‘The Alto Knights’: is Robert De Niro about to accomplish something unprecedented or become a laughing stock?
When the trailer for the upcoming Robert De Niro gangster epic The Alto Knights debuted, I was extremely curious to watch it. When it was announced a few years ago as Wise Guys, it had all the old-school Hollywood pedigree that speaks to me in my advancing years. OK, I’m only 38, but the idea of De Niro playing a mobster in a movie directed by Barry Levinson – of Rain Man, Good Morning, Vietnam, and Sleepers fame – sounded fantastic. Throw in that it’s written by Nicholas Pileggi, the man who wrote Goodfellas and Casino, and it was always going to have me saying, “One, please”.
As soon as I clicked play and got into the meat of the trailer, though, a sinking feeling washed over me. Somehow, I had forgotten that we’re not just getting one Robert De Niro in this film. Instead, De Niro is playing both duelling mob bosses in the story: Frank Costello and Vito Genovese. As I watched a shaky De Niro walk up the stairs of a plush restaurant wearing a hat and glasses before ambling over to sit at a table opposite another De Niro with receding hair and liver spots, I felt uncomfortable. Then, when the two De Niros started talking to each other in basically the exact same voice, I hung my head.
Admittedly, The Alto Knights could turn out to be the greatest gangster movie in years, although that seems unlikely given some of the early scuttlebutt surrounding it. However, it can’t be denied that hiring an 80-year-old De Niro to play both lead characters in a film that will probably take place over a long time period sounds dicey. After all, Scorsese already asked audiences to suspend their disbelief about the CGI used to make De Niro look “young” in The Irishman, despite him still moving like a man in his 70s. Will Levinson get audiences to suspend their disbelief similarly for The Alto Knights, a movie I’d be fairly certain will be no Irishman? That sounds unlikely to me.
What troubled me most about De Niro’s gamble—playing two completely different men in a film that seems to consist largely of them sitting across tables from each other—is that the film is a drama. Audiences are meant to take it seriously, yet Levinson has opted for a technique almost exclusively reserved for comedy. Allow me to explain.
Let’s do a thought exercise: think about most movies where an actor plays multiple characters. The first ones that come to mind will probably be films where one actor plays twins, and that tactic can be used in all genres. If an actor plays two different family members – like, say, a father and son – that can also work in a dramatic sense, as can actors playing clones or evil alternate versions of themselves.
However, can you think of a dramatic film in which an actor plays completely separate individuals who aren’t family members? I certainly can’t. In fact, the only movies that pop into my head are comedies, such as Mike Myers playing Austin Powers, Dr Evil, Fat Bastard, and Goldmember in the same movie. The same goes for Peter Sellers playing Dr Strangelove, Merkin Muffley, and Lionel Mandrake, or – God help me – Eddie Murphy playing the Klump Family in The Nutty Professor.
To me, The Alto Knights is a pretty unique project in Hollywood history – unless I’m forgetting a glaringly obvious example of someone playing a dual role quite like this in the past. It’s also a massively risky project because I found myself simultaneously intrigued, distracted, and lightly amused by the two De Niros in the trailer. In the end, if the legendary star manages to convincingly separate Costello and Genovese in the audience’s mind to the point where they’re not constantly thinking, “Hey, they’re both Bob”, he might just have pulled off something unprecedented in Hollywood history.
I’m scared that the kneejerk reaction will be laughter, though, because we’re so used to seeing this kind of thing solely in funny movies—and I don’t want to laugh at De Niro. That’s what my embarrassingly frequent rewatches of Meet The Parents are for.
