My white whale finally snared

No this post doesn't have to do with The Whale, but it does have to do -- in a very small way -- with Brendan Fraser.

As my 164th movie of 2023, I have finally seen Killers of the Flower Moon.

There was a chance I would have seen it nearly 70 2023 movies ago. It was in line to be my 95th 2023 viewing back on October 21st, when there was a chance I would have seen it just two days after it was released in Australia. You may recall me mentioning that when we were in Sydney for my 50th birthday, my wife had originally described the day after my birthday as a free day where we could do whatever, including me going to a movie, before our flight later that night. She meant a 90-minute movie, not one more than twice that length, so it seemed too cruel to push it through even though I could play the birthday card.

The 206-minute length continued to keep it off my list of theatrical priorities, once I'd missed my initial chance to see it and turned reviewing duties over to one of my other writers. Eight o'clock was about the latest any theater was starting it, which meant it would take me out of play for dinner with my family, unlike those movies I sneak out to at 9:20. I could have pushed it through but it just seemed too daunting.

Besides, I knew it was coming to AppleTV+. I just didn't know when.

Some movies that have an exclusive relationship with a streamer have only a short theatrical run before debuting on the streamer. David Fincher's The Killer would be a good 2023 example of that. It was on Netflix about two weeks after it debuted in theaters. (I did end up seeing it during its theatrical run, as you will recall from this post, and that was in part due to missing out on the similar scenario with Martin Scorsese's latest.) 

But two weeks passed, four weeks passed, six weeks passed, and only then did I hear that Killers of the Flower Moon was available -- and still only for the premium $19.99 rental. 

You might have thought me a bit panicked by this point. I had already heard one of the most talked about movies of the year discussed on several podcasts, trying desperately to avoid spoilers but also getting more of a sense of what to expect from the movie than I might have liked. I also, of course, had to edit my own critic's review of the movie. Which told me some things but thankfully did not include spoilers. (I knew that Lily Gladstone's character was "sidelined" for the second half of the movie, which caused me to wonder if that were a euphemism for "dead.")

But I held strong. I knew the AppleTV+ premiere was looming. I was just playing a game of chicken to see whether it would be before my January 23rd ranking deadline. If I knew it wouldn't be, I could always pay the $19.99 rental fee. 

Finally I won out. I learned that Killers was finally coming to AppleTV+ on January 12th, and the only reason I didn't carve out the time for it last weekend was that I was out of town. I finally did that yesterday, setting up the projector in my garage and starting it around 4:20 in the afternoon. I only paused long enough for bathroom breaks and the like and finished it just before 8. (I was told not to break it up. I usually only break up a movie when it's unpremeditated and I've fallen asleep.) Yes I know that's a lot of uses of the word "finally" in one paragraph, but it's designed to show you how long the wait felt.

And because this was my white whale, I'll write now to tell you what I thought about it, even with my finalized rankings set to reveal all in just a few days. And because I assume I am, indeed, the last cinephile on earth to see this movie, the following will include SPOILERS. 

For most of its running time, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon was a 3.5-star movie. I didn't take any issue with Scorsese's filmmaking, and in fact, I felt like I was in the hands of classic Scorsese in his depiction of characters being abruptly shot when they didn't imagine they were in any danger. That's Goodfellas all over.

What bothered me was the constant menace posed by the white characters, and the extreme trusting nature of the Osage, who failed to identify that menace in a timely manner.

It occurs to me that because a film shows us what's happening, it makes it seem like this should have been plain as day to the people it was happening to. Obviously that was not the case with the Osage, who certainly had historical reasons to distrust whites but may have been genuinely placated by the idea that white men were marrying their women. Who would go so far as to marry someone just to pull off a scam? Isn't there too much sanctity to marriage to do this?

Then you've got characters like Bill Hale (Robert De Niro), learning and voluntarily communicating in the Osage language, demonstrating a very overt friendship to the Osage and constantly positioning himself as their alley. He wouldn't do that just to profit off the Osage, would he?

