Who told Robert De Niro he was funny? Many of us have asked ourselves that question at some point over the past 10 or so years. But this week, in line with the nationwide roll-out of posters for his latest film Dirty Grandpa, the matter took on a new urgency.
In Dirty Grandpa, the two-time Oscar-winner plays a widower who visits Florida with his grandson in the hopes of bringing his 15-year celibate streak to a wild and messy halt.
On the poster he’s shirtless, and holding his co-star Zac Efron above his head in a dead lift.
In one sense, De Niro’s Dirty Grandpa is merely the latest version of the senex amans, or “ancient lover”: a comic archetype that’s been rattling around since the days of early Roman theatre and was good enough for Boccaccio and Chaucer.
But in another sense – well, it just looks horrendous, doesn’t it? (In fairness, I haven’t yet seen Dirty Grandpa, so there’s a chance it could be the new About Schmidt.)
It’s hard to picture anyone – even Efron fans – wanting to see the 72-year-old star of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull reduced to shouting “party till you’re pregnant” at twentysomething women in a crowded nightclub for laughs.
Yet for more than a decade, this once most serious of actors has made broad and lowbrow comedies his home turf.
The Intern, Grudge Match, Last Vegas, The Family, The Big Wedding, two supplementary doses of Fockers (Meet The and Little), New Year’s Eve, Machete, Showtime, Analyse That and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, packed in since 2000. That is a hell of a comic run.
The actor’s apparent lack of quality control has itself become a running joke.
At the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which De Niro was present, the host, Joel McHale quipped: “I don’t do a De Niro impression, but I do an impression of Robert De Niro’s agent,” before pretending to pick up a ringing telephone and immediately shouting “He’ll do it!”
De Niro is not the only New Hollywood icon now widely thought to be squandering his talent.
Another much-lamented case is Al Pacino.
But at least Pacino’s recent stinkers keep you on your toes – he was miscast in Danny Collins, floundering in Manglehorn, and sleepwalked through 88 Minutes, so who knows how the next one will go wrong?
De Niro’s, on the other hand, are clumpingly predictable: most either spoof Seventies screen persona or shift it to an unexpected setting.
Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, swaggering into a red-lit bar to the opening chords of Jumpin’ Jack Flash? That’s unspeakably cool.
But the same actor, 43 years later, doing a similar walk through a Daytona Beach club to Macklemore’s Downtown? That’s unspeakable.
It’s rare, thank goodness, for a De Niro comedy to go quite as far as Rocky and Bullwinkle did, with its excruciating send-up of the “Are you talking to me?” monologue from Taxi Driver.
But they’re all built on an assumption that viewers will be steeped in, or at least dimly aware of, De Niro lore – his genius for playing violent, streetwise, wayward souls, and bringing plausibility and depth to hair-trigger maniacs.
So if you could put a De Niro-brand socio- path in a film about a nervous young man trying to win over his prospective father-in-law, for example? Well, imagine the hilarity that would ensue.
That was the thinking behind Meet the Parents, the 2000 film that was largely responsible for the De Niro comedy boom.
De Niro has a limited number of comedy moves, but Meet the Parents makes expert use of his best three: overt friendliness with an undertow of threat, an expression you might call “simmering volcano”, and the wildly disproportionate outburst (“I will bring you down, baby! I will bring you down to Chinatown!”).
But it also gets a few cheap laughs by undercutting De Niro’s standing as a respectable actor — the scene in which a lorry’s spinning tyres spray him with septic tank waste, for instance – and this is where the problems start to creep in.
That particular comic tactic yields diminishing returns, not least because De Niro’s standing droops a little every time you do it.
So that’s why the scripts of Meet the Parents’ two awful sequels, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, had to go to much greater extremes to achieve the same effect.
But that didn’t stop all three Meet the Parents films from being wildly successful.
That De Niro’s comic style is often both broad and limited can’t be helped: the films that work tend to be the ones that make a virtue of it.
A year before Meet the Parents came Analyse This, in which De Niro played a mob boss in psychotherapy, and the role didn’t require much more than judicious deployment of the same three moves above.
Yet De Niro’s best comedy to date – Midnight Run – is the one which turned that dynamic on his head – and positioned him, improbably, as the straight man.
In the late Eighties, De Niro was long- established as a great screen actor and Oscar-winning talent, but his films had never been licences to print money. (The Untouchables, released the previous year, had been his biggest hit to date, but that show’s newly minted star was Kevin Costner.)
But this addictively eccentric odd-couple road-movie buddy-comedy hybrid changed that. De Niro’s streetwise spikiness and Charles Grodin’s deadpan psych-outs turned out to be a perfect comic mismatch, and the film made De Niro a commercial star.
Tellingly, even though he’s technically playing the straight man, De Niro doesn’t have to be outrageous to be funny.
In the scene in which he mockingly compliments the FBI agents on their sunglasses — “Are they government-issued, or do all you guys go, like, to the same store to get them?” – his fake sincerity is hilarious because it’s almost indiscernible from the real thing.
Back in 1983, his performance as the unhinged aspiring stand-up Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy had showed De Niro understood the rhythms of comedy well enough to make it supremely unsettling. Its climactic monologue wavers hair-raisingly between derangement and real comic proficiency, and is all the scarier for it.
