Overall Rating
  Awesome: 52.46%
Worth A Look: 22.95%
Average: 13.93%
Pretty Bad: 7.38%
Total Crap: 3.28%
5 reviews, 92 user ratings
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| Casino |
by PaulBryant
"I just wanna keep things quiet…"
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Casino is the type of picture only Martin Scorsese could make. His frenetic editing style, colorful camerawork and explosive outbursts of emotion couldn’t be more appropriate for a story about Las Vegas. In a sense, Scorsese possesses a very ‘Las Vegas’ filmmaking style, in that his films always have a great sense of unreality, of fabrication, and yet also of inimitable fascination.Scorsese makes Martin Scorsese films - nobody else’s. This one he co-writes with Goodfellas screenwriter Nicolas Pileggi, and the result is the Scorsese picture to end all Scorsese pictures. He begins Casino with an extended narration (done, very strangely, by several of the main characters) and fashions a typically fascinating introduction to characters, places, and themes which will become variously intertwined and integral to each other. True to form, we have the intense, brooding face of Robert De Niro, the unadulterated ferocity of Joe Pesci, the protracted camera acrobatics and narrative jokes, a man obsessed with a beautiful younger woman, and scenes of unbelievable, semi-comic displays of violence.
Ruthlessness attaches itself to every character in Casino. Strangely, within the group of unsavory characters, the person with the highest moral values is the man who runs the Tangiers Casino, Sam Rothstein (Robert De Niro), in a role which is fairly subdued as De Niro characters go. Pesci is the sick and twisted mob-man Nicky Santoro, who decides to ply his trade in the “untapped” world of Las Vegas. He sees his opportunity in Las Vegas to be the main man, the only guy with real muscle, and be therefore untouchable. He’s right, but Sam doesn’t want any part of the dirty business. Ironically, Sam has come to Las Vegas for a “washing of his sins”, seeing the town as the only place he can do his form of ‘business’ and not be put in jail.
Rothstein sums up, in classic De Niro deadpan, “In any other place in the country I would have been arrested for what I was doing. In Las Vegas, I’m Mr. Rothstein”. So, while Nicky still wants to break legs and scam bookies out of the money he owes them, Sam only wants to run a square, legal casino, sit back calmly, and watch the money roll in. An even temper never being a Pesci trademark, we know from the outset just where his character is going to end up.
De Niro gives a vastly underrated portrayal of Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein. The actor we usually identify with intense, beneath-the-surface anger, we always sense (usually rightly) that De Niro's anger will explode from the surface in an fit of supreme viciousness. What’s odd in Casino is that he never shows us this side: he never lets himself get out of control, even when he has legitimate reasons to. Even in a scene where he has caught two gamblers cheating at blackjack, he only threatens to cut off the man’s hand, and then ends up (almost benevolently) smashing it with a hammer. He lets the other cheater leave unscathed, and the feeling of relief we feel is coupled with the feeling that De Niro is being too much of a softy. This makes his character somewhat of a reprieve to us - a respite from Travis Bickle, Jake La Motta, or Jimmy Conway - and in a lot of ways, a more interesting character is the result.
Rothstein is rightly wary of Santoro, knowing that his petty thug designs aren’t fit for what he sees as a more ‘civilized’ city – one where people cheat and steal legally, and thus must hold themselves accountable not to go too far, and ruin a good thing. He uses Nicky to strong-arm anybody that gets out of line, but he doesn’t want the obligation of being connected with him.
Throwing a striking Sharon Stone into the mix doesn’t make Rothstein’s problems any easier. As he explains in the film just before he proposes marriage to the high-priced call girl, “for a man who likes sure things, I was about to bet my life on a long shot.” Sam doesn’t know what he’s in for though, as Stone’s Ginger gets pregnant, starts some heavy drinking, even heavier cocaine use, and doesn’t quit sleeping with the sleaze-ball pimp Lester Diamond (James Woods), whom she's still in love with.
It’s easy to understand what Sam initially see in Ginger, she’s quite breathtaking and charming. What’s hard to grasp is why he proposes to her after she tells him she doesn’t love him, and why he then gives her the only key to a safe deposit box full of millions of dollars worth of jewelry. She has to remind him they’ve only known each other a few months, but he is insistent on thinking this one-time hustler could be a good mother to the children he wants. It’s hard to sympathize with Sam when things start to go bad with Ginger, as he seems to be the only one who doesn’t foresee what a stupid decision he’s making. And at the end of their tempestuous marriage (huge understatement - the two make Goodfellas Henry and Karen Hill look like Fred and Ethel), he never lets loose, never gets his revenge, or even his equal due. She railroads him the whole movie, and he sits back and takes it. Where have you gone, Robert De Niro?
Scorsese loves to tell these guys’ stories. He revels in their amorality, their brutal displays of inhumanity in the pursuit of money, their reckless degradation of women and callous indifference to children. He loves to paint their hypocrisy; they go out all night, beat the hell out of guys they don’t like, cheat the casinos out of money, put rival gang member’s heads in vices, and then come home to their quiet families, make breakfast for their kids, play golf, and act like ‘regular’ guys. Hypocrisy is what fuels Scorsese’s engine the most. He loves contradiction. The storm that brews under the calm exterior, the ability to exhibit seemingly genuine love for friends and family, and then the opposite exhibitions of brutal disregard for human life.
Casino’s particular story goes on too long, however. It can’t sustain its the three hour running time. We can take only so much debauchery, so much head-cracking, cocaine-snorting, top-of-the-lungs screaming, and tension-filled atmosphere. Make it two and a half hours, not three. On the other hand, it is hard to fault any single scene or sequence for being over the top. Las Vegas is over the top, so a movie about does Vegas deserves to be. Scorsese pushes us to the edge with giant close-ups of rolling dice, and the inside of a rolled-up dollar bill snorting cocaine, and flaunts so many shots that are needlessly extravagant. We are inundated with an overload of visual and aural information, and, as interesting as all of this may be, it ends up getting in our way and hammers home the obvious themes of the movie too bluntly.Walking into a casino can be overwhelming, just as sitting down in front of a Martin Scorsese movie can be. Casino’s perfect match of story to director almost makes the movie too perfect, too ideal, and then teeters on becoming unbearable – if only it weren’t so fascinating.
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link directly to this review at http://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=1012&reviewer=364
originally posted: 11/21/04 07:33:20
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USA
22-Nov-1995 (R)
DVD: 17-Jan-2006
UK
N/A
Australia
N/A (R)
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