Robert De Niro's thawing continues with HBO doc about late artist father

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jun/07/remembering-artist-robert-de-niro-sr

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The

thawing of Robert De Niro has been as astonishing to witness as the

shattering of a glacier cliff.

It started on the promotional trail

for Silver Linings Playbook, during a Katie Couric interview in

which De Niro broke down – or, more accurately, the audience

waited respectfully while the actor arm-wrestled his welling emotions

to the ground, holding up a hand apologetically the way you might for

waiting traffic. Couric didn’t have the heart to hit him with a

follow-up.

The actor teared up again last week when talking to Out

magazine about his artist father, who was gay – as a new

documentary reveals.

“I

get emotional,” he said. “I don’t know why.”

As if there

might be something at all unusual about a son getting choked up about

his about the struggles of his dead dad.

But

then this is De Niro, whose character in Michael Mann’s Heat, a

super-thief named Neil McCauley, is first introduced perusing a book

on titanium stress fractures and whose powers of self-abnegation are

summed up in his advice to never get too attached to anything you are

“not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat

around the corner”.

There were always signs of the emotion

buried several fathoms below the tungsten-tough surface of his

performances. Martin Scorsese, for example, shot 19 takes of the climax to Raging Bull, in which La Motta

delivers the “I could have been a contender…” speech from On

The Waterfront to his dressing-room mirror. De Niro picked out take

13, the more emotional. Scorsese liked a flatter one.

So they watched

both, back to back, but failed to change each other’s mind.

Scorsese chose his.

“I still think the one I have in is best,”

said the director.

“All right,” said De Niro. “Let it go.”

Was

take 13 better? We’ll never know. We have Scorsese’s Raging Bull,

not De Niro’s, another of their grand excavations of men

hollowed out by their rages and resentments, to set alongside Travis

Bickle and Rupert Pupkin – psychotically thin-skinned, hazy

with delusion, collecting injuries and injustices the way Catholics

count rosaries. And yet by his early 30s, De Niro knew great success

playing such men, and could count two Oscars on his mantelpiece. The

big mystery with him has always been: where did that pressure cooker

of alienation and resentment come from? What set the bull raging?

At

least a partial answer is glimpsed in Remembering The Artist Robert

De Niro Sr. Directed by Perri

Peltz, this new film tells two stories. The first is that of the father,

craggily good-looking just like his son, who

in the 1940s and 50s found some fame as an artist.

De Niro Sr was one of Hans Hoffman’s favorite students, was exhibited by Peggy Guggenheim and acclaimed by Art News alongside abstract expressionists like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Less auspiciously, his work also showed the lingering influence of post-impressionists like Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, his “luxuriousness, calm and voluptuousness” standing out like a sore thumb at a time when American painting was gutting itself of just those qualities.

“'Too

French,' they would say, ‘Not American enough,'” recalls one

contemporary, who subsequently saw his friend sink into neglect,

sucked under by jealousy, resentment and bouts of depression, as

American art fell for the bright acrylic glare of pop art.

“I feel I hardly have the courage at this moment to wash my brushes,

which have been standing in turpentine,” goes a journal entry,

read in voiceover by his son.

De Niro uses the same flat,

telephone-book effect he used to read Travis Bickle’s journals in

Taxi Driver: “June

8th. My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with

regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A

long continuous chain …”

You

thought you were in this alone? Travis Bickle, meet Robert De Niro

Sr, another of God’s lonely men, watching the world leave him

behind.

The film's second story, detailing the effect of all this on the son, is more

sketchily told – one reason, perhaps, that the doc comes in at

a trim 40 minutes. De Niro's parents separated when he was two and divorced

when he was nine or 10, his father a fleeting presence through most

of his childhood, sometimes glimpsed tantalisingly on the street.

“I’d run into him, or I’d see him on his bike,” says Bobby – a

rather wrenching image, with its own tight-lipped heartbreak,

although it remains unexplored. De Niro is one of the most clam-like

of interviewees, but I would have liked the interviewer to press more

on his memories of the darker figure he remembers from his teens,

“rambling”

and “ranting” about the injustices of the art world. On one

occasion, De Niro and his father hauled some of his paintings around

Paris, on an ill-advised and luckless sales mission, before the son

planted his father on the return flight to New York.

Part

of the reason for De Niro Sr’s decline was fashion, but the

simplest explanation for this lack of evolution may be to do

with his sexuality, his heroically painful, Cheeveresque battle with

which is recorded in his journals.

“If God doesn't want me to do be

a homosexual, about which I have so much guilt, he will find whom I

will love and who will love me,” he writes. Later, he records a

frustrated trawl of the streets, “looking for a gallery, or a

lover, either for that matter” – a telling conflation which

suggests how much the feelings of being alone and unloved in one

sphere buttressed and reinforced the sense of it in another. In a

manner eerily familiar to his son’s later acting work, De Niro Sr

was in love with feeling unloved.

How

much Robert De Niro’s exposure to his father’s rages and

resentments bled into his later performances, and how much of it was

the son exploring instincts that had doomed the father, is

perhaps too impertinent a speculation. But the son achieved fame playing

the painfully un-famous – which is to say not just ordinary men, but

the Bickles and Rupert Pupkins of this world, who feel their lack of

acclaim like an injustice in their gut.

The documentary’s most

heartbreaking moment comes from a journal entry in which the father

records seeing his son newly tan, for a movie role.

“I wanted to

run my fingers through his hair, but I hardly think he would have

appreciated it,” reads Bobby now, clearly willing to trade

everything for that fleeting missed contact, but making do with this

recreation of it instead.

The

documentary is part festschrift, part expiation, fuelled by filial

regret at things left unsaid, connections missed, as well as the

desire to right wrongs and honor his father’s

legacy. On one level, you wonder if De Niro hasn't spent the best

part of his career already doing so.

• Remembering

The Artist Robert De Niro Sr airs in the US at 9pm on HBO, 9 June.