“Show, don’t tell” is the simplest rule of cinema. Four decades into his storied, Oscar-winning career, Barry Levinson, the director of Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam, should know as much. There’s so much mobsplaining in the film-maker’s messy true-life Mafia movie that it often feels like Robert De Niro is aggressively reading a Wikipedia entry. Citation!
Listening to a clutter of archive footage, explanatory radio broadcasts and TV news stories, extensive voiceover, straight-to-camera narration, and interior monologue, one wonders when the film will start. The convoluted Mafia politics keep on coming.
In a gimmicky, prosthetics-heavy flourish, De Niro essays dual – and duelling – roles as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two Italian-American associates battling for control of the Luciano crime syndicate in the 1950s. Costello is the gentleman mobster, a bootlegger and bookmaker with links to the Democratic Party and a penthouse suite in New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Vito, a former childhood chum, is a hothead returning from exile, leaving a trail of corpses around his Manhattan territory.
Costello is happily married to his Jewish wife and sounding board, Bobbie (Debra Messing); Frank ends up in a very public and acrimonious divorce case from the similarly heightened Anna (Kathrine Narducci).
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Nicholas Pileggi, a writer of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, has post-Sopranos fun with wise-guy banter. An exchange concerning Mormon history between Genovese and Cosmo Jarvis’s (future boss) Vincent Gigante becomes so hilariously overheated that it almost results in a road crash. A raid that sends many portly mob bosses running indelicately for the hills deserves a special collective noun. A jiggle of mobsters? A gam of gangsters?
These occasionally fun interludes fail to coalesce into more than a superfluous genre entry. The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction. Curiously bloodless in every respect.