I don't think the Osage were that naive, but Scorsese only documents brief scenes of elders showing general wariness of the intentions of the white man. These elders did not translate this to wariness about the specific white men who were actually robbing and killing them, despite what seems like ample evidence that they should have. Again, it's difficult to tell whether this is because they were too trusting, or because a film with an omniscient perspective allows us to see things that they could not see.

Still, the result was for me to feel almost as frustrated with the Osage as I was disgusted with the evil men who preyed on them. This was especially the case with Gladstone's Molly Burkhart. Gladstone's inarguably excellent performance is undermined by the fact that even among all these deaths of her people, and specifically her people (as in the people in her own immediate family), she was unable or unwilling to see the danger under her own nose. Even as her own husband was mixing her insulin with another substance that was meant to "slow her down," and quite obviously did. 

I get that this is Scorsese's point. In what is ultimately a bracing indictment of colonialism and atrocities carried out by white people throughout history, we are meant to understand the powerlessness of their victims, which enabled them to ransack and spread across the face of the earth. But maybe this is where the length of the film comes into play. Because this goes on for so long on screen, we are aching for some sort of agency on the part of the Osage, some moment when they won't stand for this shit anymore. It is a long, long time in coming, and even the early attempts showcase a blindness to the true villains that seems irresponsible in its failure to analyze the available evidence. 

Part of the problem with this is that I did not find the relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart and Molly convincing enough. I didn't believe that they had some amazing connection based on a true alignment of their souls. Probably in part because Gladstone is such an intelligent actor, Molly projects an intelligence vastly superior to that of Ernest, which suggests she should see right through him and not be wooed by his dopey charms. And in case you think she's just drawn to the handsomeness of Leonardo DiCaprio, he's got bad enough teeth to offset most of that. If we are to believe she really failed to identify the culpability of her own husband for so long, it can only be because she is head over heels for him and believes the same to be true of him. The evidence of this is just not there, so it looks like she's just gullible.

Then of course I was just put off by the thing that Scorsese executes exactly as he intended to, which is to show how brash these white men were about killing the Osage without consequence. Ultimately there is a consequence, of course, but before then these killings go uninvestigated for so long, and are carried out with such indifference to making them seem like something other than what they are, that it balled my fists. We see Hale and Burkhart freak out when some woebegone underling botches a killing that was meant to look like a suicide, but even the consequences of this sort of screw-up take a lot longer to arrive than I would have thought. And then there are times when they just don't care how it looks and damn the consequences. I get it: This is the point. This is what white Americans could get away with in the 1920s. That didn't make it extremely frustrating to watch, almost as though it was a fault of the way the story was being told.

Of course, in its final hour, as the consequences start rolling in, I did find that the justice I was seeking made the experience of watching Killers of the Flower Moon more satisfying. But it wasn't until the final ten minutes that this thing really jumped forward by leaps and bounds.

First there are, of course, the two big scenes between two of the three leads, where Ernest finally stands up to Bill and Molly gives Ernest the chance to come clean with all his truths. One of these gives Ernest a temporary moral high ground, and the other pulls it away from him again. This is a very satisfying turn of events for all the characters involved, as we finally see some long-desired agency from Molly as well.

Then there's the radio play, which had never been spoiled for me in all I had heard about this movie. What an interesting and potent way to bring this into more modern times, both in the world of the film and in our world. I never would have guessed that Scorsese would have pointed a finger at us for our love of true crime podcasts in a movie set in the 1920s. I was floored by this way of closing the film, as it wraps up all the characters with the frivolous productions values of radio entertainment, and also leaves us with a lasting thought to ponder from the director himself.

