A Testament to Faith

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"Read the newspaper. What does it say? All bad. It's all bad. People have forgotten what life is all about. They've forgotten what it is to be alive. They need to be reminded. They need to be reminded of what they have and what they can lose. What I feel is the joy of life, the gift of life, the freedom of life, the wonderment of life!"

Leonard (Robert De Niro)

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I have already written about a couple of Robin Williams' movies that premiered in December, but today is the 25th anniversary of the premiere of a movie that will always be among my favorites — "Awakenings."

It surprised me, though, how much attention was given — and continues to be given — to Robert De Niro's performance. He was good, as always, but so was Robin Williams — who gave a truly sensitive performance (one that was probably surprisingly sensitive for many people). De Niro got the Oscar nomination for Best Actor. Williams was passed over.

Williams played a doctor who discovered the benefits of using a drug that had shown promising results with Parkinson's patients on victims of an encephalitis epidemic that left many people catatonic for decades. De Niro played one of the victims who now had to adjust to life in a world that didn't exist when they became sick.

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The movie was an affirmation of life, both from those who portrayed the victims of the illness and those who sought to treat them.

Williams' character came to hospital with no experience working with patients. He worked with earthworms in his most recent project. It was tedious work, but he brought a rare, even for that time, dedication to his task.

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Dr. Sayer (Robin Williams): It was an immense project. I was to extract 1 decagram of myelin from four tons of earthworms.

Dr. Sullivan (John Christopher Jones): Really!

Dr. Sayer: Yes. I was on the project for five years. I was the only one who believed in it. Everyone else said it couldn't be done.

Dr. Kaufman (John Heard): It can't.

Dr. Sayer: I know that now. I proved it.

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But he quickly developed an empathy for his patients and a deep desire to restore a conscious life to them. When the use of L–Dopa had truly astonishing results with Leonard (De Niro), Williams' character was emboldened to seek the funding necessary to make the drug available to all of his catatonic patients.

As I say, the emphasis was on De Niro, but I really felt the heart of the story was Williams. So, too, apparently did Roger Ebert.

"Dr. Sayer, played by Williams, is at the center of almost every scene, and his personality becomes one of the touchstones of the movie," wrote Ebert. "He is shut off, too: by shyness and inexperience, and even the way he holds his arms, close to his sides, shows a man wary of contact. He really was happier working with those earthworms. This is one of Robin Williams' best performances, pure and uncluttered, without the ebullient distractions he sometimes adds — the schtick where none is called for. He is a lovable man here who experiences the extraordinary professional joy of seeing chronic, hopeless patients once again sing and dance and greet their loved ones."

This was no Mork from Ork or any of Williams' manic characters. It was a character with whom the audience could identify.

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Julie Kavner played another such character, a nurse and ardent supporter of Dr. Sayer's vision. The introverted Dr. Sayer never realized what the audience had known for a long time until the end of the movie — that she loved him.

I guess that was something of an awakening in Dr. Sayer.

Sadly, the benefits of L–Dopa turned out to be temporary, and the patients were soon restored to their catatonic states — not unlike the story of Charly, Cliff Robertson's Oscar–winning role.

The manic side of Robin Williams could only be contained so long, of course, and he had a memorable Robin Williams moment during the cast press conference. Director Penny Marshall, in attempting to describe the story, kept saying "menstrual" instead of "mental," prompting Williams to step to the microphone and deadpan, "It's a period piece."

It was also a testament to faith in the human spirit and its ability to overcome just about any obstacle.

"Awakenings" received three Oscar nominations — Best Picture, Best Actor (De Niro) and Best Adapted Screenplay. It lost all three.

Taming a Raging Bull

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Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro): She says he's pretty.

Joey LaMotta (Joe Pesci): Yeah, well, you make him ugly.

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I like black–and–white movies. I know some people don't. I've noticed that younger people are often dismissive of black and white, but they deprive themselves of some truly great movies that way — classics, whether they came out in the '30s or on this day in 1980.

That was the day that Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull," the story of boxer Jake LaMotta, premiered — and it seemed fitting to tell the tale in black and white, just as it seemed fitting 25 years later to tell the story of Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy in "Good Night, and Good Luck" in black and white.

