Leaving Old Las Vegas Behind and Not Looking Back

Rating: 7/10 (3 February 2017)

It's not cute or cloying and manages to avoid trade in many of the clichés we have come to recognize in films about Las Vegas. And for a film nearly three hours long it never drags. My first viewing of this movie, however, leaves me satisfied but not mesmerized, content, but not changed in any way. Still, I appreciate the contribution this film has made to our understanding of and perspective on the history of Las Vegas, even as the film failed to evoke in me a nostalgia for what was lost with the crumbling of the old casinos.
Sharon Stone's performance as Ginger has deservedly won praise. On the surface, Ginger is a classic character type -- the hustler seduced by the promise of a conventional, comfortable life. In the end, she is undone by her choice to trade in her joie de vivre for a chance to be arm candy to a casino boss. However, watching her come unglued is fascinating. She's as unpredictable and dangerous as any character in this movie. The moment when Ginger and Nicky lash out at each other, each like a feral, desperate animal, recalls the fathoms each character has traveled from a much more placid and controlled persona. As the Vegas hustler who catches Sam Rothstein's eye, Stone's Ginger goes from the apple of the film's eye to a dead junkie lying desperate and forgotten in a hotel hallway. Along the way, she invites our empathy as a forlorn and seemingly confused trophy wife, to convincingly portraying a conniving and cold-hearted woman intent to get what she can out of a marriage of convenience.
The film travels in its characters' hubris. Sam Rothstein, as played by Robert DeNiro, makes the fateful decision to fire an inept but politically-connected employee. Nicky Santoro, as played by Joe Pesci, displays a will to power that overtakes even ambition, engaging in a tryst with Ginger, whacking anyone who displeases him, and generally acting as if his run of luck in sin city will never come to an end. These three characters, Sam, Nicky, and Ginger, are bound, in different ways, by oaths and promises, by traditions and conventions, all of which come unwrapped as the Vegas outsiders find their welcome finally wearing thin with the local powers that be, and perhaps, with the laws of nature. As the system they have established starts to sputter, so does the friendship between Sam and Nicky, and the love, if one could ever have called it that, between Sam and Ginger, does not hold, indeed cannot hold.
Casino does not offer a morality tale. It does not warn us, at least not overtly. But the caution and road signs are there for those who would read them. What ultimately prevents this from being a great film, however, is a stronger sense of what it all means. Excess is on display: greed, will to power overtaking common sense, addiction, lust, and anything else you would care to name. And the relationships? Of course it is no surprise that they do not last. But the director, Martin Scorsese, fails to tell us what the unbinding of the old order really entails. At the end of the film the protagonist, Sam, intones over arching shots of exploding buildings and new Disney-like casinos. One close shot of the lion at the MGM Grand suggests that a new showmanship has replaced a grittier, earthier place that really meant something. We even see hordes of obese seniors storming the casinos. Scorsese hints, strongly, that something has been lost.
But certainly more has been lost than violence and organized crime? We might be willing to go down the road of regretting the loss of an older, more meaningful era if the director had set up a film that showed the consequences of vice overcoming the bonds of friendship. What if DeNiro really drove home for us how the vices of sin city prevented a marriage between Ginger and Sam from ever taking hold? But we never really get this. Instead, the film spends rather too much time on the mob bosses from out of town who always get their suitcases, and rather a lot of time on Nicky's propensity for violence. More could have been done to delve into Rothstein as a character. Was he always a narcissistic strongman with a need for control? Or, did this happen to him in Vegas? We never really find out. The film also never really explains the unraveling of the marriage between Sam and Ginger; we simply encounter it as a fait accompli. Ultimately, if this film wants us to mourn the old Las Vegas, it needs to give us more reason to think something existed worth saving in these characters and in their way of life. Their respective fates, Rothstein's unexpected survival, Ginger's slow fade, and Nicky's brutal murder, seem disconnected and anomalous.
A film that trades in so much nihilism shifts, unexpectedly, near its end, to sentimentality, asking us, with its tribute to the old casinos and revulsion at the new edifices of corporatism, to finally sentimentalize the characters and their milieu. But audiences may not be so quick to whitewash a corrupt and violent era, even with its sharp and colorful personalities. Corporate-backed casinos emerging on the ruins of a corrupt and violent era? Might seem like a small price to pay, after all.