‘They’re the same – he’s marrying himself!” The speaker is an aghast Bobbie Costello, played by Debra Messing, addressing her shruggingly detached mob boss husband, Frank Costello, played by Robert De Niro. They are guests at the wedding of mercurial club owner Anna (Kathrine Narducci) to Frank’s hot-tempered mafia associate Vito Genovese. And Vito is played by … Robert De Niro.
This film is a laborious true-crime account of Frank and Vito’s homicidal falling out in 1950s New York, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Nicholas Pileggi, though with little of the perspective, light and shade and narrative richness of Pileggi’s earlier scripts. As Vito, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, bad-tempered and wears glasses and a hat. As Frank, De Niro is gloweringly resentful, taciturn, slightly less bad-tempered and doesn’t wear glasses or a hat. Bobbie’s line surely has to be a meta joke about the through-the-looking-glass casting – but, really, the point of the Vito/Frank duplication is a question that is not asked or answered by the movie itself, and has echoes of the meme of the two Spider-Men pointing at each other. Is the idea that they are basically the same person? Maybe. But it’s a pedantic and self-cancelling approach, obstructing the idea of interesting and important differences in the two men, who in fact no more resemble each other than all the other hatchet-faced wise guys around them. Maybe everyone on screen, men and women, should have been played by Robert De Niro, in a Charlie Kaufman-type nightmare.
