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"FacebookPinterest\n\nGQ, February 2007\n\nIt's not like I want to blame him, honest. Back in the day, we'd never seen anyone like the guy, which is why I wasn't the only 1970s college freshman to come out of Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets wishing I could be a human grenade like Johnny Boy. But when looking at Robert De Niro's screen progeny, I can't help thinking he ruined everything I love about movie acting. If I'd known all that obsessive intensity was going to inspire two generations of wannabes to believe that the measure of Oscarcaliber acting is how grueling it is, I might have rooted for him to lose his famous game of Russian roulette in The Deer Hunter.\n\nNever mind that Bobby himself, after the ultimate effort of Raging Bull, settled into coasting on an image every bit as complacent as John Wayne's\u2014and less meaningful, too. He's always been a shrewd custodian of his own mystique. The real problem is that defining fanatical commitment as the only true test of an actor's mettle, the way De Niro's fabled early performances for Scorsese and others did, is one mirthless idea of screen glory. An awful lot of the pleasures of movies are fairly superficial\u2014downright frivolous, even\u2014but that doesn't make them ignoble. That's why treating acting as a form of religious zealotry has its limits.\n\nBecause the young De Niro was so compelling, the mistrust of charm or ease that's actually one of his limitations left qualities like lighthearted bravado, sexiness, or just an infectious zest in performing\u2014 not one of them a bad reason to enjoy a movie star\u2014looking flimsy. In his prime, he also shunned comedy and romance like the plague, most likely because he knew he didn't have the right touch for either\u2014at least until he discovered the lucrative joys of selfparody. But his successors interpret his aversion as a value judgment, and they, too, scorn appearing in such piffle. Since today's neoDe Niros are all male\u2014unless Hilary Swank counts\u2014my guess is he isn't their hero for art's sake alone. Like Hemingway, he makes an epicene trade seem manlier. Even if you share their consensus that Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver was the greatest performance in movie history, which I don't, I'm not sure it's all that fertile a career guide. You know, what about our needs Nowadays, they come in a distant second to actors' cravings to be taken seriously.\n\n\"I was caught in the leadingman trap,\" Brad Pitt told Entertainment Weekly in November, expressing thanks for the ordeal Alejandro Gonz&amp;amp;#xE1;lez I&amp;amp;#xF1;&amp;amp;#xE1;rritu put him through on Babel. Fine, more power to him. But it's not as if we've got a surplus of genuine leading men, and Pitt's impression that he is or was one just proves the category's decline. (Sorry, Brad\u2014you were beefcake, astounding women with your apparent ability to doze off with your eyes open.) His pal George Clooney may be the only current marquee name who fits the bill, and even Clooney has been bitten by the solemnity bug. He'll never believe Ocean's Eleven was a better movie than Syriana.\n\nBut Clooney's got nothing compared to the dude who still doesn't know that Fast Times at Ridgemont High was a better movie than I Am Sam: Sean Penn, the foremost, and most besotted, of De Niro's epigones. Once the Academy duly forked over for his \"Is that my Oscar in there Is that my Oscar in there\" performance in Mystic River, you knew he'd only get more insufferable. But even I wasn't prepared for his excesses in that flawlessly wrongheaded disaster All the King's Men. Frothing away in splendid ignorance of the fact that your average southern demagogue, no matter what wickedness festers within, is fairly good at making himself congenial, Penn didn't really need an assassin to do him in. Any capable veterinarian could have handled the job.\n\nNowadays, it seems our most gifted actors, warped by De Niro's imposing example, can barely commit to a movie without ransacking their wardrobes for hair shirts. But call me naive: I did think Leonardo DiCaprio would have too much imagination to pursue a muse this unoriginal. Early on, in What's Eating Gilbert Grape and Baz Luhrmann's Romeo &amp;amp; Juliet\u2014not to mention his role as De Niro's stepson in This Boy's Life, which in hindsight has that Hollywood tang of inadvertent prophecy\u2014DiCaprio was exciting not only for the lyrical freshness of his acting perceptions but also for how eager he was to share them. Yet ever since Titanic, he's been treating his participation in that great pop event as a misunderstanding he's got to live down. I know I'm supposed to admire the grownup Leo's dedication, and up to a point, I do. But he's turned into yet another resolutely uningratiating, morbidly selfserious actor who never taints his talent by providing anything as corrupt as entertainment value. He's calling attention to his craft to distract us from his magnetism, when any idiot can see it ought to be the other way around.