Both movies were based on true stories that took place at a time when color was cost prohibitive, something you really only saw on movie screens, not the much smaller screen of the television set. And you certainly didn't see color in news footage of either LaMotta's fights or the Murrow–McCarthy clashes.

But "Raging Bull" wasn't really a boxing movie, and Roger Ebert came about as close as anyone has to explaining what it was really about. He wrote that it was "about a man with paralyzing jealousy and sexual insecurity, for whom being punished in the ring serves as confession, penance and absolution. It is no accident that the screenplay never concerns itself with fight strategy. For Jake LaMotta, what happens during a fight is controlled not by tactics but by his fears and drives."

LaMotta's obsessiveness with his wife (played by Cathy Moriarty), who was 15 when they met, told the story best.

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LaMotta constantly worried that she would have relationships with other men. When she made an offhand remark about one of his opponents, saying he was "good–looking," LaMotta made a point of pounding the man into a pulp, then glaring at his wife in the crowd. She got the message.

It's one of those basic, primal urges in man, I guess, to stake out a territory and be jealous of anyone who posed a threat to it, whether that territory was land or livestock — or female. It may not be the sort of thing that can be changed, as deeply ingrained as it appears to be.

In modern man, much of that instinct is contained by various factors that didn't exist or were much less pronounced centuries ago, including professions, but some professions still urge those within them to utilize such instincts. One such profession is boxing, where violence is not just permitted but openly encouraged.

It really shouldn't surprise anyone when a professional fighter resorts to violence outside the ring. It is the only way many of them ever learned to resolve any kind of conflict.

The story was told in a kind of flashback style with the present day being an aging Jake LaMotta, past his boxing days and doing standup routines to support himself, followed by reflections on his life and career.

The movie followed a recurring theme that those familiar with Scorsese's work must have recognized. Again, Ebert may have described it best: "the inability of his characters to trust and relate with women."

"Jake has an ambivalence toward women that Freud famously named the 'Madonna–whore complex,'" Ebert observed. "For LaMotta, women are unapproachable, virginal ideals — until they are sullied by physical contact (with him), after which they become suspect."

Or, as Groucho Marx put it, "I wouldn't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."

It isn't funny, though. Jake even went after his brother (Joe Pesci) in a jealous rage.

Ebert couldn't stop gushing about the movie. He wrote that it was "the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema— an 'Othello' for our times. It's the best film I've seen about the low self–esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women. Boxing is the arena, not the subject. LaMotta was famous for refusing to be knocked down in the ring. There are scenes where he stands passively, his hands at his side, allowing himself to be hammered. We sense why he didn't go down. He hurt too much to allow the pain to stop."

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"Raging Bull" tied with "The Elephant Man" for the most Oscar nominations at eight apiece. De Niro won Best Actor, and Thelma Schoonmaker received the Oscar for Best Film Editing, but "Ordinary People," in hindsight a rather routine drama, won Best Picture and Best Director.

There are probably some Oscar voters who regret those decisions now. Certainly the folks at the American Film Institute would go along with awarding those Oscars to Scorsese and his movie. AFI ranks "Raging Bull" #4 on the all–time greatest movies list. "Ordinary People" didn't make the Top 100.

Living in a Material World

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"Paulie may have moved slow, but it was only because Paulie didn't have to move for anybody."

Henry (Ray Liotta)

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So much has been said about "Goodfellas," which premiered on this date in 1990, that it almost seems redundant to go over the plot.

So I will content myself with making some general observations.

First of all, let's talk about its place among the great films of all time. The American Film Institute ranked it #92 of all time — only about one–tenth of the movies that were ranked ahead of "Goodfellas" were made after "Goodfellas" made its debut, and I can't really quibble about any of them except for "Titanic" — which I thought was good but not great.