In Midnight Run, all he had to do was use those powers for good. — The Daily Telegraph
Who told Robert De Niro he was funny?
In Dirty Grandpa, the two-time Oscar-winner plays a widower who visits Florida with his grandson in the hopes of bringing his 15-year celibate streak to a wild and messy halt.
On the poster he’s shirtless, and holding his co-star Zac Efron above his head in a dead lift.
In one sense, De Niro’s Dirty Grandpa is merely the latest version of the senex amans, or “ancient lover”: a comic archetype that’s been rattling around since the days of early Roman theatre and was good enough for Boccaccio and Chaucer.
But in another sense – well, it just looks horrendous, doesn’t it? (In fairness, I haven’t yet seen Dirty Grandpa, so there’s a chance it could be the new About Schmidt.)
It’s hard to picture anyone – even Efron fans – wanting to see the 72-year-old star of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull reduced to shouting “party till you’re pregnant” at twentysomething women in a crowded nightclub for laughs.
Yet for more than a decade, this once most serious of actors has made broad and lowbrow comedies his home turf.
The Intern, Grudge Match, Last Vegas, The Family, The Big Wedding, two supplementary doses of Fockers (Meet The and Little), New Year’s Eve, Machete, Showtime, Analyse That and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, packed in since 2000. That is a hell of a comic run.
The actor’s apparent lack of quality control has itself become a running joke.
At the 2014 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at which De Niro was present, the host, Joel McHale quipped: “I don’t do a De Niro impression, but I do an impression of Robert De Niro’s agent,” before pretending to pick up a ringing telephone and immediately shouting “He’ll do it!”
De Niro is not the only New Hollywood icon now widely thought to be squandering his talent.
Another much-lamented case is Al Pacino.
But at least Pacino’s recent stinkers keep you on your toes – he was miscast in Danny Collins, floundering in Manglehorn, and sleepwalked through 88 Minutes, so who knows how the next one will go wrong?
De Niro’s, on the other hand, are clumpingly predictable: most either spoof Seventies screen persona or shift it to an unexpected setting.
Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, swaggering into a red-lit bar to the opening chords of Jumpin’ Jack Flash? That’s unspeakably cool.
But the same actor, 43 years later, doing a similar walk through a Daytona Beach club to Macklemore’s Downtown? That’s unspeakable.
It’s rare, thank goodness, for a De Niro comedy to go quite as far as Rocky and Bullwinkle did, with its excruciating send-up of the “Are you talking to me?” monologue from Taxi Driver.
But they’re all built on an assumption that viewers will be steeped in, or at least dimly aware of, De Niro lore – his genius for playing violent, streetwise, wayward souls, and bringing plausibility and depth to hair-trigger maniacs.
So if you could put a De Niro-brand socio- path in a film about a nervous young man trying to win over his prospective father-in-law, for example? Well, imagine the hilarity that would ensue.
That was the thinking behind Meet the Parents, the 2000 film that was largely responsible for the De Niro comedy boom.
De Niro has a limited number of comedy moves, but Meet the Parents makes expert use of his best three: overt friendliness with an undertow of threat, an expression you might call “simmering volcano”, and the wildly disproportionate outburst (“I will bring you down, baby! I will bring you down to Chinatown!”).
But it also gets a few cheap laughs by undercutting De Niro’s standing as a respectable actor — the scene in which a lorry’s spinning tyres spray him with septic tank waste, for instance – and this is where the problems start to creep in.
That particular comic tactic yields diminishing returns, not least because De Niro’s standing droops a little every time you do it.
So that’s why the scripts of Meet the Parents’ two awful sequels, Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, had to go to much greater extremes to achieve the same effect.
But that didn’t stop all three Meet the Parents films from being wildly successful.
That De Niro’s comic style is often both broad and limited can’t be helped: the films that work tend to be the ones that make a virtue of it.
A year before Meet the Parents came Analyse This, in which De Niro played a mob boss in psychotherapy, and the role didn’t require much more than judicious deployment of the same three moves above.
Yet De Niro’s best comedy to date – Midnight Run – is the one which turned that dynamic on his head – and positioned him, improbably, as the straight man.
In the late Eighties, De Niro was long- established as a great screen actor and Oscar-winning talent, but his films had never been licences to print money. (The Untouchables, released the previous year, had been his biggest hit to date, but that show’s newly minted star was Kevin Costner.)
But this addictively eccentric odd-couple road-movie buddy-comedy hybrid changed that. De Niro’s streetwise spikiness and Charles Grodin’s deadpan psych-outs turned out to be a perfect comic mismatch, and the film made De Niro a commercial star.
Tellingly, even though he’s technically playing the straight man, De Niro doesn’t have to be outrageous to be funny.
In the scene in which he mockingly compliments the FBI agents on their sunglasses — “Are they government-issued, or do all you guys go, like, to the same store to get them?” – his fake sincerity is hilarious because it’s almost indiscernible from the real thing.
Back in 1983, his performance as the unhinged aspiring stand-up Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy had showed De Niro understood the rhythms of comedy well enough to make it supremely unsettling. Its climactic monologue wavers hair-raisingly between derangement and real comic proficiency, and is all the scarier for it.
In Midnight Run, all he had to do was use those powers for good. — The Daily Telegraph
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