ROBERT DE NIRO was to the forefront of that adventurous new breed of actors and directors who emerged in the 1970s but who have appeared content to rest on their laurels in recent years, prioritising commerce over art, as is their prerogative.
It's all the more appropriate, then, that De Niro delivers his most satisfying performance for years in What Just Happened, a comedy that satirises the malaises of the movie industry.
The screenplay is by veteran producer Art Linson, whose many credits include Heat, Fight Club, The Untouchablesand Into the Wild, and is based on his caustic 2002 memoir, What Just Happened: Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line. The movie is, we are assured in a disclaimer, a "completely fictionalised" adaptation, but the various characters remain recognisable.
Not for the first time, De Niro chews up the scenery in the leading role, but here with aplomb and a keen sense of humour. He plays Ben, a producer named by Vanity Fairas one of the 30 most powerful players in the film business. A shrewd, sly operator, Ben is one of those people who prizes the mobile phone as an aid to lying about where he is or what he's doing.
Ben is getting increasingly frazzled, however, as he tries to deal with his two ex-wives, a blunt-spoken studio head (a perfectly glacial Catherine Keener), and a vain actor (Bruce Willis, gamely playing himself) who refuses to shave a long beard that he claims to be an expression of his artistic integrity. And he has to cope with a coarse English director (Michael Wincott) determined to impose an unhappy ending on his new movie, Fiercely, a pretentious thriller starring Sean Penn.
Cinema has a long history of biting the Hollywood hand that feeds it, in movies from Singin' in the Rainand Sunset Blvdto Swimming with Sharksand the recent Tropic Thunder. De Niro previously worked with What Just Happeneddirector Barry Levinson on another satire, Wag the Dog(1997), in which he played a White House spin doctor hiring a Hollywood producer to fake a conflict with Albania as a distraction from a presidential sex scandal.
Levinson nimbly directs this breezy, entertaining romp that's awash with cynicism. While it's not as incisive an attack on Hollywood mores as Robert Altman's scathing The Player, it hits its well-judged targets more often than not.
After a critical drubbing at the Sundance festival in January, the film was re-edited before screening in May as the closing presentation at Cannes, aptly enough because the movie ends at that festival.
Directed by Barry Levinson. Starring Robert De Niro, Catherine Keener, Sean Penn, John Turturro, Robin Wright Penn, Stanley Tucci, Kristen Stewart, Michael Wincott, Bruce Willis 15A cert, gen release, 104 min ***
