By Jake Wilson
THE ALTO KNIGHTS ★★½
(MA), 123 minutes
Surprisingly, until now, there hasn’t been a major movie centred on the long-reigning New York mafia boss Frank Costello, who is said to have been the most direct model for Don Corleone in The Godfather (and who is not to be confused with the fictional gangster of the same name played by Jack Nicholson in The Departed).
In fact, a Costello movie has been in the works for decades. The version that has finally reached us as The Alto Knights was directed by the 82-year-old Barry Levinson (Bugsy) from a script credited to the 92-year-old Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) – and while I applaud Hollywood’s willingness to let its veterans keep going, the film is half-hearted enough to suggest an awareness of having arrived too late.
Robert De Niro and Debra Messing in The Alto Knights.
Still, it’s bound to merit a footnote in histories of the genre, not least for its unusual casting. Robert De Niro plays both Costello and Costello’s rival Vito Genovese, who in 1959 arranged a failed hit on his old pal – the starting point for the movie, which follows the two men, both then in their 60s as they try to work out their differences over the next few years.
The two are contrasting personalities (with equally contrasting wives, played by Debra Messing and Kathrine Narducci respectively). Costello is a criminal type De Niro has played often, especially in the second half of his career: restrained, pragmatic, keen to maintain his respectable facade.
Genovese is more of a jabbering hothead, as if De Niro were trying his hand at standing in for his frequent co-star Joe Pesci (he wears tinted glasses for this part, as well as more makeup).
Robert De Niro pays both roles in this tale of a true-life mafia rivalry.
Both performances are interesting in themselves; while Costello is the less showy of the two roles, the character’s tendency to avoid confrontation becomes rather fascinating, especially when he gets to the point of forgiving the man (Cosmo Jarvis) who shot him in the head.
But the casting still feels like a misguided stunt, robbing us of the excitement of seeing two powerful actors play off one another without offering enough in return. A pun on “alternates” seems to be lurking in the title, which literally refers to a social club Costello and Genovese frequented in their youth – but if we’re meant to think of them as two halves of the one guy, Levinson could have done more to make the concept meaningful.
Instead, he focuses on imitating the bravura style of Goodfellas and other gangster classics directed by Martin Scorsese, with or without Pileggi as screenwriter. But secondhand Scorsese is never going to match the real thing, and anyway, Levinson isn’t that sort of director; he just seems to be going through the motions, even when he stages a rooftop killing as a shadow play behind a bedsheet and intercuts this with a Jimmy Cagney movie on TV.
Ultimately, it’s clear why so many studios previously passed on this project: as far as the historical record goes, the story just doesn’t have that much of a payoff. Perversely, Levinson and Pileggi double down on the sense of anti-climax, teasing us with the prospect of a revelatory final scene but leaving this to the imagination.
For all Scorsese’s stylistic sophistication and moral irony, his gangster movies – including the more recent The Irishman – would be pointless if there weren’t an antisocial little boy inside him in love with the idea of playing with guns. In The Alto Knights, blood gushes when it has to, but the movie seems to be made by people who, at this point, sympathise far more with Costello’s desire to take it easy.
The Alto Knights is in cinemas on March 20
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