The thing about "Goodfellas" was that the motivation was the desire to be treated like someone special. There have been other great movies about organized crime in my lifetime — the first two "Godfather" movies come to mind — but I never got the sense that the central characters were motivated by a yearning to be treated better than anyone else, although I suppose that was always implied. Those other movies have always seemed to me to be more about money and power, but "Goodfellas" was about a bunch of guys who grew up in underprivileged homes and wished to have the privileges they had been denied. Driving fancy cars and wearing fancy suits were ways of showing that one had risen above humble circumstances; so was having all the people around fall all over themselves to satisfy your every whim.

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster," said Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), whose life story inspired the movie. "To me, being a gangster was better than being president of the United States."

At the end of the movie, Hill was nostalgic about the old days. "We were treated like movie stars with muscle," he recalled. "Today, everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everyone else."

Roger Ebert described this sense of entitlement in the context of "the most famous shot" in the movie: "[Henry] takes his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) to the Copacabana nightclub. There's a line in front, but he escorts her across the street, down stairs and service corridors, through the kitchen area and out into the showroom just as their table is being placed right in front of the stage. This unbroken shot, which lasts 184 seconds, is not simply a cameraman's stunt, but an inspired way to show how the whole world seems to unfold effortlessly before young Henry Hill."

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Bracco's character was groundbreaking in that she was allowed to speak at length. Most of the time, even today, the women in gangster movies are occasionally seen (if they are lucky) but never heard.

Violence always comes with the territory in a gangster movie, and in trademark Martin Scorsese fashion, the violence in "Goodfellas" could be shocking and explicit. I guess it needs to be that way in a gangster movie to underscore how things are done in that universe.

The violence, Ebert wrote, "is a story of economic ambition. Henry and Karen come from backgrounds that could not easily lead to Cadillacs, vacations in Vegas and fur coats, and she justifies what he has to do to pay for the lifestyle."

Robert De Niro, of course, was great in his role as Jimmy the Gent — but, really, doesn't De Niro seem to belong in gangster movies?

One final observation, and this has to do with Joe Pesci.

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Pesci won Best Supporting Actor for his performance as a psychopathic gangster. It is the same award for which he was nominated 10 years earlier but didn't win. Although he has given performances since "Goodfellas" that were worthy of Oscar consideration, I do not think he has been nominated again.

Perhaps that mistake will be corrected one of these days.

Completing 'The Godfather' Saga

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"There are many things my father taught me here in this room. He taught me: Keep your friends close but your enemies closer."

Michael Corleone (Al Pacino)

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"The Godfather Part II," which premiered on this day in 1974, was that rarest of all movies — a sequel that surpassed the original.

I thought the original movie was great, and there were even some things I liked about Part III, but Part II was a complete story, even though it actually told a couple of stories at once.

When you have seen it, though, you understand why it had to be that way. I assume that nearly everyone who saw it had seen the original movie, and those viewers needed to know how Don Corleone had come to America. They also needed to know what happened after the conclusion of the original "Godfather."

What happened in "Godfather Part III" was not so important for viewers to see. That, I believe, is what was really the problem with that movie. The Corleone family saga was complete with the sequel that premiered 40 years ago today.

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Since the advent of home video, I have believed it is best to watch the movies back to back. Only then can you truly see the evolution of Michael Corleone from the family golden boy, the college man and ex–Marine, to the cold, callous successor to Don Corleone's criminal empire. Only Michael lacked the common touch his father possessed, to quote film critic Roger Ebert. "And because he has misplaced his humanity," Ebert wrote, "he must suffer."

I have heard some people say that this was Robert De Niro's first movie. I even thought that myself for awhile. It wasn't, but it might as well have been. De Niro, who is certainly considered one of the finest actors of his generation, did not get off to an auspicious start. He appeared in a few noteworthy movies, but it was his role as young Vito Corleone that captured the attention of the movie–going public.

The more I have watched "The Godfather Part II," the more convinced I have become that Nino Rota's music deserves much of the credit for how it has been perceived. Anguished, rousing memories of the past and awakening strong emotions, the score stirs viewers to feel things that they normally would not feel when watching a crime drama. Viewers typically do not regret the end of a brutal empire that systematically seized its power through murder and bribery and all the things that usually go into the construction of a crime family.