Then there's the image of the drum circle, that pulls out to the final height, looking down on presumably today's surviving Osage. Incredibly profound. My only disappointment with this had to do with the fact that when the credits began rolling, AppleTV+ immediately offered up a trailer for Ted Lasso, and though I moved quickly to click on the now-shrunken credits window, it played the trailer anyway. Because it would have taken a couple minutes to get back into that place in the credits, and because I was now late for making dinner for my kids, I didn't get to see more than ten seconds of the credits of this film, when I'm sure I would have liked to linger in that Osage drum music for another five minutes as I let the film's ultimate conclusions wash over me.

Two other thoughts before I leave you.

1) Although many of us thought of The Irishman as Scorsese's big career retrospective statement, I liked what this one was doing as well, in the obvious ways related to themes but also in the pitting of DiCaprio and De Niro against each other on screen. When I looked it up just now, I was hoping that the actors had appeared in an equal number of Scorsese films. In actuality, De Niro still has an edge by four movies over DiCaprio, 10-6. But putting them together for the first time in one of his films seems like an intentional way to honor his two great collaborators, and put me a little in mind of that moment when De Niro and Al Pacino finally shared their first scene together in Heat. That said, I find only one of these actors really good in the film. I was glad to see De Niro still capable of so much, at a time when he is making a lot of films that are beneath him, while I found Leo doing a fair bit of play-acting here, most notably as he juts out his jaw in a fashion that seemed very artificial and very try-hard.

2) Getting back to Fraser, mentioned in the opening line of this piece, I was surprised at how little he was used, and how bad he was. One of the first things I ever heard about Killers of the Flower Moon was that Fraser was in it, and I think in some version of the timeline, Killers would have come out first and been the movie that announced Fraser's return, and The Whale would have followed. If that had been the case, I can't help wondering whether Fraser would have lost Oscar votes for his performance in The Whale because of how bad this performance is. 

So I told you that for a long time, I thought this was a 3.5-star movie. You now know I think it's more than that. 

How much more?

Well, I'm still wrestling with that, and I don't have a lot of time.

I have given the movie a gut star rating on Letterboxd, as I require myself to do. But as I see how I continue to think about it over the next few days -- and maybe as I listen to the spoiler portion of one podcast that I avoided listening to at the time -- I will have a truer understanding of my feelings on the film and where it should go in my rankings.

I guess you'll have your answer by Tuesday.

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.

My surprising quantity of thoughts on The War With Grandpa

In a holiday season that has suddenly become pretty crowded with movies I want or need to see, The War With Grandpa would not ordinarily have been one of them.

But that's where having kids comes in.

They weren't actually both my kids. A movie was just one part of the busy schedule of ways we were trying to wow a friend of my ten-year-old son on his first sleepover with us. Because it was also my younger son's birthday party, that's where we started before doing some skateboarding/scootering, and then the movie. My other son would have accompanied us but he actually transitioned from his party to a sleepover at his aunt's -- a response to his stated concern that he would be bullied by his brother and his brother's friend. A risk not worth taking on the day of his birthday party (his actual birthday isn't until January 1st).

The movie actually had a lot of bullying in it, both the ordinary kind, where an older kid at your school dumps your bowl of chili into your backpack, and the kind that's particular to this movie, with a kid to his own grandfather, and vice versa.

That's not one of the things I want to talk about with regard to The War With Grandpa, which seems to be going over like a lead balloon with most critics, but which I really enjoyed. I'll just keep this one to myself, though, as the movie has already been out for a couple weeks here, and I usually try to write reviews of thing for ReelGood sooner after they hit the cinemas than that. Keep it to myself, and to all of you.

There were, however, no fewer than three things it occurred to me to write about as I was watching the movie. Hence the title of this post. And here you go.

The cartoon character face of Rob Riggle

I have appreciated Rob Riggle as a comic presence for some time now. He has a small but comedically essential role in one of my favorite comedies of this century, Step Brothers. ("Pow!") 

It wasn't until this movie that I really realized why I appreciate him so much. Which is: He has a cartoon character face. 

I mean, just look at this guy:

What a happy guy.

