Always the dollars, always the fuckin’ dollars
Casino is often compared to GoodFellas, usually in the framework of “Casino is not as good as GoodFellas” or something. They’re both high energy gangster movies, sure. They were made just a few years apart and they share two major stars. But they’re about very different things and there’s one aspect in particular that makes them incomparable to me: GoodFellas is one of the most fun movies ever made, while in Casino, in stark contrast, is three hours of pure, distilled torture. It’s is one of the most relentlessly bleak, ugly, impenetrable films Martin Scorsese has ever made. To many, this makes it “bad” or at the very least, “overrated.” But, bravely, I am here to say they’re wrong!
By this point in his career, Scorsese had made several films about how American capitalism affects an individual, usually a man, but not always. Casino is the first time he took on the system itself. That’s why people like it less. The characters are more “types” than in some of Scorsese’s more nuanced work. I do not mean this as a negative; it’s satirical. Casino is a mean, uncaring movie about mean, uncaring people. They are not complicated: they want wealth.
The movie is a fictionalization of the life of Las Vegas mogul Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, here named Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro). Rothstein runs the Tangiers Casino and builds it into an empire, while his best friend, crime associate Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), builds Las Vegas’ criminal enterprise into an empire of his own, and they are essentially competing for absolute control of the city.
Being an authentic movie about American capitalism, the film is extremely death-centric. So let’s start at the ending, because the last 20 minutes of Casino makes me profoundly sad and it’s some of the best work of Scorsese’s career. While watching Casino (and The Irishman for that matter), I am struck by not simply the fact of characters’ deaths but the pathetic, embarrassing nature of them; I wonder if this is explicitly a reference to Barry Lyndon, which ends with the narrator’s casual mention that Redmond Barry would die in relative obscurity.
“It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor—they are all equal now.”
Nicky Santoro’s and his brother Dominick’s mafia assassination in the cornfields speaks to this existential fear and, incidentally, is the best mob violence set piece in Scorsese’s career. It is intensely visceral, shocking, and (you can read this on one of my many Letterboxd logs of the film) completely devoid of scopophilic pleasure. It is a complete nightmare to experience. I love it.
The mob guys beat them with baseball bats and “they buried them while they were still breathing.” Nicky’s voiceover about the meeting abruptly ends with the first blow of the baseball bat, when he finally realizes he is no longer in control, no longer untouchable. Nicky’s brother gets beat first, so Nicky can watch; moments later, Nicky weeps, sobs, his face entirely saturated with blood, as his brother is stripped to his underwear and unceremoniously dragged into a four-foot grave, casually dumped as if he were nothing. And then Nicky gets the same treatment. You can see Nicky’s shallow, jagged breaths as the mob men pile dirt on his face. (Reminiscent of a shot in The Irishman! More on that whenever I get to The Irishman!)
Nicky is the ultimate conduit of Scorsese’s vision of American capitalism. Nicky took initiative. Nicky carved out a niche for himself and succeeded. Nicky made Las Vegas his territory, and so long as he continued to kick back some money to Chicago and Kansas City, no one bothered him. But when he started to get reckless and arrogant, he threatened the livelihood of the other mob bosses and became a liability to the system. When you no longer serve the system, you die. In the all-American cornfields.
Now, there are some moments of levity in the film, it’s not all apocalyptic doom. There are jokes, and we love jokes. And there is, of course, Ginger’s (Sharon Stone) star entrance, which might be Thelma Schoonmaker’s greatest work as an editor (I simply love hyperbole). Ace first spots Ginger from the security office, watching her steal chips from some guy she’s hustling with on CCTV. She is cheering down on the casino floor as he wins, whooping it up!, while in the security office, Ace watches her without any sound—breathlessly, even. When that guy Ginger’s with tries to stiff her on her share of the winnings, she makes a scene, throwing all of the chips into the air, causing the crowd to swarm and try to pick them up.
By this point, Ace has moved onto the floor to watch Ginger up close, and he is so down bad immediately. They make eye contact over the commotion and we get a freeze frame on Ginger as the opening guitar riff of “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia plays, and there’s a slow push-in on Ace as he watches her stride away in slow-motion behind the commotion, completely at ease, casually glancing back at Ace, with her eyes glistening with fire and lust. “What a move,” Ace’s voiceover tells us. “I fell in love right there.”
But such excitement fades. Ginger’s death just as pathetic as Nicky’s—overdosing in a Los Angeles hallway alone, from a hot dose. In three months, she’d gone through all the money and jewels she’d taken from Ace. “In the end, all she had left was $3,600 in mint condition coins.”
Before we get to death, though, Ace and Ginger’s relationship is occasionally scored with the “Theme de Camille” from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, a piece of music to which I have a Pavlovian response of pain. It evokes the feeling that you know something is over before it’s actually over. About 30 minutes into Contempt, Brigitte Bardot takes a little walk as this piece plays, and there is a brief montage of shots from her day with her husband Michel Piccoli, and in that moment she realizes she doesn’t love him anymore. (I have famously called this the greatest cinematic moment in history.) How many times did Ginger think this about Ace? How many times did Ace know Ginger was thinking this? There was never any room for love in their relationship.
The Contempt score plays at the tail-end of the film, as well, and takes us into the credits. The final sequence, after the deaths of Ginger and Nicky, shows the death of Las Vegas itself. The corporations take over and demolish the old classy casinos and in their place build castles, pyramids, and sphinxes. “Today it looks like Disneyland. And while the kids play cardboard pirates, Mommy and Daddy drop house payments and junior’s college money on the poker slots.” The brutality of capitalism always gets worse; the violence of phase one might end but in phase two, the redistribution of wealth becomes more efficient, more sedating, more faceless, and, somehow, more ruthless.
“And that’s that.”