Word: deniro
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...other side. Redford holds back. He's not a hero, and he doesn't want you to dislike the people he plays. Redford retains a glamorous remoteness and passivity that doesn't stray far from good American-Eagle values. It's stability and studiness. but DeNiro gets to American from a different angle. He works his way up the spine and into the buzzing, seething mass of semi-methodical madness in the brain. He goes as far into his characters as he can go, always probing for that pure, nuclear core of nonfissionable personality that is at the nexus...
Unlike Redford, DeNiro is Proteus. redford never relinquishes his healthy, Rock-Mountain looks. When you say Robert Redford you know what you will get. But with DeNiro there is a volatility that makes you think of him in many faces and with a little anxiety. In Mean Streets he was nervy, wiry, and speed-driven, in The Deer Hunter aloof and grimly self-possessed, in Raging Bull sinewy, stupid, animal-like, as well as lazy...
While Redford dares to be good looking and a good man, deNiro plays for keeps--for greatness. He plays the megalomaniac's game, and nothing is certain. He makes you worry...
...pathological individualism that we are given here, and we always go for that. DeNiro exhilarates us in Mean Streets because he's his own man even when geing his own man is absolutely self-destructive craziness. He's burning with it. In this subterranean world of dumpsters and neon and bar-darkness, racketeers and ferret-faced, small-time hoods, he dares to be a total jerk. He's the problem child who won't stop playing, hyperactively needling the frayed nerves of the others, and exploding in careless bravura. He is wired. Johnny Boy digs the risk and the rock...
...DeNiro's thin face, flexed body and slurred speech we recognize the tension of what it would mean to be cornered, to have no options. The eyes are inflamed, puffed with misery, or else vacant with the unsatisfactoryanaesthesia of TV, and we know something has got to give. We suffocate with Travis; there's no sex, no contact, no fun, just anger and loneliness and introspection...