‘They’re the same – he’s marrying himself!” The speaker is an aghast Bobbie Costello, played by Debra Messing, addressing her shruggingly detached mob boss husband, Frank Costello, played by Robert De Niro. They are guests at the wedding of mercurial club owner Anna (Kathrine Narducci) to Frank’s hot-tempered mafia associate Vito Genovese. And Vito is played by … Robert De Niro.
This film is a laborious true-crime account of Frank and Vito’s homicidal falling out in 1950s New York, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Nicholas Pileggi, though with little of the perspective, light and shade and narrative richness of Pileggi’s earlier scripts. As Vito, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, bad-tempered and wears glasses and a hat. As Frank, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, slightly less bad-tempered and doesn’t wear glasses or a hat. Bobbie’s line surely has to be a meta joke about the through-the-looking-glass casting – but, really, the point of the Vito/Frank duplication is a question that is not asked or answered by the movie itself, and has echoes of the meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other. Is the idea that they are basically the same person? Maybe. But it’s a pedantic and self-cancelling approach, obstructing the idea of interesting and important differences in the two men, who in fact no more resemble each other than all the other hatchet-faced wise guys around them. Maybe everyone on screen, men and women, should have been played by Robert De Niro, in a Charlie Kaufman-type nightmare.
Just before the war, Frank and Vito make a good living in black market alcohol and drugs and illegal lotteries as part of the Lucky Luciano crime family. Vito then flees to Italy and when he comes back to New York in 1945, he finds that his old pal is only giving him a small slice of the cake. And, moreover, stolid, cautious Frank is unwilling to expand further into drugs, having bribed his way into a cosy, pseudo-respectable position in society. Frank infuriates Vito with a professed ambition to retire and his willingness to cooperate as an un-subpoenaed witness in front of grand juries. Vito suspects (understandably) that this stance will only be carried off by selling out his former criminal pals and so orders a hit on Frank, resulting in a brutal and incompetent assassination attempt that leads to disaster.
The film’s title refers to the postwar New York drinking club where Vito and Frank hung out; the movie had previously been called Wise Guys, which was perhaps too close to Pileggi’s book Wiseguy, on which the film Goodfellas was based. All the time-honoured mannerisms are here, including the old-fashioned barber-shop hit – but the movie also adds little memory moments in black and white, as well as snatches of documentary archive footage. It also has a habit of giving the old guys in the club stretches of expository dialogue to tell each other and us what is going on. When the entire nationwide mob family is busted by police at a powwow in upstate New York, Pileggi speculates that Costello deliberately contrived the meeting and reported them to the cops to save himself – a snitch move, from which the film carefully rescues Costello by sentimentally putting him in the same prison cell as Vito.
There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour. There is, however, a sweet, autumnal touch when the melancholy, ageing Frank is forced by his wife to take their dogs for a walk in Central Park in mink coats to keep out the cold.
• The Alto Knights is out on 20 March in Australia, and 21 March in the UK and US.