But more than that, what a cartoon character! He looks like William Hanna and Joseph Barbera imagined him one day and then brought him to life. 

Or more than maybe a cartoon character, maybe it's that he looks like a caricature. You remember when you used to not be able to walk through any tourist area in the world without there being some guy sitting in a chair, ready and able to pick up a Sharpie and draw a seven-minute portrait of your giant head on a teeny tiny body that was skiing or playing tennis?

Yes, that's what Rob Riggle looks like.

God bless him, he's a joy to watch.

Interestingly, one of the teenage characters in the cast also has a "Riggle face" -- so much so that I actually thought he might be Riggle's son, benefitting from a little bit of nepotism. Turns out, no -- his name is Isaac Kragten and here's what the looks like:

You can't really see it here but trust me, he has a very Riggle quality to him.

And speaking of faces ...

I missed Uma Thurman's Picasso face

It hasn't been that long since I've seen Uma Thurman in a movie -- she made a brief appearance in Lars von Trier's 2018 film The House That Jack Built -- but it felt like ages since I'd seen her in anything properly, where she had a significant role. That's because before that it was the 2015 film Burnt, and before that it was Lars von Trier again with the two Nymphomaniac films, which I didn't even remember her being in. (Not that I remembered her being in Burnt.)

She's only 50. We should not have had that long of an Uma Thurman drought. Oh the lives Harvey Weinstein has ruined.

Anyway, watching this, I realized how much I missed her and her Picasso face.

Now, before anyone starts accusing me of some kind of Weinstein-style body or appearance shaming -- even though I don't know if that's one of the things he did -- I absolutely mean it as a compliment when I say she has a Picasso face. It's not even really that anything is disproportionate, as she could pass for either a conventional beauty or an unconventional one.

But you will agree, there is something eccentric about her face, something that absolutely caused her to become an A-lister where people whose beauty is more uncomplicated did not reach similar levels of success.

Here, this is her nowadays:

She hasn't suddenly turned into an old woman and she's clearly still "got it." 

And by "it" I don't only mean a distinctive appearance. I mean a presence, a charisma, and in the case of The War With Grandpa, a great sense of comic timing.

Early on in the film, the kid and his grandpa agree on the rules of engagement for their turf war over the kid's bedroom, and one of those is that there should be no collateral damage -- no negative consequences to anyone else in the family but them. So much for that. The movie quickly establishes a running bit where their pranks backfire on her character, who is the grandfather's daughter and the boy's mother. Twice these pranks encroach on her drive time, and lead her first to throw the contents of a coffee cop spiked with hot sauce onto a motorcycle cop next to her -- and later, to do the same with a python.

Thurman kills it in these scenes. Sometimes you worry that when someone hasn't been working for a while -- she's appeared some on TV, but that doesn't count ha ha -- then they may lose some of their sharpness. Not so here. And whatever it was about this particular script that prompted her to get back into the game, I'm very glad she did.

The redemption of Grandpa De Niro

Robert De Niro has been in the grandpa phases of his career for long enough that it no longer feels like a recent development. It's been at least ten years, anyway, as 2010's Little Fockers was, technically speaking, my ten-year-old son's first movie in the theater, given that he was a baby sleeping at my feet for one of those "get mom out to the movies" sessions.

But he's only been in two movies where the word "Grandpa" was in the title, and the first one was godawful.

That first was 2016's Dirty Grandpa, a film I hated so much, not only was it my lowest ranked out of the 151 movies I saw that year, but there are currently only 18 movies lower than it on my entire Flickchart. That may be too harsh of a judgment, but it gives you some idea just how much I hate that movie.

That movie's total absence of heart was why it repulsed me so much. Turns out, maybe De Niro just needed to pick a grandpa script that did not make him an asshole.

The War With Grandpa is that script. Every time you think this movie is going to veer off into exaggerated Dennis the Menace meets Home Alone territory, it anchors itself with a really sweet scene -- a really conspicuous demonstration of its heart. And that means, if only by the transitive property, that De Niro himself also has a ton of heart in this film.

