The Alto Knights is an intriguing addition to the mob movie canon, but De Niro should have never played both main roles.
PLOT: A personal rivalry between Mafia bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese inadvertently changes the balance of power in the mob forever, revealing to the American public just how vast of a criminal empire it really is.
REVIEW: I understand why The Alto Knights must have been a passion project for everyone involved. Producer Irwin Winkler, star Robert De Niro and writer Nicholas Pileggi are three of the men responsible for the greatest mob movie ever made – Goodfellas -, and it’s fitting that they’d want to be the ones to tell one of the most important Mafia stories of all time. Indeed, Vito Genovese’s attempt to kill Frank Costello kicked off a series of events that eventually led to the testimony of Joseph Valachi, who was the first member of the Mafia to ever acknowledge its existence and popularized the term “Cosa Nostra.”
Whether or not you like The Alto Knights depends on your interest in mob history. For fans of the genre, such as myself, The Alto Knights is a solid entry, even if its central conceit, being that Robert De Niro plays both Costello and Genovese, doesn’t work as well as you’d hope. For more casual fans, The Alto Knights will likely prove too talky and slow, with director Barry Levinson, an old hand, adopting a more stately approach than someone like Martin Scorsese would have.
One can’t blame De Niro for wanting to take on both lead roles, and one also has to give him credit for wanting to get this experimental so late in his career. No one can accuse him of phoning it in here, and he does his best to make Costello and Genovese two distinctly different performances. Costello is a more standard De Niro role, with him the soft-spoken elder statesman of the mob who eschews violence and would rather just live a quiet life with his beloved wife, Bobbie (Debra Messing). By contrast, Genovese, who he plays under heavy makeup, feels like a role that might have been tailor-made for his old co-star Joe Pesci, being smaller and prone to explosive bouts of anger.
De Niro is good in both roles, but having him play opposite himself feels gimmicky. If you think back to the classics of the genre, usually the scenes everyone remembers are the ones where two heavyweights go mano-a-mano. Think Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in Heat, or De Niro and Pesci screaming at each other in the Nevada desert in Casino. More recently, there was Al Pacino and Stephen Graham’s “you people” scene from The Irishman. Given that they’re both playing the same role, Costello and Genovese are rarely in the same frame, although the CGI used for such scenes is solid. Usually, though, it just cuts back and forth between close-ups, and there’s no chemistry between De Niro and himself. As good as he is (and he’s one of the greatest ever), the sequences where the two leads have a go at each other lack the fireworks they would have had Pesci or Pacino played one of the roles opposite De Niro had he been able to choose just one character. Again, I get why he did it, as it’s an interesting experiment for him as an actor, but it makes the movie much less entertaining than it would have been with a different approach.
If you can get over that aspect and appreciate The Alto Knights for what it is, you’ll still get a solid crime drama out of it. Pileggi’s script is terrific, showing how the feud between Genovese and Costello helped end the mob’s heyday. While Levinson opts for a quiet approach, specific sequences are very effective, such as a bit where Costello has to testify before a grand jury as Genovese rages at the televised version of the hearing, which (as in real life) only showed his hands as he spoke. Levinson, of course, has experience with the material, having made the mob classic Bugsy (as well as the mob-adjacent Sleepers).
As for the supporting cast, Messing has good chemistry with De Niro as Costello’s adoring wife, while The Sopranos vet Kathrine Narducci steals scenes as Vito’s half-crazed wife, Anna. The movie also opts for a surprisingly affectionate depiction of Albert Anastasia – the head of Murder Inc – who’s played by Michael Rispoli as even-tempered and a true blue friend to Costello. The only one I wasn’t sold on was Cosmo Jarvis (of Shogun) as Vincent Gigante, with the device used to give him a bigger chin and neck off-putting (I couldn’t figure out if it was prosthetics or just Jarvis squeezing his neck folds together). His performance is good, but every time I saw him on screen, it just felt like he was unnaturally squeezing his neck folds together, which took me out of the movie.
Interestingly, this isn’t the first movie De Niro’s been in to depict the climatic “Apalachin meeting,” an infamous event where mobsters from all over met at a farm in New York State to broker peace. It was played for laughs in the prologue of Analyze This, and here, Levinson also tries to wring some humour out the fact that all these wise guys ended up riding tractors and traipsing through mud to get away from the state cops.
While I wish The Alto Knights had been done differently, with different actors playing Costello and Genovese, as a fan of the genre, I still found it an entertaining addition to the mob movie canon. It’s no classic, but if this is your cup of tea (as it is mine), you’ll probably get a kick out of watching old-timers like De Niro, Pilleggi, and Levinson take another whack at the material.
