Opinion Robert De Niro, the Wise Guy at Cannes

By the time Robert De Niro arrived at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, with Martin Scorsese’s dark, unsettling Taxi Driver — which won the top prize that year — and Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900, a five-hour-long epic historical about Italy in the first half of the 20th century, he had behind him the weight of two roles of the kind that would, for a lesser actor, have been a career peak. To both Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II (1974), he brought a magnetic, chameleon-like quality that marked him as one of the most exciting talents of the age. Over the next half-century, he became recognised as one of the undeniable greats. At Cannes this year, 49 years after he first came to the Croisette, De Niro was honoured with an honorary Palme d’Or for Lifetime Achievement.

Consider the filmography that followed Taxi Driver, in which he gave one of the most riveting performances of his career as the lonely, deeply paranoid Travis Bickle (the “you talkin’ to me?” scene might be the most popular audition choice for aspiring actors everywhere). From Jake LaMotte, the toxic, self-destructive boxer of Raging Bull (1980) to Rupert Pupkin, the delusional wannabe comedian of The King of Comedy (1982), from the cold, violent mobster, Jimmy the Gent, in Goodfellas (1990) to the sly, charming and utterly poisonous William King Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), De Niro has delivered performances that balance a deeply interiorised understanding of character with a captivating screen presence. Even when it seemed like he was simply playing a variation of the “wise guy” or gangster, he has managed to make each character unique.

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Many of these are also the result of association with like-minded artists, including Scorsese, with whom he has made 10 films, filmmaker Brian De Palma and actor Joe Pesci. The honouring of De Niro is thus also a celebration of cinema as the most collaborative of art forms.