Exploring the evolution of Robert De Niro’s acting style
The power of the Robert De Niro legacy and his borderline-mythical status as an actor runs deep throughout cinema and popular culture. Spanning over fifty years, the man’s career has taken him from the driver’s seat of a taxi to the darkest depths of the Vietnam jungle, and he has graced our screens with a rich array of complex characters, as well as perhaps more well-trodden and established stereotypes.
With such an expansive list of credits and a movie count of more than 140 pictures, we can identify a development of his roles and a specific evolution of his acting style. These different phases of De Niro’s work aren’t concrete but viewed in the context of half a century of acting, and it’s hard to deny that, overall, the type of characters he’s played correspond to specific eras and say something about his development as an artist.
Even though it wasn’t his first major performance, nor even his first collaboration with Martin Scorsese, his role as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver in 1976 launched De Niro into unprecedented stardom. Immersing himself into the role and employing the ‘method’ technique, he notoriously shed thirty pounds and secured a genuine cab license to understand better the strange and dangerous intimacy that driving strangers around at night can grant. In the extensive notes written on the Taxi Driver screenplay, which he was prone to do for several films at that time, we are given valuable insight into how seriously he took the role.
Two years later, the exploration of a damaged and disenfranchised man would continue with his depiction of Mike Vronsky in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter in 1978. Suffering deep-rooted and severe post-traumatic stress from the horrors of the Vietnam War, the character is a textbook example of a red-blooded American man being broken down by the world around him. In keeping with the actor’s dedication to research, immersion and total transformation, De Niro travelled the US before production began, meeting steelworkers and learning the nature of their lifestyles. Whilst he would return over the decades several times to this nexus of maleness, fragility and violence, these types of performances ultimately culminated in De Niro’s Oscar-winning performance as the fiercely aggressive, unstable and paranoid Jake LaMotta in the 1980 classic from Scorsese once again, Raging Bull.
The 1980s saw De Niro move into a different space altogether. From the tightly wound energy of Rupert Pupkin, practically vibrating with derangement in The King of Comedy, to the career-driven and carefully calculating priest in Ulu Grosbard’s True Confessions, we can see how the actor began gravitating towards softer and gentler parts. De Niro wanted to challenge himself with roles that, whilst no less exciting or complex, didn’t necessitate the unbridled machismo that had been so intrinsic to earlier parts.
As the experience mounts and the man gains new tools, by the time we reach the 1990s, De Niro has found a way to bridge the two different spectrums of male identity. The strength, rage and power are kept behind a calmer and more pragmatic gate. Whereas Jake LaMotta would have fought out of any corner, roles like James Conway of Goodfellas or Sam Rothstein of Casino would sit afar, smoking, observing, and cooly plotting their solution. The undercurrent of aggression is never far, though, as demonstrated by Louis Gara in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, where, after shrugging and murmuring throughout the movie, he suddenly snaps and displays his capacity for violence.
Unlike some actors, one of De Niro’s most remarkable traits has been his ability to step back from lead characters as he got older, taking on more age-appropriate roles with miraculous aplomb. By the 2000s, he’d forayed into the world of gangsters and mafiosos enough for a particular ‘tough-guy’ persona to be recognised. This was alluded to with comic effect in films like Meet the Parents and its sequel, Meet the Fockers. De Niro happily plays the father-in-law to Ben Stiller’s character, elevating the classic dynamic of father-in-law/son-in-law to new heights of tension.
In his later life, we see De Niro’s openness to trying new things. Sometimes they are shameless, in the very best sense of the word, with derided films such as 2016’s Dirty Grandpa. Four years later, The War with Grandpa walked a similar path, but all these films did was demonstrate the actor’s willingness to have fun and try to make people laugh. It’s unlikely that the same, if any, research and immersion in the role was undertaken like with the powerhouse performances of the ’70s and ’80s, but it was a development nonetheless, a step in a new direction, an attempt at something fresh.
It is, however, a welcome change to find De Niro reuniting with the likes of Scorsese, Pacino and Joe Pesci again, seen in 2019 with the spectacular The Irishman. With its ambitious and epic decade-spanning plot, it saw the actor boast different performances in the same film whilst all under the deft direction of his long-time collaborator. Indeed, it feels like the evolution of De Niro’s acting has been so all-encompassing that it has come practically full circle. With Killers of the Flower Moon releasing this Winter, cinephiles anticipate the next role from one of the greatest living actors in cinema history and to see what he and Scorsese have achieved together 49 years after their first collaboration.