But De Niro's contribution should not be underestimated — and Rota's music, manipulating the viewers in ways few scores have accomplished, played an important role in that. Rota's Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score was richly deserved. (I will never understand why he wasn't even nominated for his work in "The Godfather.")

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The success of "The Godfather Part II" was also due in part to the fact that so many of the original cast members returned. Not only Pacino but Robert Duvall as Tom Hagen, Diane Keaton as Pacino's increasingly alienated wife and so many others.

Nevertheless, the first two "Godfather" movies wouldn't have been what they were without director Francis Ford Coppola. It was Coppola's vision that united the stories, an impressive cinematic achievement.

One Shot

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In the late 1970s, America's involvement in Vietnam had been over for only a few years, but Americans already were coming to terms with the experience the way they always seem to — by way of the cinema.

Vietnam movies were plentiful in the late '70s, and they were frequently well done, but each was different. The movie that was released 35 years ago today, "The Deer Hunter," had its own, unique angle. In this case, it explored the effect of the war on a bunch of working–class buddies from western Pennsylvania — guys who believed .

It was presented, essentially, in three acts — and would have been a great theatrical production if not for the fact that it would require some really extensive sets.

In the first act, the buddies were home, participating in two coming–of–age rituals — marriage and military service. After the wedding of one and before the start of military service for some, the buddies went deer hunting. Robert De Niro's character had a philosophy — a deer had to be taken down with one shot — and that "one shot" theme was at the heart of the story.

De Niro was probably the most bankable star in the movie at that time. Audiences had seen him in, among other movies, "The Godfather Part II" and "Taxi Driver." Other folks in the cast — chiefly, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep — went on to greater things, but they were largely unknown in 1978, especially Streep.

But De Niro was the name.

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Anyway, in the second "act," the scene shifted to Vietnam, and movie audiences were introduced to "the game," in which North Vietnamese soldiers forced prisoners to play Russian roulette and gambled on the results among themselves. De Niro, Walken and John Savage were among those forced to play the game; De Niro and Walken even had to play each other.

It should have come as no surprise to anyone that the characters were emotionally scarred by the experience. They managed to turn their guns on their captors and escape, but their physical survival was only part of the story.

It may have been the most intense scene I have ever witnessed in a movie theater, the no–longer–naive Americans forced to play a deadly game for the amusement of their sadistic captors.

Associated Press reporter Peter Arnett, who won awards for his coverage of the Vietnam War, insisted that the Russian roulette angle was not true. Most likely, it was not representative of the experiences of most American POWs, but, in the minds of many Americans who lived through both Korea and Vietnam and had been hearing stories of Asian wartime atrocities all their lives (if they were old enough to remember World War II) — and found Vietnam to be the more confusing and the more bizarre conflict by far — it probably seemed entirely plausible.

In fact, until I saw "Saving Private Ryan," "The Deer Hunter" was my gold standard for gritty depiction of war. Even more than "Apocalypse Now," which came out the following year.

I feel the need to add a disclaimer here. "The Deer Hunter" didn't re–create horrific battle scenes as "Saving Private Ryan" did. It depicted a lawless state of mind that seems to permeate nearly all wars.

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The third and final act saw the Americans back home and dealing with their issues. De Niro's character found Savage veterans hospital and learned that someone in Saigon had been sending him large amounts of money.

De Niro returned to Vietnam and tried to bring Walken back to the United States, but Walken's mind had snapped and he had no memory of his previous life. He only existed to play the game in the gambling dens of Saigon.

Again, this was probably a little extreme, but, given the conditions that many vets were in when they returned to the United States, perhaps it wasn't as extreme as it may have seemed 35 years ago.

De Niro's character, in an act that I thought of when I watched Tommy Lee Jones dragging Robert Duvall's corpse back to Texas in the final installment of "Lonesome Dove" more than a decade later, brought Walken's character's body back to the United States for burial after he actually did kill himself playing the game. That, too, was an intense scene, symbolic of the waste of Vietnam and the wreckage it made of the lives of those who lived to tell the tale — even if it wasn't true.

And, in the final scene of the movie, Walken's survivors sang "God Bless America" and raised a glass in his memory.

