VERDICT: When it comes to mob stories, Barry Levinson’s altos know the words but not the music.
The difference between Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas is the difference between a stack of wooden planks and a gazebo. While both films are written by Nicholas Pileggi and produced by Irwin Winkler, the former is a collection of names and incidents that don’t amount to much, while the latter is a classic, spinning an unforgettable tale of organized crime that’s also the story of the United States in the 20th century.
The Alto Knights shows and tells us nothing that we haven’t already seen in a million mob movies, as childhood friends Frank Costello and Vito Genovese become arch-rivals, one working within the system and flirting with legitimacy while the other remains a hothead and a loose cannon. The fact that both Costello and Genovese are played as adults by Robert De Niro is the film’s biggest gamble, but the payoff is underwhelming.
The two characters aren’t related, and they’re played by two different actors in the flashbacks (unlike the twinning in The Monkey), putting De Niro’s double-dip more in the category of Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or perhaps Mike Myers in the Austin Powers movies, than with Hayley Mills or Lindsay Lohan in The Parent Trap. De Niro probably enjoyed himself, but the characters are so fundamentally similar that the actor simply occupies additional cinematic real estate more than he stretches himself as a performer.
Frank tells the story in flashback — speaking to the camera in two different locations, for no apparent reason — relating the tale of two Italian kids making their way through the mean streets of New York, finding fortune and excitement in the world of Prohibition-era bootlegging. But while Vito flees to Europe after committing a double homicide, and then gets stuck there during the World War II years, Frank marries the Jewish and non-Italian Bobbie (Debra Messing) and cozies up to cops and politicians to keep Vito’s criminal empire thriving.
Vito eventually returns, assuming he will regain control and power, but Frank isn’t willing to hand it all over, particularly since Vito wants to enter the drug trade, which, as we know from The Godfather and Goodfellas, means the end of the golden era. Frank and Vito’s well-hidden criminal lives begin to surface in public, first in a lawsuit between Vito and his wife Anna (Kathrine Narducci), and later when Senator Estes Kefauver (Wallace Langham), casting an eye toward the White House, publicly goes after organized crime.
Anna, incidentally, owns a gay bar, and The Alto Knights gets credit for being one of the few mob movies ever to address the fact that all of New York’s queer nightclubs, at least between the end of World War II and Stonewall, were run by organized crime. We get a brief glimpse at the club’s entertainment, and even that is borrowed from another movie; it’s a dress-and-tuxedo gender-bending performance that will be familiar to fans of Victor/Victoria.
The film covers well-trod ground — if it wasn’t in Goodfellas or The Godfather, it was in The Irishman — and makes little effort to forge its path through the material. (A mob hit preceded by extensive cross-cutting? Check. A gathering of the bosses? Check. A tracking shot through popping flash bulbs as a lawyer bellows, “No comment!”? Check.)
One misses the contributions of Scorsese’s longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who made sure we knew the name and function of all those goodfellas; here, we get thrown into a dark social club (that gives the film its title) with a bunch of guys over the age of 60, and it’s left to us to figure out who’s who and how they matter.
There are pops of wit and insight — Vito scolding a lackey (Cosmo Jarvis, playing a doofus here with the same skill he demonstrated as the dashing hero of Shogun) about the correct way to conduct a hit; a gangster flees from a cop-raided mob conclave, carrying a full shrimp cocktail in a crystal goblet — but The Alto Knights more often than not goes through the motions, including legendary cinematographer Dante Spinotti pouring on autumnal sepia in a way that feels reminiscent of Gordon Willis’ groundbreaking work with Coppola.
The best mob movies draw implicit lines between organized crime and society at large: who’s in charge, who benefits, who suffers, who exploits. Here, Pileggi just has characters say the quiet parts out loud, as when Vito is watching the Kefauver hearings and complains that government officials are “the biggest gangsters of all.” Yeah, we get it, but usually the movie (or a TV show like The Sopranos) allows us to draw that conclusion for ourselves.
Even with De Niro (and De Niro) in the leads, this is mob-movie cosplay, a hollow shadow of previous triumphs. As a mob lawyer might bellow, “Nothing to see here.”
