Alex Prager for The New York Times
For a person of my generation, it pretty much goes without saying that Robert De Niro is the finest screen actor of his. To be a movie-besotted adolescent in the '70s and early '80s was to experience, in real time and at an impressionable age, performances that would go on to become icons and monuments. ''This kid doesn't just act — he takes off into the vapors,'' wrote Pauline Kael in her review of ''Mean Streets.'' Not that there was anything airy or abstract about what he was doing, which was transforming himself — physically, vocally, psychologically — with each new role. And in the process, before our eyes, reinventing the art of acting.
De Chameleon
Yes, he once gained 60 pounds. But some of his subtler transformations are more astonishing.
"You Talkin' to Me?"
Tell us your favorite De Niro lines.
There was a time when De Niro was everywhere, assuming a new shape in every film. Maybe it seems that way to me because my own catch-up viewing, in a golden moment when both video stores and revival houses flourished, coincided with an especially productive period in his career. In any case, I remember — and still treasure — De Niro in Elia Kazan's adaptation of ''The Last Tycoon,'' in Bernardo Bertolucci's ''1900,'' in ''Brazil,'' in ''The King of Comedy'' and ''New York, New York'' and, and, and . . . at least a dozen more movies that I won't try your patience by listing here.
I confess, however, that it took all my professional discipline to resist squandering the time I spent with De Niro on a recent Saturday afternoon in a slack-jawed fanboy recitation of his greatest hits. Oh, my God, you're Jake LaMotta! You're Johnny Boy! You're Travis Bickle! I'm talking to you.
To the younger generation, though, he is most recognizably Jack Byrnes, Ben Stiller's impossible father-in-law in the ''Fockers'' franchise. And as the reliable heavy in a steady stream of action movies and crime dramas, some (but not all) of them quite good. It has become fashionable to suggest that De Niro's best work is behind him. But nostalgia is a vice, and a survey of the last four decades of movie history reveals that De Niro has never slackened, diminished or gone away but has rather, year in and year out, amassed a body of work marked by a seriousness and attention to detail that was there from the start.
So let's not herald his new movie, ''Silver Linings Playbook,'' as a comeback or a return to form. He has been here, more often than not in top form, the whole time. But ''Silver Linings,'' directed by David O. Russell and based on a novel by Matthew Quick, is nonetheless something special — an anarchic comedy in which De Niro plays a wild, funny and touching variation on the difficult-father theme. His character, Pat Solitano Sr., is a Philadelphia Eagles fanatic whose dream of domestic peace is undermined by his emotionally unstable son (Bradley Cooper) and his own volatility.
Pat Solitano is a reminder that De Niro, an unmatched master of brooding silence and quiet menace, can also be an agile comedian and a prodigious talker. On-screen, anyway. He has a reputation among journalists for sometimes extreme reticence, and the role of celebrity interview subject is not one he is known to relish. In our conversation, which took place in his TriBeCa office, he did not put on the smooth bonhomie that is the default setting for off-duty movie stars in the company of writers. He sat with his feet planted on the floor and his hands flat on the arms of a deep leather chair, and the answers to my questions did not always come readily or easily. It seemed like work.
Why shouldn't it have? Nothing about De Niro's approach to acting, as evident in nearly a hundred movies so far, should lead anyone to expect glib insights or ready answers. That wasn't what I was looking for, any more than I wanted a glimpse of the ''real'' Travis Bickle or Jack Byrnes or Pat Solitano or any of the others. But I was curious about where they had come from or, more precisely, how they had come to be. I was looking for clues, chasing after vapors, interested in doing the job of talking to an actor about his.
SCOTT: Let's start with "Silver Linings Playbook" and working with the director David O. Russell. How did that come about?
ROBERT DE NIRO: I knew David before, and I'd seen one or two of his other movies, and then I saw "The Fighter," and I thought it was terrific. And then this came along, and I don't know whether I read the book before I read the script — but either way, he changed it, obviously, from the book. The book was interesting, the character was interesting, but it was the reverse of the way he is in David's version.
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