\n\nThough I had a fairly good time at The Departed, I'd have been happier if Jack Nicholson's two costars had followed his prankish lead and had a food fight with the scenery. Instead, one of its nuttier disproportions is that it's a movie starring Leo DiCaprio and Matt Damon that gets livelier\u2014hell, sexier\u2014whenever Alec Baldwin and Mark Wahlberg turn up. By any number of uninteresting yardsticks, DiCaprio is terrific: He's all refles and wary, subtly stricken reactions, phenomenally concentrated. But he never makes his situation ours, because he's about as concerned with audience rapport as the subject of a wildlife documentary. In his early scenes with Vera Farmiga, Damon brings a lot more juice to the party, but Scorsese isn't a director to encourage that kind of silliness; as usual, he's too intent on convincing us that the ridiculous story is a balefully momentous one. That Leo is now his favorite actor strikes me as ominous.\n\nWhen they first teamed up on Gangs of New York, Scorsese clearly wanted DiCaprio for commercial insurance, which Leo didn't provide\u2014and Leo wanted artistic validation, which Scorsese didn't provide either. Two years later, in The Aviator, a movie whose curious hollowness came from the way it presumed a current public fascination with Howard Hughes instead of trying to create some, Leo's adult technique was on formidable display. Still, it was disconcerting how playing isolated heroes outside the normal range of human emotions was becoming his creative comfort zone. Tellingly, neither he nor Scorsese ever tried to engage us by suggesting that Hughes's famous eccentricities were a hoot. Instead, DiCaprio doted on the script's bathetic nonperceptions (Howard's mom messed him up; he was so lonely) in the same way he'd embraced the littleboylost side of Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. By and large, his adult performances open up with something like his old empathetic magic only when he can turn on the sensitivity faucet to reveal his character's hidden pain\u2014never something crassly crowdpleasing, like exultation or merriment.\n\nIf only because the plot forces him to interact with people from a perspective besides paranoia, DiCaprio is less recessive than usual in Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond. The movie's preposterous blend of opedifying moral concern and Old Hollywood high jinks is wellnigh irresistible, and Danny Archer, the diamond smuggler caught up in Sierra Leone's brutal 1990s civil war, is Leo's most dashing role since Titanic. But what a difference a decade makes. Advertising his dedication by getting every tricky behavioral detail down pat, he's so busy being scrupulous and convincing that it never occurs to him that the part isn't a character study. It's a rakish concoction to get the Cook'stour story rolling, and what it cries out for is cocky, oldfashioned moviestar flair. Expert as he is, he spends the movie preoccupied with the technical demands and emotional nuances of a role Errol Flynn wouldn't have even bothered to sober up to play.\n\nWhatever Flynn had, it wasn't acting genius, at least not as Leo defines that arduous priesthood. But in Flynn's day, and well into Warren Beatty's, movie performers took it for granted that seducing the audience was part of their job. We and they both knew that their screen personalities were fantasies about human behavior, more beguilingly sardonic or debonair or hard bitten than real people could ever be, and the artifice wasn't just pleasurable for its own sake. It got us involved by heightening and clarifying a story's meaning, which in those innocent times was understood to be what makebelieve was good for.\n\nOne of the many ways the movies have gotten weirder since Errol Flynn was alive is that Hollywood has internalized the notion that entertaining the public is for slobs. The gap between the ponderous masterworks designed as Oscar bait and the summer contraptions designed to make big bucks is now a chasm, as is the gap between the killjoy acting geniuses we're conditioned to look up to and the professional doofuses, like Will Ferrell, who invite us to look down. That was why audiences practically sobbed with gratitude when a genuinely firstrate actor, Johnny Depp\u2014conspiring with moviegoers behind his director's back\u2014consented to remind us in Pirates of the Caribbean that his profession is a branch of show business.