CASINO

Rip It Up, Issue 224, 1 April 1996, Page 40

CASINO

Director: Martin Scorsese

...or, Goodfellas take two. Casino is a gamble that doesn’t quite come off. This rambling (three hours of it!) morality tale of love and trust fits neatly enough into the Scorsese canon but, alas, the director’s earlier films took but half the time to make the same point. Some brilliant Saul Bass titles usher in a flabby first hour, burdened by its documentary-like presentation of the workings of the gambling establishment, and not helped by some confusion as to whose eyes we’re looking through. It’s not until Sharon Stone enters, as the lucre-crazed Ginger, that the plot starts to focus itself on some Scorsesian inevitability. Scorsese works through his usual cinematic flourishes — from the airborne De Niro in the credits sequence and the Stroheim-like vision of Stone all but drooling over her diamonds and gold, to the usual arty dissolves. The music is utterly integral to the film and fascinating in the way it heightens Scorsese’s visuals, ranging as it does from Bach and Louis Prima to lashings of early Stones. Scorsese seems to be encouraging a certain deadpan quality to the playing and often De Niro’s brash one-colour ensembles speak more loudly than the actor. Stone, despite all the Academy Award brouhaha, is too often simply strident and sometimes registers as little more than a 70s clotheshorse.

There are some neat character sketches, with Joe Pesci once more playing the gentle tough guy (“Be nice, be fucking nice”) and De Niro as brilliant as ever at couching deadly rage in the gentlest of guises (his final domestic argument with the hysterical Stone is a classic). The pacing picks up when the film starts to dispose of the villains with style and sadistic ingenuity, and Scorsese even allows himself some nostalgia at the end of the movie, when the aging De Niro reminisces about the Las Vegas that once was. Sadly, he may well have been talking about the director.

WILLIAM DART