De Niro, the man who personified the gold standard of screen acting for the last three decades of the 20th century, has already survived one career slump, that wayward spell in the aughts that saw him terrorise a CGI moose in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, sleep with the fishes in Shark Tale, and, of course, meet the dubiously amusing Fockers, both big and Little. Consensus agrees that his career started to uptick in the years since, thanks partly through his collaborations with auteur filmmakers David O’Russell (2012’s Silver Linings Playbook; 2015’s Joy), Nancy Meyers (2015’s The Intern), and, most convincingly, Martin Scorsese (2019’s The Irishman and 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon). In the two Scorsese films particularly – re-activating a collaboration that had decades earlier yielded career-best work for both parties – De Niro was an artist reborn, producing sophisticated character work with rich, heavyweight material.
Really, though, these were the anomalies. The majority of De Niro’s projects have been forgettable, unedifying misses. Think The Comedian, in which he played a comedian, or The Alto Knights, last year’s plodding gangster flick in which De Niro gamely played two roles, without enough enthusiasm for either.
Zero Day, the 2024 thriller series he fronted for Netflix, seemed to disappear, dissolving more or less anonymously into the streamer’s ocean of content like all sewage pumped out of the British coast. The Whisper Man – a pulpy straight-to-streaming thriller in which De Niro plays a crime novelist and onetime serial-killer-catcher – is more of the same: a great actor slumming it in the minor leagues. Clunky, implausible and murkily lit, the film seems unable to capture De Niro’s attention, the actor more or less sleepwalking through the deadly cat-and-mouse hunt. (Sloth-and-mouse might be more accurate.) Really, though, who’s to blame him for taking roles like this?
What seems at first to be evidence of De Niro’s flimsy curatorial judgement really attests to a bigger problem. Where are the great roles being written for elderly men? Look around – they don’t exist.
If we were to take stock of all the great actors of his generation, De Niro, 83, is clearly not alone in his commitment to spending old age acting in sub-par movies. His Irishman co-star Al Pacino is another great actor stuck in a habit of mediocrity. Once-reliable character actors like Ed Harris or Tommy Lee Jones or Christopher Lloyd have faded into irrelevance, likewise former A-listers Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman (though for the latter two, misconduct allegations – which they’ve denied – may have played a part).
Sir Anthony Hopkins still finds the odd worthwhile role, including an Oscar-winning part in 2020’s The Father, but a lot of less worthwhile parts to boot. (This month he’s also, it’s worth pointing out, released his first album.) In the five dozen or so films that JK Simmons had made since winning the Oscar for Whiplash in 2014, has he had a great role since? Those who have avoided these late-in-life downturns have largely done so by retiring – actors like Joe Pesci, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson simply opted out, to varying extents. It’s significant, perhaps, that if you move down a generation – to the leading men now in their late fifties and sixties, the Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises – the big roles on offer now largely exist in action films.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