As it turns out, it's much more fun to enjoy De Niro in a film than to roll your eyes at what seems like another terrible choice just to earn a few extra bucks.

With the right script, De Niro still has a lot to offer us, and I still want to see him offer it. I've avoided enough of his recent other movies to know how he comes across in those, when he's bringing more adult material to the table, but it's really nice to know that he's capable of doing work that isn't just for the lowest common denominator, be that kids or teenagers looking for some cheap dick jokes (as in Dirty Grandpa).

And The War With Grandpa -- which he likely filmed at age 75 or 76 -- gives good evidence that we could have him around a while longer. He still seems pretty spry. It's nice to know that we might not have to choke down however many more movies he still wants to make, but that there could be some War With Grandpas thrown in there.

The right amount of Capone

Josh Trank's Capone didn't do much for me, as you know from this post, but what it did do is whet my appetite to revisit for the first time in yonks (to use the Australian phraseology) one of my favorite movies as a teenager, Brian de Palma's The Untouchables.

This is the amount of Al Capone we need.

Robert De Niro appears on screen for less than 15 minutes of a two-hour movie, but you know what? Each and every one of his scenes is memorable.

There's the opening scene, where he talks about crime in Chicago while getting a shave, and you wonder if the barber nicking his neck with his razor is going to be cause for the man to be immediately killed.

There's the famous baseball bat scene, where he murders a capo who disappointed him in front of all the other capos, to send a message to them all to stay in line, to "play for the team."

There's the scene where he talks about wanting Elliot Ness and his family dead, and keeps hitting the word "dead" so you know how serious he is.

There's the scene where both parties have to be held back on a staircase so Ness and he don't get into a fist fight with each other.

There's the scene where he's sitting at the opera and gets a big grin on his face upon learning that one of the untouchables has been taken out.

There's the scene where he starts punching his lawyer during his trial when the lawyer changes his plea from not guilty to guilty.

And there are no more scenes.

This is a stark contrast with Capone, where Tom Hardy is on screen for nearly every damn shot of the entire movie, excepting for a very few brief scenes between federal agents discussing their surveillance of him.

Now, the performances these actors are giving is one of the things that makes the contrast so stark. In The Untouchables, it's the great Robert De Niro, who can make a role iconic just by playing it. Notably, he doesn't strain for some kind of absurd accent. He just plays Robert De Niro, and if you think that's a criticism, have you ever seen a Robert De Niro movie? He's menacing without even making a specific effort to be, with just a look from those steely eyes. He leaves us wanting more.

Tom Hardy's performance in Capone is nothing but accent. Joe Morgenstern, in a review tabulated to equal a rating of 10 on Metacritic, describes him as "growling in a voice that evokes Marlon Brando, Lionel Stander and Stephen Hawking's synthesizer." (This is a hilarious description even though I don't know who Lionel Stander is.) In my previous post I suggested Hardy should win an award for most acting. He's all flinches and ticks and drools. You know the type of performance I mean, the type that makes you want way, way less. (In another review, which I can't seem to locate at the moment, the critic referred to him as showing a curious disregard for the normal binaries of good vs. bad acting.)

The real problem, though, is that by spending so much time with Capone in Capone -- and Trank's artistic choices don't help -- it's clear we are meant to sympathize with this man on some level, almost like it's a tragedy that he's lost his physical and mental faculties from neuro-syphilis. The film sets the tone by opening on a scene of Capone playing hide and seek with his grandchildren, in which he appears loveable and easygoing. I actually found this to be the film's most effective scene, as it overturns our expectations -- Capone is shown carrying a blunt instrument through his silent mansion, as though he's paranoid about an intruder trying to kill him, only for it to be revealed that he's playing the role of villain in a game with these children. However well it works on a narrative level, it lays the groundwork for us to see this monster as human.

