentric behaviour (he becomes increasingly picky and defensive, and is obsessed with minor casino details) are only tolerated to a point by the bosses before they take action to protect their business interests.
Although De Niro had played gangsters many times by this point, Casino finds him, like Scorsese, in a somewhat lighter mood; De Niro plays Ace as more of a pragmatic businessman than a violent criminal. De Niro brings a touch of comic exasperation to the role, showing us that Ace is a perfectionist who feels that no one else quite comes up to his exacting standards. Along with his performance in Heat (1995), this could well be the last of the classic De Niro performances. After this, his choice of roles has been far less discerning, with his performances becoming more broadly comic and self-referential.
And Stone and Pesci haven’t done anything since to match their exceptional performances here. While Pesci’s role may be similar to his character in Goodfellas, Nicky is a wittier person:a man who views Ace’s perfectionism with wry amusement. Nicky also has a warm side to his character; he is seemingly a happily married man as well as being a devoted father who is proud of his son. Stone, on the other hand, may be shrewd and calculating (something that Ace realises when he first sets eyes on her, but which doesn’t stop him from courting her) but she’s also a tragic character. She is infatuated with the sleazy Lester (James Woods), and shares a close bond with him that Ace cannot break or understand.
In Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s book on the maverick stars and directors of 1960s and 1970s American cinema, some filmmakers lament the state of American cinema in the 1990s, and the fact that the studios seized power from the filmmakers and sanitised the industry with bland movies. Is Casino Scorsese’s comment on this development, with Vegas as a metaphor for Hollywood - a place where traditional casinos have been usurped by theme park-style attractions? And are talented individuals like Ace and Nicky surrogates for the harassed maverick 1970s director?
As Nicky laments at the start of the film, ‘…In the end, we fucked it all up. It should’ve been so sweet, too. But it turned out to be the last time that street guys like us were ever given anything that fucking valuable again.” Is this Scorsese (to quote both Easy Rider (1969) and a chapter from Biskind’s book) basically saying “We blew it”? Whatever Scorsese thinks about Hollywood, he – like Ace – has weathered the storm, adapted to changes in the industry and kept working. More than ten years after its release, the epic and operatic Casino is looking increasingly like a classic gangster picture, and one of the best Martin Scorsese films of the 1990s.
Discuss this film here
|
|
