What Are We Doing Here, Alto Knights?

Somewhere along the way, The Alto Knights appears to have become afraid of its own story. That may be one explanation for the phony structural razzle-dazzle that bogs down Barry Levinson’s period crime drama, which stars Robert De Niro as both Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two of New York’s most legendary mob bosses. The movie delivers a lot of exposition — you might even learn some basic mafia history watching it — but it rushes through characters and incidents with such awkward abandon that one wonders if it was hacked to pieces from something larger, or if it was maybe never a fully realized work to begin with.

Another explanation for the film’s frenetic stylization might just be that it’s trying to replicate the ferocious pace and formal bounce of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, a film to which it pays homage at several points. Beyond De Niro, the two movies do admittedly share a screenwriter: the great Nicholas Pileggi. Perhaps more important, they share a producer: the great Irwin Winkler (Raging Bull, Rocky), who has been trying to get this project made since 1974, back when the late Pete Hamill was supposed to write it. The film’s got pedigree, and there’s certainly value in the concept. On paper, The Alto Knights feels like the kind of serious, genre-inflected drama we could use more of. But it’s totally inert.

Childhood friends, Costello and Genovese thrived as bootleggers during Prohibition and rose to the upper ranks of the mob. After Genovese fled to Italy in the 1930s to beat a murder rap, Costello wound up becoming the big boss. World War II intervened, and by the time Vito came back to the U.S., he found himself marginalized, and a slow-boiling war began. The film opens with a failed 1957 attempt on Frank’s life ordered by Vito and then doubles back and lets Frank narrate the story of how things got to that point in a haze of flashbacks. Along the way, Levinson intercuts between Genovese’s and Costello’s lives while also splicing in later interview footage, black-and-white slides of the old days, flashbulbs exploding, and snippets of other scenes. Everything hurries along with little life or inspiration or involvement.

In Goodfellas, all that stylistic pizazz meant something: We felt the intoxicating charge of power and money and violence, and what that meant for a protagonist who had been an outsider to the street-corner romance of gangsters. Here, it comes off as posturing and mimicry. Not to mention unnecessary: This is a story in which (supposedly) small gestures mean everything, set in a world where subtle actions — a word dropped here or there, a name mentioned in passing — can bring entire empires down. (There’s a reason all those Godfather installments clock in around three hours.) This is a movie that needs its viewers to be locked in, not adrift and confused. The clumsily rushed storytelling means that we get no time to understand or care about the stakes of this slow-burning mob war developing between these men.

Casting De Niro as not one but two rival mob bosses probably seemed like a neat idea at some point, but the results are borderline disastrous. For the impulsive chatterbox Genovese, De Niro appears to be doing such an obvious Joe Pesci imitation that it’s hard not to imagine Pesci reading every line. (They really do feel like they were written for Pesci, too. Is it possible he was attached at some point?) But even if you had no idea who Pesci was, there’d be something off-putting about seeing these two De Niros, and not just because of the poor prosthetic work on their faces. As Costello, the actor plays a reserved, anxious, quiet guy, deferential to a fault — it’s not a bad part for him, given his ability to always hint at darker undercurrents. But putting the two performances against each other keeps drawing our attention to the phoniness of De Niro’s turn as Genovese, to its prefab energy and programmed profanity. Individually, the two turns are merely kind of dull; juxtaposed, they start to feel like a bad comedy routine.

How did we get here? Levinson has certainly made some great films in the past. But his talent always seemed to lie in character and setting. As a writer he had a good ear, and as a director he had patience: He seemed to understand people, and to understand that if you watched them long enough they’d reveal things about themselves. These are two qualities sorely lacking from The Alto Knights, a movie where the dialogue is so lackluster and the actors seem lost. As conceived, it probably needed a stylist, someone with a deft visual touch and a sense of rhythm. And frankly, Levinson isn’t any of those things. (Very few directors are.) The Alto Knights is a movie whose ambition has passed. It feels like the husk of something that might have been great once.