In Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro famously asked his reflection, “You talkin’ to me?”, and in The Alto Knights, he is, playing two separate mob bosses who repeatedly engage in gimmicky whatsamaddawitchoo-grade chitchat.
Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson’s film, which hits theaters Mar. 21, stars De Niro as real-life godfathers Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, whom it imagines as opposite sides of the same clichéd coin, the former a pseudo-respectable bigwig who seizes and maintains power by keeping cops and politicians in his pocket, and the latter a hotheaded psychopath whose hands are as dirty as his mouth. Taking these dual turns together, it’s an ignominious tour-de-force for the esteemed headliner, who gets to indulge in just about every caricatured mannerism and colloquialism in the stale La Cosa Nostra cookbook.
Dramatizing a true mid-20th-century tale with an abundance of affectations and almost no momentum or purpose, The Alto Knights is the very thing gangster-movie critics claim they are: an act of nostalgic glorification of cretins whose only supposed virtue is adherence to their code.
Levinson’s first feature in a decade is guided by the narration of Frank, whose point-of-view it assumes. That renders it a rosy-eyed fable of childhood friends whose differing demeanors and ethos made them enemies, and of a mafia that, it claims, was created by a bunch of working-class immigrants who, like those who had preceded them, were simply exploiting the particulars of their time and place in order to achieve the American Dream.
So thick is its gloopy romanticization that at one point Frank and Vito reminisce about the good ol’ days while dressed in white uniforms and bathed in angelic light, and Frank subsequently, wistfully musing—as a slide projector displays photos—“Life goes on.”
That bromide, apparently, doesn’t pertain to De Niro himself, who with The Alto Knights rehashes his The Godfather Part II and Goodfellas greatest hits to less-than-great results.
Levinson’s film opens in 1957 with Frank being shot at the elevator of his Central Park West apartment building by Vincent Gigante (Cosmo Jarvis). Despite being hit in the head, Frank survives, much to the fury of Vito, whom De Niro embodies under conspicuous make-up and latex that he doesn’t wear for Frank.
Tended to by his wife Bobbie (Debra Messing), a loyal nobody who does nothing throughout this distended venture, Frank doesn’t rat out Vincent and, by extension, Vito. Before he can settle this lethal feud, the material flashes back a few years to detail the tensions between the two men, which escalated once Vito returned from Italy (where he’d been evading prosecution for murder) and bristled at Frank—whom he’d left in power—declining to get into bed with him in the narcotics trade.
The Alto Knights is written by Nicholas Pileggi, whose book Wiseguy was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, and yet that prior work’s authenticity is nowhere to be found in this old-hat affair. Frank goes on and on about how Vito is a loose cannon who doesn’t understand that drugs are a one-way ticket to life behind bars, and Vito ignores his buddy’s warnings and barrels full-speed ahead with his plans—none of which are actually depicted. Instead, large swaths of the early going are wasted on Vito’s romance with club owner Anna (Kathrine Narducci), whom he marries and then begins stealing from, thereby instigating furious phone calls from Anna to Bobbie for help, and a divorce hearing in which she rails against her husband and accidentally reveals, publicly, the long-standing relationship between Vito and Frank.
Outed as a gangster, Frank and his cronies are called to testify before the first-ever televised Senate hearing, during which they all plead the fifth save for Frank, who—after demanding that his face be shielded from view—gets himself into hot water by facing questions. This is historically accurate and completely tedious, since Levinson and Pileggi offer no reason to care about this story.
Assuming a straightforward and sentimental perspective on their saga, they merely restage past events in order to lionize Frank, who’s presented as a noble sort of lowlife who’s never seen with a gun, ordering a hit, or doing anything illicit. So far does this tack go that the director even wastes extended time on a scene in which Frank walks two dogs who are decked out in their own mink coats—a cutesy bit that provides the film’s sole laugh when one of the pooches refuses to go and is dragged by Frank across his apartment building’s lobby.
Not wanting to proceed with Frank and Vito is a relatable feeling throughout The Alto Knights, whose dawdling pace is almost as extreme as its over-the-top acting. Everyone involved is doing fourth-rate mobster schtick, led by De Niro in lead performances that allow him to squint (and double squint) in virtually every frame.
De Niro’s addresses to the camera (and audience) are never contextualized and haphazardly employed, and while legendary cinematographer Dante Spinotti lends it a dark, rich visual texture—he remains a master at delicately using shadow to reflect character and theme—the film stumbles and bumbles its way from one uninteresting incident to another.
Ultimately, those include Albert Anastasia (Michael Rispoli) demanding retribution for Vito’s attempted assassination of Frank, Frank striving to retire from the “family”—and to convince Vito that his intentions are sincere—or an Apalachin, New York meeting of the nation’s mob bosses that exposes, to the public, that the mafia is a nationwide scourge.
The Alto Knights ambles toward a conclusion that would warrant the term “anticlimactic” if there were any preceding hint of suspense. Levinson and Pileggi litter their film with references to people and schemes in a vain stab at making it seem epic, but its familiarity—in tone, word, attitude, and gesticulations—is crushingly pervasive.
De Niro has done this routine countless times before, and with considerably more idiosyncratic energy. Moreover, given his well-publicized political opinions, he should know that nothing good comes from celebrating ruthlessly corrupt and ambitious tyrants except a whole lot of pain, misery, and banal evil.
