Knowing The Score
For years I was looking for a Robert DeNiro movie that had caught my fancy the one time I saw it years ago. It was a movie where he played a seasoned safe-cracker of global renown who pulls off heists in the U.S. and elsewhere and then works his way back to his real life home in Montreal. There he lives in an Art Deco designed apartment and owns a classy, but small jazz club. His girlfriend is Angela Bassett, who is an international flight attendant who flies in to see him regularly. It always struck me as a creative dream set-up that was a perfect fit for Tribeca-dweller DeNiro. The opening scene when he pulls off a successful jewel theft and works his way back to Montreal via an elaborate series of old car and van swaps that culminate in a fishing motorboat ride across the St. Lawrence River and into Canada is a great piece of imagineering. For a long time I thought the movie was perhaps Heat (the film where DeNiro plays a crook with a similar M.O. who comes up against Al Pacino, an L.A. cop). Then I thought maybe it was Heist, but while it has a similar noir feel, that wasn’t it. So, this afternoon on a rainy San Diego Sunday afternoon (the temperature has suddenly fallen to the mid-50’s from low nineties last Thursday), I decided that I needed to find a movie to watch and I scanned through Prime until I stopped on The Score. This is the 2001 film done by Frank Oz, whose claim to fame is a blend of Muppets and Star Wars, but this time managed a cast with DeNiro, Bassett, Edward Norton and even Marlon Brando. I am wallowing in the pleasure of a movie I thought I had lost forever that is as good as I remember it and perhaps better.
I think what I like about this movie is the high degree of professionalism exhibited by both DeNiro and Norton. It’s a strange thing, but I guess I prize cold and calculating professionalism more than most. I don’t respect it more than ethical behavior, but this movie is a good example of top-notch writing that makes sure that the people who the heist is perpetrated against are not necessarily all that sympathetic. Good writers know that most of us are steeped in situational ethics whether we realize it or not. That makes it matter whether the “victim” is sympathetic or whether he or she is compromised enough to make this a victimless crime, which is the case in The Score.
We all have to know the score when we are confronted by life’s uncertainties and random bounces. We have to drop our veils of optimism and let the facts and probabilities speak for themselves. Right now Donald J. Trump is sitting in the residence of the East Wing of the White House wondering what to do next. He has spent months carefully crafting a narrative in anticipation of just the events which have transpired. He had Louis DeJoy positioned to do all he could get away with to screw with the mail-in ballots, which he knew would be a problem for his vote count. He got the party operatives in key battleground states primed to run covert operations to further mess with the vote. In Pennsylvania, the GOP was working the state legislature and the courts to deny late voting. In California (somewhat of a Republican lost cause except at the Congressional level) they had what the New Yorker characterized as a Wyle E. Coyote scheme of mislabeled voting dropboxes, for which they got busted. And then there was the ultimate snooker in getting Amy Coney Barrett appointed to the Supreme Court on the fastest track anyone has ever seen (Lindsey Graham even flaunted COVID to hold weekend special committee hearings).
His plan was that he and his crack legal team (decidedly NOT!) would find a way to toss the election into the Supreme Court ala Bush v. Gore and get a sympathetic vote led by his appointees of Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch along with his faithfuls in Thomas and Alito to toss the election decision in his direction by only allowing the early in-person votes which the strategy had tilted to favor the Republicans and Trump. The mail-in strategy was working great with almost 100 million in the mailbox and delivery times were noticeably slowed particularly in the blue urban centers (thank you logistics wiz DeJoy). But then everything went to shit.
While the Election Day and Night went as good or better than planned with Florida falling to Trump early, things started going off the track when Fox News analysts declared early that Arizona had fallen to Biden. That was not in the Trump playbook. Even a call to Rupert couldn’t fix that fuck up and when the AP agreed with Fox, Trump’s tailspin was underway. As planned, the Election Night presser was set to go with the claim of the win. It was a little later than expected, but everyone knew the script. Bad miscalculation. Maybe it was the premature Arizona call and maybe it was just the high expectations of a blue win, but the Trump speech fell more than flat at 2:30am. It actually was rebuked globally and the loyalist and heretofore sycophantic Republican lawmakers ducked for quick cover. That was not planned.
Trump was stumped. He holed up in the White House for several days using his favorite Twitter account to boast about his election success, but the pundits and late-night meme crowd was ripping him a new you-know-what. His operatives that remained loyal (these are the smarminess of the smarmy) went out and tried to rev up the base in the key swing states where the counting was underway. The most serious miscalculation was the degree to which everyone, from the Supreme Court to Jim Baker (who led the Bush v. Gore charge for the Republicans) insisted that the count must go on. The idea of stopping the count just wouldn’t fly and might never have flown. And in such tactical grappling, such a misjudgment is near fatal as it reminds the world loudly what you are trying to do in the most obvious manner with which no one in their right mind wants to be associated.
And almost scripted like the last Seinfeld episode, Trump goes to let off some steam at the golf course on Saturday morning and while the cat was away, the counting mice did their things and pushed the vote data to the point where CNN, NBC and then (drop the microphone here) Fox News declared Biden/Harris to be triumphant over Trump/Pence. In a pitiful last ditch that made a somewhat appropriate mockery of his entire electoral strategy, his crack team, led by the idiot savants of what used to be Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Corey Lewandowski were sent to a landscaping company in South Philly, thinking they were going to the Four Seasons Hotel to make their last ditch howl at the moon that Trump had really won the election.
Now DJT stews himself into a snit in the White House wondering about his next moves now that the drone show and fireworks show of the winners ring in his ears (you KNOW he was watching it). The vast celebrations across the country and around the world are simply too loud to ignore and have put paid on whatever crafty tactics were planned for this moment. I heard Anthony Scaramucci, the most notable and early Trump turncoat, say that any further Trump tactics were simply attempts to drain his bases’ pockets for the last few pennies to pay for the campaign overdraft and whatever legal strategies may be needed to make a smooth exit. Good luck with all that, Donald. He ends up more like the outwitted Edward Norton than the smooth and victorious Robert DeNiro. Knowing the score has never been a strength of the man who turned prematurely orange as a pumpkin at midnight right before our eyes.