In The Untouchables, it's clear Capone is a monster in every moment. He demonstrates nothing but malevolence, which I think is correct. Oh, I'm sure Al Capone loved his family and maybe helped an old lady across the street once or twice. But I think it's correct that our takeaway should be that this man is evil and was responsible for a great many ruined lives, while not paying nearly the price he deserved to pay for his crimes. In Capone, there's a line of dialogue where one of the feds says "What's the difference between Al Capone and Adolf Hitler? Adolf Hitler is dead." And while that line is potentially problematic in some respects, comparing ethnicity-based genocide to a much smaller scale mass murder driven purely by business interests, it does indicate the extent to which people at the time considered Capone a menace.

Capone as a movie, though, does not make us believe it.

The Untouchables as a movie was not as beloved to me in 2020 as it was in 1987, though it certainly didn't suffer the same kind of hit in my affections as another Kevin Costner movie I recently rewatched, Field of Dreams. I still like this movie quite a bit and really enjoyed watching it, but it probably doesn't quite deserve the five stars I had given it on Letterboxd as a retroactive estimation of my affections.

What the other goodfella has been up to

Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci have been earning a lot of praise this fall leading into winter (leading into summer in Australia), but there’s one goodfella who has been flying a bit under the radar.

Ray Liotta does not appear in The Irishman, but he does appear in Netflix’s other big awards contender released within the past month, Marriage Story. And I’d argue that what he’s doing here may be more interesting than what they’re doing there.

I’m sure if Martin Scorsese had written a part in The Irishman for Liotta (Harvey Keitel’s?), he would have gladly accepted it. A commitment to Marriage Story would not have prevented him. But if not being in The Irishman did, in some way, allow him to be in Noah Baumbach’s film, I’m grateful for it.

See, De Niro and Pesci are doing things they’ve done before. Many times before. That’s kind of the point. And to their credit, they are both playing significantly less hot-headed versions of their prior incarnations of these characters, in a way that particularly surprised me in Pesci's case.

Ray Liotta? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him be a lawyer before.

There are a lot of credits on Liotta’s IMDB page – 116, to be exact – and I can’t possibly know what all those roles were, especially as some of them were in movies that no one saw. But a cursory scan of the titles, coupled with the ones I’ve already seen, tells me it’s very unlikely that he’s ever played an attorney.

And even if he has, it has probably been a shady attorney, one indistinguishable from the mobster rolls that have been his bread and butter ever since Goodfellas made him famous. If not actual mobsters, then criminals, lowlifes and other rapscallions.

But in Marriage Story, he’s the best divorce lawyer money can buy – which I don’t suppose rules out the concept of him being shady. In fact, at $850/hour, maybe he’s even more shady. But he’s clearly respectable, as only people who can afford it pay for him.

And he’s really good in the role. It may have less than ten minutes of screen time in total over only two or possibly three scenes, but Liotta makes that character truly believable, an able sparring partner for superlative Laura Dern on the other side of the aisle. I believe that Liotta could argue for his client like a shark going after chum, and not just because he’s a sleazebag familiar with all the tricks. It’s because he’s an actually competent lawyer playing a kill-or-be-killed game.

Seeing Ray Liotta as a respectable lawyer tells me Liotta is not done reinventing himself as an actor. As for Pesci and De Niro, they are both paying homage to, and possibly suggesting they have nowhere still to go from, the roles that made them famous. Pesci had to come out of actual retirement to play the role, as a matter of fact. 

Now granted, there’s a bit of an age gap here. Liotta is “only” 65, while the other two both turn 77 in 2020. That’s enough of a gap, at that age, that it means the difference between still going strong and starting to wind down.

But when I saw that Scorsese had “rejected” having Liotta in his movie – not that his calculation was probably anything like that – it kind of made me wonder why Liotta didn’t get to take part in the fun.

And I’m happy with the answer “He’s still got too many new surprises left in him.”