I’m on a United Airlines flight from Denver back home to San Diego and based on two United flights (to Denver and back), which are the first I’ve taken in some time, I have to say that United is not doing a great job in the customer service area. I normally fly Delta or Jet Blue and while I occasionally have problems in first class with them, its relatively rare. United doesn’t seem to be able to do anything right based on my admittedly limited recent exposure to them. On the flight to Denver we had snack troubles wherein the flight attendant looked at Kim and I as though we were greedy gluttons for taking two little snack packets on a two hour flight (over a normal meal time) that had no other food service. Being chastised openly by a flight attendant for taking two tiny packs of pretzels from an open offering basket is hardly what I expected for my first class passage fare. On this flight we are also on first class and we have noted that the plane is newer (a good thing) and the seats are a bit more comfortable. They have big 17” video screens in each seat back and what looks to be a nice selection of movies and entertainment (not that that is so unusual these days and certainly similarly available on both Delta and Jet Blue). The problem is that the system is very glitchy. It has had to be rebooted several times in what is now the first 45 minutes of the flight.
Both Kim and I have opted to watch Robert DeNiro in The Alto Nights, a recent, supposedly true, mobland story set in the late 50s and early 60s. It involves mob bosses Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, who had grown up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan together in the bad old days at the turn of the Twentieth Century. These guys were very much in the center of the big-time Cosa Nostra heyday. This is the Godfather and Goodfellas all rolled into a story where both competing mob bosses who swapped roles heading the Mafia in New York during WWII when Vito was in self-imposed exile in Italy, have a very realistic feud that ends with Frank tipping off the cops and Feds about the famous Castskills gathering of all the mob bosses from around the country. He did that because he could not otherwise stop his old pal Vito from running amok killing people (he tried and failed to kill Frank, which is the scene that starts the whole story). The interesting thing about the movie is that it does a very convincing job of portraying the Mafia like a bunch of old and out-of-shape hoodlums who are really scared of their own shadows rather than the tough guy image portrayed in other movies. They are not so smart and not so devious as Tony Soprano, but rather more like an old Vito Corleone who wants peace more than war.
There are many gems of wisdom embedded in the dialogue in this movie, just as there are in all the Godfather and Goodfellas movies, but one in particular caught my attention because it so wonderfully describes a characteristic you often find in some people. At one point at the early stages of the feud, Frank’s wife Bobbi asks him why he can’t just pull his old childhood friend aside and warn him that if he keeps up with all the violence, it will just blow back on him. Frank explains that Vito is not one of those guys who can be warned and she wonders why. Frank then says that Vito was a kid who grew up on the side of Mount Vesuvius outside Naples. He said, “how do you expect a guy who was brought up on the side of a volcano to accept a warning about anything?” What a wonderful imagery that says it all. Some people cannot be warned, they ignore warnings and carry on with whatever they want to do. They have learned that life is short and risks are all around us no matter what we do, so why worry about what you cannot control…just barrel forward instead.
The critics seem to be panning The Alto Nights as a retread of other mob movies with nothing but old stories that we all know. In fact, having read Havana Nocturne a few years ago, I would say that many of the stories portrayed are familiar, but a few details altered to make this story stick to its theme of the struggle between good and evil. In fact, that struggle is why I suspect Barry Levinson chose to have both Frank and Vito played by DeNiro. DeNiro is so o familiar to us all now and is such a quintessential New Yorker that he is the perfect canvas for this dual portrayal of mankind in its most notorious state. Both men clearly are rooted in the tough streets of their shared youth and yet one simply wants peace and harmony and to walk his dogs on the Upper West Side while the other is needlessly greedy and vengeful, preempting violence by anticipating it and metting it out needlessly to reinforce his tough guy image. Everything about Frank seems rooted in gentility and everything about Vito is rooted in brash violence. They clearly are intended to represent the two sides of the human soul Snd the struggle that goes on inside us all to one degree or another.
In yet another statement of our times, the Frank/Vito juxtaposition is shown less in youth and more in age. They were more alike than not down on Delaney Street when they were forming their worldview. But in their older age, everything about their ways, except their looks, diverge to opposite corners of the soul. Neither one is any longer in their prime, so they become cartoon reflections of power and control. In many ways, that makes this a particularly poignant moment for that portrayal as we are being led as a country and as a world by men who should have long ago relinquished leadership, but instead cling to it to play out the worst of their frailties and flaws. Eventually they both succumb to the next Kings of the Hill as they always have and always will and we are left to wonder why the world needs to keep going through this trauma and cannot manage to impose term limits on itself. I suppose it goes back to growing up on the side of a volcano. We never seem to accept the inevitable and obvious warnings that nature provides us and prefer to await the lava flow before accepting our fate.