The release of Casino in November 1995 came with the weight of unfair, if understandable, expectations. Martin Scorsese had only released Goodfellas five years previously, and this re-teamed the great filmmaker stars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci for a story also set within a criminal organization. Superficially, the movies have much in common – by design, and by pure accident.
One of the overt resonances lies in the presence and performance by De Niro, whose Sam “Ace” Rothstein could essentially be interchanged with Jimmy “The Gent” Conway in the way both men dutifully but ruthlessly establish every rule of thumb in their little universes. There is also no denying that Pesci, having just won an Academy Award for doing so, was once again playing a psychopathic hotfoot, this time named Nicky Santoro, a mob enforcer who is every bit the live-wire that Tommy DeVito was. Finally, there is the matter of Scorsese’s established style, which employs elaborate camera angles and elegant movement and punchy, brutal editing, as well as narration from a handful of its most prominent characters.
Yet once one pushes past superficial similarities, the two films are quite different – in subject, especially, but also in tone and in what it practices on a narrative level. If Goodfellas was about an organized crime family as just that – a family, prone to violence but practicing loyalty above all – then Casino is about the crushingly impersonal world of another type of criminal enterprise – a business, first and foremost, in which the word trust is never even part of the vocabulary.
The narrative of Scorsese’s screenplay, co-written with and adapted from the book by Nicholas Pileggi (another returning Goodfellas collaborator), spans nearly 15 years in the lives and work of Sam and Nicky as they build a casino empire in Las Vegas, the city of sin and decadence. In the ultimate reflection of such decadence, Scorsese constructed a three-hour, multi-generational epic in which every major featured character receives a genuine, sometimes tragic arc. At the top of it all is Sam, whose thorough tyranny over every worker in his casino runs the gamut, from the big-picture decisions of booting fraudulent or scheming customers to, in a frighteningly amusing moment, the number of blueberries placed in muffins by the kitchen’s harried bakers.
He eventually meets and falls for scam artist Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) when she targets certain marks on the casino floor, dazzles Sam with her beauty, and charms him with her grace. Stone’s performance is a master class in communicating how Ginger’s early, promising life gradually turns to rot, as Sam and Ginger’s marriage fails, and Sam’s professional priorities are constantly elevated above everything else in their lives. Her fate is laden with doom after finding herself far too embroiled in the details of his plans, as her drug dependency spirals far out of her or anyone’s control, and a high-profile divorce only strengthens her resolve against him.
Then there is Nicky Santoro. Our own A.C. Koch recently wrote about the liberal use of Pesci’s favorite four-letter word in Goodfellas, in which the number of its uses approached 300. Here, we have a harsher, more brutal world, in which “conservative” does not seem to be in anyone’s vocabulary. This screenplay drops far more f-bombs, with Pesci himself barking it more than anyone in the earlier movie does. It seems important, as Scorsese’s relationship to the word coalesces perfectly with Pesci’s career and reflects the terrifying harshness of Nicky as a person and as an enforcer. There is also Nicky’s comeuppance, which shares similarities with Tommy DeVito’s, but is far more brutal; instead of a quick bullet to the head, a group armed with baseball bats makes short work of him.
That sums up the decadent nature of Casino, which was received more lukewarmly than its cousin and predecessor. The aesthetic pleasures here are every bit as rich and rewarding as anything in Scorsese’s filmography, from Robert Richardson’s dazzling cinematography to Howard Shore’s outstanding score. The supporting cast is peppered with recognizable faces – a truly slimy James Woods as Ginger’s former boyfriend, Kevin Pollak and the great Don Rickles as hotel and casino operators in Sam’s employ, L.Q. Jones and John Bloom as a sibling-in-law pair who think they have the right idea about loyalty. The real show belongs to the three leads, but these are all reasons that the film remains one of its legendary filmmaker’s greatest works – a whirling and swirling tapestry of American decadence and lasciviousness at the service of corporate corruption.
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