How did Robert De Niro end up at The Whisper Man? De Niro, the man who personified the gold standard of screen acting for the last three decades of the 20th century, has already survived one career slump, that wayward spell in the 2000s that saw him terrorise a CGI moose in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, sleep with the fishes in Shark Tale, and, of course, meet the dubiously amusing Fockers, both big and Little.
Consensus is that his career started to uptick in the years since, thanks partly to his collaborations with auteur filmmakers David O Russell (2012’s Silver Linings Playbook; 2015’s Joy), Nancy Meyers (2015’s The Intern), and, most convincingly, Martin Scorsese (2019’s The Irishman and 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon). In the two Scorsese films particularly – reactivating a collaboration that had decades earlier yielded career-best work for both parties – De Niro was an artist reborn, producing sophisticated character work with rich, heavyweight material.
Really, though, these were the anomalies. The majority of De Niro’s projects have been forgettable, unedifying misses. Think The Comedian, in which he played a comedian, or The Alto Knights, last year’s plodding gangster flick in which De Niro gamely played two roles, without enough enthusiasm for either. Zero Day, the 2024 thriller series he fronted for Netflix, seemed to disappear, dissolving more or less anonymously into the streamer’s ocean of content like all sewage pumped out of the British coast.
The Whisper Man – a pulpy straight-to-streaming thriller in which De Niro plays a crime novelist and onetime serial-killer-catcher – is more of the same: a great actor slumming it in the minor leagues. Clunky, implausible and murkily lit, the film seems unable to capture De Niro’s attention, the actor more or less sleepwalking through the deadly cat-and-mouse hunt. (Sloth-and-mouse might be more accurate.) Really, though, who can blame him for taking roles like this? What seems at first to be evidence of De Niro’s flimsy curatorial judgement really attests to a bigger problem. Where are the great roles being written for elderly men? Look around – they don’t exist.
If we were to take stock of all the great actors of his generation, De Niro, 83, is clearly not alone in his commitment to spending old age acting in subpar movies. His Irishman co-star, Al Pacino, is another great actor stuck in a habit of mediocrity. Once-reliable character actors like Ed Harris or Tommy Lee Jones or Christopher Lloyd have faded into irrelevance, likewise former A-listers Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman (though for the latter two, misconduct allegations – which they’ve denied – may have played a part).
Sir Anthony Hopkins still finds the odd worthwhile role, including an Oscar-winning part in 2020’s The Father, but a lot of less worthwhile parts to boot. (This month he’s also, it’s worth pointing out, released his first album.) In the five dozen or so films that JK Simmons has made since winning the Oscar for Whiplash in 2014, has he had a great role since? Those who have avoided these late-in-life downturns have largely done so by retiring – actors like Joe Pesci, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson simply opted out, to varying extents.
It’s significant, perhaps, that if you move down a generation – to the leading men now in their late fifties and sixties, the Brad Pitts and Tom Cruises – the big roles on offer now largely exist in action films. Their biggest roles are the same roles they would have been offered 20 years ago.
Harrison Ford remains eminently employable in the world of blockbusters – in the Blade Runner, Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, or as (deep sigh) Red Hulk in the fourth Captain America film – but the meatier drama parts of his younger days have disappeared. Would it not be nice to see Ford in something with the heft and credibility of, say, Witness again? The same largely applies to Samuel L Jackson. It’s not like there have never been plum roles for old actors. Think of Paul Newman in The Verdict. I struggle to think of the last time a film like that got made.
For a while, the thinking was that television could be a life raft, the emergent trend of glossy, high-budget “prestige TV” offering actors the sort of toothsome acting gigs the big screen no longer could. But while some older actors were able to temporarily capitalise – Steve Buscemi with Boardwalk Empire; Michael Keaton with Dopesick; Brian Cox with Succession – the bubble has seemingly burst. Now you have actors making futile inroads into streaming content at a time when the prestige has run dry. So when De Niro stars in Zero Day, or Ford stars in Shrinking, or Pesci stars in Bupkis, or Billy Crystal stars in Before (nope, me neither), no one really takes notice. There is too much TV now, and none of it endures.
I’m singling out men here simply because the dearth of quality roles for older women is often taken as a given: it pretty much goes without saying that elderly female actors face the same lack of opportunities, only more intensely – and often without the sort of creatively hollow-but-nonetheless-lucrative-and-widely-seen franchise offers that are politely extended to men. (The world, it seems, isn’t ready for Mrs Red Hulk, played by, let’s say, Dianne Wiest.)
As with men, many of the biggest female actors have either slowed down their output, settled for subpar projects, or migrated to television (or, often, a combination of these three things). Holly Hunter and Sissy Spacek have done just two movies apiece between them since 2018; Sally Field has made only three. (Though they’ve all worked in streaming television.) Helen Mirren has continued to work prolifically in film, but dive into her recent filmography, and it’s basically all blockbuster schlock (Fast & Furious; Shazam! Fury of the Gods) or independent films with no critical or commercial cut-through.
Sigourney Weaver, like Ford, has maintained a prolific presence in the multiplexes chiefly through franchise sequels (Avatar, Ghostbusters, Star Wars). Even Meryl Streep has seen the relentless conveyor belt of Oscar nominations seize up over the past decade. Something like this year’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 reminds us just how much juice she’s still got, but roles like these are becoming anomalies.
But of course, while this is no less urgent a problem, Hollywood’s aversion to writing good roles for older women is a known and acknowledged prejudice. With men, this is less true. It almost goes against perception: these are elder statesmen, after all. Who in the industry is more respected than Robert De Niro? But ageism in Hollywood is a silent blight. There is a generation of great actors wasting their final working years – it’s about time we admitted it.
‘The Whisper Man’ is streaming on Netflix
