The Alto Knights: An amazing farewell song to Mafia’s film (Critique)

Based on a hazardous concept, this cross portrait of two mafia is nevertheless concerned for the testamentary dimension that Robert de Niro injects.

Let’s talk about the elephant immediately in the room. The supposed tour de force which serves as an advertising argument for the film. Robert de Niro in a double role (two Niro, yes), playing both the legendary mafia Frank Costello and his equally legendary Vito Genovese opponent. Either two gangsters who left their imprint on the world of organized crime of the 20th century, two former friends (they were members of the New York club “Alto Knights”, who gave his title to the film) who ended up becoming rivals: one (Costello) wanted to take a more tidy life, devoted to grazing the Judges and politicians (Genovese) Always pushed the plug of violence and immorality, seeking to take advantage of the new financial windfall offered by drug trafficking.

A gangster with gentlemen manners, the other without faith or law: Costello and Genovese are two rival brothers, two intimate enemies, two faces of the same room. We understand the idea that pushed Niro to endorse the two roles (on a suggestion of his producer and old traveling companion Irwin Winkler). The actor had already played the silent mafia at La Costello (in The freed Or Casino), the bloodthirsty mafia and boosted at the Genovese (in The incorruptible), but never both.

By deciding this time not to call on Al Pacino or Joe Pesci (or even Bobby Cannavale) to give him the reply, it is as if the actor made a definitive opa on the genre of Mafia’s film-that he said once and for all that he is the king. Why not, but the problem is that the film never justifies its theoretical bias a little crazy from a dramatic point of view-we are neither in a story of twins Pretensenor in a typical comedy Nobility obliges Or Professornor in an SF concept at the Mickey 17. De Niro may be grimted in such a way that Genovese does not look too much like Costello, it is two of Niro that we see here face to face, a disturbing vision which plunges the spectator into a “valley of the strange” in the Cosa sauce.

We can nevertheless decide to close our eyes to this hazardous concept, saying that if De Niro wanted to split, it is perhaps because something eminently personal is played out here-the actor recently explained that he had himself attended the club of the Alto Knights in his youth, thus observing very closely, from his adolescence, the princes and the anonymous fingue carriers ofunderworld that he will later play in the cinema. Friend Scorsese could undoubtedly have helped him to dig this intimate material deeper, but he is Barry Levinson who was entrusted with the orders of the project – Levinson having a little expertise in Mafia’s film (Bugsy) and the de Niro-Movie (Men of influenceamong others).

Passed a very ungrateful intricate visually (the assassination attempt by Frank Costello, in 1957, all in a broken mirror, shards of glass and syncopated editing), the director of Rain man Films his mafia intrigue in a somewhat defraded neo-classical style, but not unpleasant, which musard and takes his time, wedging on the rhythm of these cachochym gangsters who, between two settling of scores, walk their doggies in slow motion in Central Park like any retiree from Manhattan, when they are not bickering MUPPET Showor characters from Soprano.

The Alto Knights thus draws the contours of a post- mafia cinemaThe Irishman (wrinkled, tired, told in a voice filled with bitterness and regrets), as there was in the 90s a post-post-post-post-cinemaFreed (Full of cocaine, rock’n’roll and sequence plans). It is fatally less exciting, but, behind the procession of ghostly silhouettes and visual shots (this close-up on sausages cook in a pan, a book of Italian-American recipes), there is nevertheless a good story, a very bushy historical material and rather well synthesized by another Biscard of the genre, the former journalist Pileggi (author of Freed and Casino).

The Alto Knights Thus revisits several decisive moments in the history of the mafia in the 1950s, including the “Kefauver Hearings” (a commission of inquiry of the American Senate on organized crime) and the famous meeting of Apalachin – an improbable meeting at the top of a hundred mafia chiefs in a country house, which Levinson describes in the last third of the film in a rather funny tone.

These events had a huge impact at the general public at the time, which understood when a mafia did take the tricks of crime in America. It was the beginning of a pop fascination that The godfatherthen all these films that we know by heart and made the glory of De Niro. By telling these stories today, he clearly hears the loop to complete. Deliver a fantasy of “ultimate film on the mafia”. Until the next?

The Alto Knightsby Barry Levinson, with Robert de Niro, Debra Messing, Cosmo Jarvis … in theaters.