November 30, 1995 | Martin Scorsese is a hard act to follow — even, apparently, if you’re Martin Scorsese. Casino, Scorsese’s sensationally stylish drama of a mobsters’ paradise lost, is a daring and vibrant piece of work, easily one of the year’s very best films. And yet, for all its neon-lit blood and thunder, it pales in comparison to Scorsese’s earlier GoodFellas, a movie that may well be the definitive statement on the subject of overweening ambition among the ranks of Mafiosi.
But give it its due: Casino is a different story, with a markedly dissimilar tone. In many respects an absurdist satire of middle-class morality gone perverse, GoodFellas was at once a darkly hilarious comedy of bad manners and an epic gangster melodrama of white-hot passion and blood-red mayhem. In sharp contrast, Casino is colder, harder and far less empathetic. Even the violence — which, with the notable exception of two scenes, is presented here with less exuberantly graphic detail than in GoodFellas — is all the more unsettling for being so dispassionately blunt. For all its flash and filigree, there is an air of detachment about the entire enterprise, suggesting that Scorsese wanted to maintain a documentarian’s distance while examining the violent lives and self-regarding schemes of men (and women) who view Las Vegas of the 1970s as their manifest destiny.
Even more than GoodFellas (or, for that matter, Scorsese’s Mean Streets), Casino relies heavily on voice-over narration to provide context for, and commentary on, the events on screen. But even this intensely subjective style of storytelling serves to hold the audience at arm’s length. (And not just because at least one of the two central narrators appears to be speaking from beyond the grave.) Casino is based on the investigative journalism of co-screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, the same author whose Wiseguy provided the basis for GoodFellas. In form and content, Pileggi’s latest collaboration with Scorsese comes off as the cinematic equivalent of that staple of non-fiction best-seller charts, the luridly detailed true-crime story. The big difference is, unlike the recently published and well-received book that Pileggi drew from the same material, Casino changes names to protect the not-so-innocent.
Robert De Niro stars as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, a prodigiously talented bookie with a near-infallible instinct for picking winners. In 1973, his Kansas City mob bosses pick Ace to serve as their front man for a Las Vegas casino financed with loans from the Teamsters union. Ace, a man with the nerve of a riverboat gambler and the soul of an accountant, approaches his job with a workaholic’s attentiveness to detail. He doubles the mob’s take, enforces a take-no-prisoners policy against scam artists — and even ensures that each blueberry muffin in the casino restaurant is adequately stuffed with fruit. For Ace, there is nothing so unimportant that it should be left to chance. And, indeed, he brings himself grief only when he lowers his guard and gambles on two staggeringly unreliable long-shots.
Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), Ace’s friend and fellow underworld regular of many years, is sent to Las Vegas to provide his trademark brand of muscle for the mob operation. Unfortunately, Nicky is too impulsive to be mindful of Las Vegas mores, and too willful to check his tendencies for hair-trigger violence. Where Ace is diplomatic, even courtly, Nicky is a blunt instrument. In no time at all, Nicky is banished from the casinos, and left to his own devices as a lethal free-lancer.
Nicky is bad news, but even his loose-cannon craziness isn’t in itself enough to short-circuit Ace’s well-oiled machinery. Ace’s real troubles don’t begin until he falls, hard, for Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), a gold-digging hustler with a heart of pure brass. To her credit, she’s honest with Ace: She warns him that she doesn’t love him, will likely cause him heartache, and can’t stop thinking about the sleazy operator (James Woods) who has been her lover since her teens. But Ace won’t be dissuaded. Love, he insists, will come later, after they’ve been married for a while, after she’s gotten used to the money, baubles and lush life that he can provide for her. Long after a less single-minded obsessive would give up, Ace continues to delude himself into thinking he can transform Ginger into a loving and trustworthy mate. In this regard, he is about as successful as he is at curbing Nicky’s sociopathic appetites.
Strictly speaking, Casino doesn’t really establish itself as a romantic triangle until the final third of its briskly paced three-hour running time. And even after it does, the movie is less than entirely convincing. But this is the only aspect of Casino that even comes close to ringing false. Much, much more of the movie is mesmerizingly persuasive as it does what movies do best: It immerses you completely into a specifically defined time, place and milieu, and consistently sustains your interest with each new convincing detail. Even if the dramatic elements were less than riveting, Casino would remain fascinating for its documentary-style depiction of casino cheating techniques, mob money-skimming schemes, and police-surveillance rituals. (One hilarious sequence offers subtitles to explain what two friends really mean while talking on a phone line that they know is tapped.) Scorsese and Pileggi are as observant and informative as a National Geographic TV special while they examine the intricacies of their criminal subculture, especially when it comes to charting the chain of corruption that extends from valet-parking attendants to city and state politicians. Talk about your wildlife.
The human drama is scarcely less interesting, even though much of it evokes a strong sense of deja vu. As Nicky, Joe Pesci is every bit as savagely funny and scary as he should be, but that’s not quite enough — his performance too often plays like a rerun of his Oscar-winning work in GoodFellas. The only new wrinkle is his character’s casually demeaning treatment of women. On two different occasions, he expresses his desire for oral sex in the least courteously way imaginable. Rarely in movies has a character’s sexual etiquette been used with such concise expressiveness to reveal his basic nature.
De Niro’s portrayal of Ace also recalls a previous star turn — not his chillingly self-possessed gangster in GoodFellas, but his sad, slow-to-anger romantic in the under-rated Mad Dog and Glory. Still, there is enough to his work here that is fresh and effective, especially during his scenes with, of all people, Sharon Stone. Until now, you could safely dismiss Stone as an over-heated sexpot with a bit too much awareness of her well-practiced steaminess. But her coke-snorting, mood-swinging and self-loathing Ginger is the sort of vivid and viscerally powerful performance that demands respect and earns awards. As he did so brilliantly in GoodFellas, Scorsese surrounds most of Casino with a pop-standard soundtrack (everything from Devo and the Rolling Stones to Louis Prima and Dinah Washington), providing a wall of sound that would make even Phil Spector envious. But during two key intimate interludes with De Niro and Stone, Scorsese wisely turns down the volume, so that the only sound we hear is their voices. And that’s more than enough.
Casino is aggressively anti-romantic in its depiction of mob figures and their bloody business. So much so, in fact, that Scorsese errs twice on the side of literal and artistic overkill, in the hope of restoring the sting to on-screen violence. But there is something faintly bogus about the final scenes, where Casino tries to suggest that, back in the 1970s and ’80s, when it was run by gangsters, Las Vegas was somehow a better, purer place than it is the 1990s, now that is has become a corporate-controlled playground. Fortunately, Scorsese is too scrupulously honest to end on a wistfully melancholy note. The final line — “And that’s that!” — is like a slap across the face, a curt reminder that, to survive in such an amoral landscape, you sometimes have to shut down your heart and operate on automatic pilot. After all, business is business. Love and loyalty, jealousy and betrayal, life and death — those are mere distractions. Not nearly as important as, say, the blueberries in the muffins. Or the odds against the house.