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Director Michael Cimino won an Oscar for his work on "The Deer Hunter," and Walken won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

"The Deer Hunter" also won Oscars for Best Picture, film editing and sound.

De Niro and Streep were both nominated but lost — De Niro to Jon Voight, star of another Vietnam movie, "Coming Home."

How to Change the Subject

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Tracy (Kirsten Dunst): What would they do to me if I did tell someone about this?

Conrad (Robert De Niro): They could come to your house in the middle of the night and kill you.

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I thoroughly enjoyed "Wag the Dog," which debuted on this day in 1997, and to no small extent because I understood and appreciated the nature of the title. But it did require a little explanation.

When I first heard the title, I thought it was the name of a character — you know, like Bozo the Clown. Logically, I figured that it was a dog named Wag and, if the title character was a dog, it must be a cartoon — you know, kind of like Felix the Cat — although perhaps not (this was around the time that "Babe" was in the theaters).

But then I discovered it was a variation of the old saying that "the dog wags the tail, the tail doesn't wag the dog."

When applied to a political context — as it was in this movie — it meant to distract public attention from a matter of great importance to focus on a matter of lesser importance — or, in the case of this movie, a matter that didn't really exist.

In the movie, the president is facing the voters in his bid for re–election. Foolishly, he sexually assaults a member of some Firefly Girl group that is visiting the White House in the closing days of the campaign, and he needs the help of a spin doctor played by Robert De Niro to get him over the hump (as it were) to Election Day.

(In my own defense, the plotline encouraged some really bad puns.)

De Niro, in turn, recruits a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman), who is bitter over never receiving the recognition he craves for the work he has done, to help him create a phony war to distract attention from the abuse allegations.

And, thus, an elaborate deception was born.

Hoffman's character put together such an impressive visual depiction of a war that he himself observed it was "the best work I've ever done in my life, because it's so honest."

Well, honesty was relative.

Or, in the words of the movie's producers, "Why does a dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, the tail would wag the dog."

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Hoffman's undoing was in not being satisfied with the knowledge that it was his "best work." He wanted the credit that had been denied to him throughout his career.

"You're playing with your life," De Niro's character warned him, but he wouldn't listen — and he wound up dying shortly thereafter, officially of a heart attack while sunning himself by his pool.

Overseeing all of this was Anne Heche's character, Winifred the presidential adviser who acted as the buffer between the president and everything else. At times, she was severely tested, as when she was informed that the hand–picked "hero" of the fictional conflict — played by Woody Harrelson — was an unsavory sort who had been convicted of raping a nun.

"Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God," she kept muttering.

Hoffman assured her that, as long as the "hero" took his medication, "He's fine."

What if he doesn't take his medication, Heche's character wanted to know.

"He's not fine."

To be fair to Hoffman's character, he did design a credible war backdrop for the cover story, enlisting Kirsten Dunst to play a peasant girl running from assailants with a kitten in her arms (the kitten and the scenery and sound effects would be edited in later — Dunst was told to run through a sound stage carrying a bag of tortilla chips).

In a classic example of the misdirection used by the spin doctor and his associates, De Niro's character urges people like the press secretary to make up denials about non–existent rumors — such as the one about the B–3 bomber.

There is no such thing, of course, and no one had been talking about it, but De Niro's character still protests that he doesn't know how such rumors get started — and the direction of the conversation is changed.

Roger Ebert made an intriguing observation in his review of the movie in the Chicago Sun–Times: "It's creepy how this material is absurd and convincing at the same time. ... Even when a conflict is real and necessary ... the packaging ... is invariably shallow and unquestioning; like sportswriters, war correspondents abandon any pretense of objectivity and detachment, and cheerfully root for our side."

Coincidentally, the movie came out around the same time that Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was in the news, and he was facing impeachment. The Clinton administration also engaged in some saber rattling against Iraq — which critics alleged was an attempt to shift the focus of the public conversation. It was, they said, a real–life "Wag the Dog."

"['Wag the Dog'] is a satire that contains just enough realistic ballast to be teasingly plausible," Ebert wrote, "like 'Dr. Strangelove,' it makes you laugh, and then it makes you wonder."

It still does.