Overstimulating Strip

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2010)

Scorsese follows up GoodFellas with a sort of variation on the theme, creating a similar structure but with different characterization and mood. Both GoodFellas and Casino tell a true story of mob activity in two parts, the rise to power and the inevitable downfall, featuring interwoven voice-over narration, pop music, and, well, Joe Pesci as short fuse to a bomb gone out of anybody's control. They contain different enough elements however that comparing them too closely can misconstrue the point of both; nevertheless, the similarities are there.
Casino immediately appeals with its Saul Bass opening titles, and then quickly keeps up the momentum with sharp cinematography glorying in the light and spectacle of the Las Vegas Strip. The Strip is a popular place for filmmakers to play with the light and imagery, and Scorsese is all over it with some amazingly striking and glorious compositions. On a purely visual level, this movie is more than worth the time to check out, and on that note may be better watched silently.
Because, the thing is, it's also very noisy. With almost never-ending voice over, constant music, and Sharon Stones superb but still harrowing performance of an overwrought junky falling into sheer hysterics, the very few and all too short moments of silence in this movie stand out for their sheer contrast, and end up being the high notes. It's a shame, too, because technically this is DeNiro's finest performance along the "detached, cool, but cares" mode, and he plays a genuinely likable character who wants to play it as straight as possible and knows how to make everyone happy--provided they actually listen to him, which of course they don't, and provided that nothing goes wrong, which of course they do.
There's so much to like individually about the film that it is hard to criticize it as a whole. Each individual scene works on its own level, most of them involving DeNiro and Stone as they work through their relationship (one of the most heartwarming moments when he proposes to her, and one of the most heartbreaking moments when he discovers their daughter tied up), the storytelling is sharp, and the visuals straight up eyecandy, but Scorsese still overdoes it in all marks, creating an overwhelming and mostly overstimulating project out of the whole. Form following function? Technically the Strip is one of the world's most famous realms of fully immersive virtual reality, along with New York Times Square, the Mall of the Emiratis in Dubai, and too many places in Tokyo to name. However, that not being a thematic point of Scorsese's movie at all, it doesn't really help the fact that he could have used a little reserve letting the individual pieces work on their own without distracting them from one another by layering them over each other.
--PolarisDiB