After seeing Robert De Niro in Silver Linings Playbook last year, I was hopeful that he had turned a corner. Once considered the great actor of his generation, for almost twenty years, he had been mostly phoning it in. But in Silver Linings Playbook, he worked his ass off. He was subtle, sweet, sympathetic, and I immediately thought he would get attention from awards at the end of the year; he did, and was nominated for an Oscar for the seventh time. But then I saw The Family, and he had returned to self-parody. And I don’t mean that he’s happy to be typecast as an Italian-American tough guy and just recreate expressions and noises from Raging Bull or The Godfather, Part II, though he’s done this a couple dozen times.

In Luc Besson’s new mob comedy The Family, he plays Giovanni Manzoni, a vicious mobster in witness protection in Normandy, France, who passes himself off as writer. In comic irony, the locals think Gio is an intellectual of some sort, and they ask him to discuss The Harder They Come at the local film society. The movie turns out to be Goodfellas, one of De Niro’s greatest roles, and Gio earns rapturous applause after telling the crowd all about mob life in the United States. This is supposed to be moment of meta-comedy, but it was more successful at reminding me not only how derivative The Family was, but also how far De Niro has fallen. Continue…