I could never get romantically involved with Robert De Niro

Kicking off the repeat viewing section of the "watch whatever you want" portion of my year, I casually threw on Heat on Friday night. I'm not sure how you "casually" throw on a 164-minute movie, but to the extent that you can, I did.

I started perusing the options on Amazon without knowing what I wanted to watch, only that I wanted to watch something I'd liked but seen exactly one time before. Heat fit the bill. Because it's so long, I didn't finish until after 1 a.m., but finish I did. 

Heat spoilers to follow. 

I could probably make a number of observations about a movie I had not seen since the fall of 1995, but today I am focused on Robert De Niro's incompatibility as a romantic partner.

Incompatibility with whom? Well, anybody, I suppose.

You probably remember (since everyone I know has seen Heat more than I have) that De Niro's love interest in this movie is Amy Brenneman, an actress I had kind of forgotten about until she popped up here. As a side note, it's a shame that people like Brenneman get basically 20 years in the spotlight, while De Niro gets 50. I'm not saying these are equivalent actors, only that Hollywood puts women like Amy Brenneman out to pasture, so we have the ability to forget about them. The same is not true of men. 

Anyway, De Niro and Brenneman (I'll go with the actor names rather than the character names) meet in a bar when she starts chatting him up despite all evidence that he has no interest whatsoever in such a conversation. When he says "Lady, why are you so interested in what I read or what I do?", that would be enough to send me running for the exits, even when he subsequently apologizes and moves one seat closer to her. The moving one seat closer would also be a "Check please!" moment for me. (Another side note: It occurs to me that Brenneman has a real southern twang in this scene, one that sort of disappears for the rest of the movie. Maybe that's another reason why she got 20 while De Niro got 50.) 

Of course, Brenneman is charmed by all this and doesn't say "Shit, that's Robert De Niro, a psychopath who might murder me at the drop of a hat!"

At his most chilling, De Niro conveys a kind of non-negotiable menace that suggests that one wrong step will get you killed, and it doesn't even have to be how you would define a wrong step. His definition of a wrong step meets a much lower threshold than yours.

Of course, Robert De Niro plays a different character in every movie, and the one in Heat is particularly averse to murder. That's not to say he doesn't kill several people in this movie, in addition to wantonly shooting a machine gun on an open street in a way that could easily kill somebody whether it actually does or not. (The movie takes pains to show that most of the shootings originate with other more hair-trigger members of his crew.) In fact, the last-minute errand that ends up being his undoing is to kill Waingro (Kevin Gage), a man he wants to kill specifically because he killed some armored truck officers -- a predecessor to other betrayals. That's more because Waingro's actions exposed him and his crew to far worse jailable offenses than robbery, but you get the idea De Niro really doesn't like the actual killing either.

But even in this comparatively sympathetic role, there's something in De Niro's eyes that would suggest to me -- if I were a woman -- to stay away. Not to mention in the way he asks questions, the way he makes small talk. It's weird. It's a bit aggressive. You don't know what he's thinking, or what he might do. 

I think it's why he played such a perfectly deranged potential romantic partner in Taxi Driver. Cybill Shepherd reluctantly agrees to go on a date with him despite his evident weirdness, but then he takes her to watch a porn movie, at which point, he confirms her gut instinct about him. 

I'm being a bit facetious about some of these things, but I think it's true (and probably an obvious statement) that an actor's body of work has an effect on how we perceive each new performance they give. De Niro has made over 100 movies -- I imagine, though I haven't counted -- so I can't make the following statement with any certainty. But there's a reason he has not been cast as a typical romantic lead at almost any point in his career. It's not that it was beneath him, though it probably was (and though nothing is beneath him at the current stage of his career). It's that casting directors just do not see "romantic lead" when they look at Robert De Niro. They see "psychopath."

And because of all this, there's a bit less credibility in Heat when Brenneman's character stares deep into his eyes and feels like she's met the man of her dreams. 

The man of her nightmares, maybe.