\n\nIt's also why the now septuagenarian Peter O'Toole has become a critics' darling for the first time in decades\u2014and yes, an Oscar contender\u2014for his graceful work in director Roger Michell and writer Hanif Kureishi's Venus. Though the movie's notquiteromance between an elderly actor and an uncultured 19yearold is sentimental, the beauty of O'Toole's performance is that it isn't. Treating any resemblance between the character's gallant decrepitude and his own as blessedly irrelevant, he just assumes he's been hired to amuse and enlighten us about somebody Kureishi has made up, and gets to work devising dozens of tiny accentuations of the man's foibles for our benefit. His only interest in the hero is to make the characterization as entertainingly accessible as he can, and wow\u2014how unambitious, right\n\nO'Toole is clearly beyond worrying he's got a legend to live up to. Even if he did, it wouldn't cross his civilized mind to suppose that it's any of our concern. By contrast, all the glum dudes for whom testing themselves is the point often end up embroiling us in displays of pure acting ego. In real life, most of us just don't get that worked up about our own psychologies; that's why intensity is the most overrated quality in screen acting and casualness the most underrated. The feral concentration De Niro brought to every role early on was a bracing shock, but as an approach it's long since congealed into hyperbole\u2014and narcissism, since it ultimately valorizes the actor's brilliance over our desire to take some pleasure in it.\n\nThese days, even an effort to shed the hair shirt can end up as one more vanity showcase. In Ridley Scott's stillborn A Good Year, it was astonishing how the question \"Can Russell Crowe be charming\" emerged as the movie's subject\u2014indeed, its only reason for being. Lightening up had become his latest acting challenge, as tense as Nixon's opening to China. (Answer, if you care: Yes, Crowe can be charming. Okay, affable. All right, not wholly unpleasant. It might be nice if next time he tried it in a movie, not a postcard.)\n\nAt the spectrum's other end is an actor who's plainly never understood why he's being tested at all\u2014that designer handbag of a man, Jude Law. In another era, Law might have had an amiable career in light comedies, playing silly, feckless people we didn't need to take seriously: gigolos, Tony Blair. (In fact, he's seldom looked happier than in his cameo as a robot named Gigolo Joe in Spielberg's A.I.) But thanks to his one ace performance eight years ago, in Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley, he's had greatness thrust upon him in project after project since, looking more panicked every time. Even before Chris Rock ridiculed him at the Oscars two years ago, I'd gotten exasperated with his gulpy inadequacies\u2014and realizing that the movie that provoked Sean Penn to rise to Law's defense was All the King's Men just makes the whole thing funnier.\n\nEven for Law, though, Minghella's Breaking and Entering is some kind of nadir. Apparently, Minghella has looked around his London neighborhood, noticed immigrants and people without money in the vicinity, and decided it's time for a big statement (it wouldn't behoove him to make a small one, would it) about the crazy way we live now. Playing an architect who gets involved with Juliette Binoche as a soulful Balkan refugee, Law can't even use his one asset, boyish enthusiasm; watching him try to make his Goodbye Kitty face the map for Minghella's gaseous insights into privilege and the new underclass is pure misery. Even after Binoche laments that no man has touched her in six years, you still wonder why she was desperate enough to try sex with a hamster.His one effective scene, however\u2014a CGIassisted spiel for the urbanredevelopment complex his character is designing\u2014does convince me he'd make a fine pitchman. With any luck, maybe someday they'll invent a product for him. Then I can stop having nightmares about Jude Law costarring with Leo DiCaprio in Scorsese's glowering, bloody threehour remake of Dumb &amp;amp; Dumber.\n\nTom Carson is a GQ correspondent. To see his musthave DVD picks, click here."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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