It’s rare to see a film in which not a single interesting thing happens over the course of its entire running time. Not only is that true of Barry Levinson’s “The Alto Knights,” but this tired-as-hell mafia story — which wouldn’t merit so much as a footnote in the history of mob cinema if not for the gimmick of casting Robert De Niro as real-life crime boss Vito Genovese and his best frenemy Frank Costello — seems totally at peace with it.
From the moment it starts, Levinson’s first theatrical feature since 2015’s “Rock the Kasbah” is comfortably entombed in the same deep sense of resignation that inspires its main character to get out of the game. Frank Costello knows that his era in the underworld has come to a close, and he narrates the limp saga of his own life as if it were already irrelevant. As if he were deeply embarrassed by the disconnect between how much bloodshed he survived, and how little it all mattered in the end. As if there were nothing else to say about it at this point.
It goes without saying that a man like that can be a very compelling subject for a movie, but the movie itself can’t afford to agree with him. “The Alto Knights” is steeped in Frank Costello’s mindset to a tedious extreme; it’s the last shot of “The Irishman” stretched out to 123 dramatically inert minutes of “haven’t we seen this 1,000 different times already?” Levinson knows we have, and he doesn’t seem all that excited about showing it to us all over again. But as the war between his twin De Niro’s makes all too clear, retiring is never as easy as it seems.
Written by 92-year-old “Goodfellas” scribe Nicholas Pileggi, produced by 93-year-old “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” producer Irwin Winkler, and shot by 81-year-old “Manhunter” cinematographer Dante Spinotti (whose only other feature since the pandemic is Nick Vallelonga’s “upcoming” musical rom-com “That’s Amore!”), “The Alto Knights” is a gangland tale by and about a handful of legends whose grip on their work has slackened to the point that most of them can’t bear to let it go. Costello is such a notable exception to that rule that Levinson and co. felt like they had to make a movie about him.
When this story begins in 1957, the acting boss of the Luciano crime family is ready to quit or die trying. Frank’s childhood best friend — the hot-headed and increasingly paranoid Vito Genovese, convinced that his rivals will keep gunning for him until they’re buried in the ground — insists upon that second option. Alas, the thick-headed goon that Vito sends to whack Frank in the lobby of his lux Manhattan apartment building (a swollen and unrecognizable Cosmo Jarvis as the aptly named Vincent Gigante) fails to follow through with a double-tap, and Frank survives with a scratch to the head. The botched attempt doesn’t only deepen Frank’s desire to head for the hills (and leave Vito even more determined to finish the job), it inspires Frank to roll back the tape and reflect on his entire life up to that point… which he does by talking directly into the camera as he clicks through a slide projector full of Photoshopped images from his youth. If you’ve ever watched “The Godfather Part II” and thought “I bet this would be better as a glorified Powerpoint presentation,” I’m afraid you might have been wrong about that.
Somehow, distilling Frank and Vito’s friendship into a series of still photographs and a few unnecessary snippets of black-and-white footage doesn’t create the kind of foundation this movie needs to invest our attention in the rivalry that catches up with its characters as old men (it doesn’t help that the “archival” clips inexplicably star a pair of young De Niro look-alikes, as if the image of young Vito Corleone hasn’t been seared into the collective unconscious for the last 50 years). What the history lesson does establish is the “this happened and then that happened and then this other thing happened” cadence of a film that never establishes the narrative rhythm it needs to anchor its story in any sort of present tense, and so “The Alto Knights” tends to exist as less of a crime drama than it does as a loose constellation of dimly recreated events (shot in Cincinnati to better resemble mid-century New York, this cheap-looking period epic tries to squeeze a full American epoch out of a few prop cars and some wonderfully expressive costumes).
That these events are recreated without any semblance of style or urgency is made all the more apparent by the fact that “The Alto Knights” hits most of its beats at least three times in a row, as the film was written and/or cut in a way that often finds its actors repeating the same basic emotion or piece of information from slightly different angles. It almost seems like the cast was trying to satisfy the specific inputs of a video game tutorial; at one point, the critic sitting next to me leaned over to ask “why does this movie feel like it was improvised?”
That fumbling quality creates a strange and uneasy tension with the specificity of watching someone act opposite themselves, and it does a disservice to the relative pleasures of De Niro’s two performances. The guy isn’t exactly breaking new ground here, and the conceit of his casting doesn’t really distract from the discomfort of seeing a mob movie icon prop up a project so derivative of the ones that made him immortal in the first place (imagine if Toshiro Mifune had been alive to star in “The Last Samurai”), but De Niro isn’t phoning this in, and it can be fun to see him play off two very different sides of his screen persona, even if there’s no real thematic weight behind the decision to cast him in both roles.
Known as the “prime minister of the Underworld,” Frank is cautious, rational, and so buttoned-up that he wears a full suit and tie just to watch TV at home with his wife (an unsubtle Debra Messing), and De Niro embodies him with the sedate and semi-vacant curmudgeonliness that the actor tends to bring to his talk show interviews. The highlight of this movie is unambiguously the scene where De Niro, as Frank, is forced to carry his wife’s small dog into the elevator of their apartment building. One of them is a Pomeranian, one of them is a Chorkie, and both of them are wearing little mink coats to keep warm from the New York winter, and also from the intense coldness of De Niro’s frown. It’s a moment of pure cinema in a film where everything else feels manufactured to death.
Vito, by contrast, “was raised on the side of a volcano.” He’s the type of mobster who executes his wife’s ex-husband just for having the temerity to eat at the same restaurant as they do, and De Niro — spray-tanned to hell and back, the tell-tale mole on his cheek digitally removed — inhabits him with the sort of comic fury that makes it seem like he’s channeling Joe Pesci. His friendship with Frank means nothing to Vito, which makes him a vaguely relatable character insofar as it means nothing to us either. Vito’s fiery but troubled relationship with Anna Genovese (Kathrine Narducci) means even less, but “The Alto Knights” is duty-bound to shoehorn it in here as part of the movie’s diligent history of the mafia’s undoing.
It’s ostensibly fascinating that a man like Frank Costello — who profited so much from the proliferation of organized crime — would play such a large role in scaling it down, but Levinson’s film is too busy laying the past to rest to bring it back to life, and “The Alto Knights” is never flatter or more overfamiliar than when it’s doing the things that should feel like gimmies to a well-heeled gangster film. A famous hit towards the end of the story is staged as though it were more beholden to the history of mob movies than it is to the history of the mob itself, while the story’s climax, which dramatically recreates one of the most daring gambits of Costello’s life, is dulled to death by the sheepishness of its telling.
It’s almost as if Frank can’t fathom why anyone today should care about the incredible true story of how some enterprising immigrants without a nickel to their names formed a multi-billion-dollar racket that shaped a huge part of 20th century America. The tragedy of “The Alto Knights” is that Levinson can’t either.
Grade: C-
Warner Bros. will release “The Alto Knights” in theaters on Friday, March 21.
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