Martin Scorsese’s crime drama is gripping when it explains the casino business, and Sharon Stone makes the personal turmoil matter. The repeated confrontations wear us down, but there is enough here to justify the long evening.
Martin Scorsese’s Casino is at its most gripping when it explains how the Mafia makes money in Las Vegas. We recommend it for that close attention to the business and for a cast that makes the people around it worth watching. It is also too willing to repeat a personal quarrel once we have understood what is at stake. At 179 minutes, that costs it some force, though seldom our interest.
The screenplay, by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi, treats the casino operation as something we can follow if somebody takes the trouble to explain it. Its heavy use of narration is justified most clearly in these opening passages, where information keeps giving us another reason to pay attention. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing handles the detail without making the business seem either simple or impossible to grasp. We were absorbed by the account of how the money is made; understanding the operation makes the struggle to control it matter.
Robert Richardson photographs Las Vegas with an extravagance that can become oppressive, and that seems right for this story. Dante Ferretti’s production design makes the casino’s display of wealth convincing enough that the explanations never feel detached from the place we are looking at. Neither gives us much relief from the excess, which is effective but tiring over a long film. The music, credited to Roy Hawkins, adds to that pressure, sometimes unnecessarily: the images and performances are quite capable of keeping us unsettled.
Robert De Niro gives Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein an authority that makes the business side persuasive, while Joe Pesci keeps Nicky Santoro troubling company. Both are compelling, though the film’s insistence on their importance can make the people around them feel secondary. De Niro’s assurance is especially useful in a film so concerned with power: Ace’s importance is easy to accept. Pesci supplies the unease that stops all this expertise from becoming reassuring.
Sharon Stone, as Ginger McKenna, is the performance that stays with us. Ginger’s volatility could easily become a convenient explanation for whatever goes wrong around the men, and the writing sometimes encourages that reading. Stone gives the anger enough hurt to make such a dismissal feel inadequate. She makes the personal drama worth attending to even when its scenes are repeating themselves, and keeps the film from becoming too comfortable with the men’s account of events.
The difficulty comes when Scorsese allows the confrontations to go on making the same point. Bitterness is established, then restated, and the narration sometimes explains a feeling the performances have already made clear. More space between these exchanges would have helped; so would trusting Stone, De Niro and Pesci to tell us less directly. The violence is disturbing, but repetition elsewhere can leave us tired before it has had its full effect.
Gangster films do not always take such an interest in how the business actually works. Here, that attention makes the struggle for money and authority more convincing, and the characters’ ambitions easier to understand. We would not ask Scorsese to make these people more agreeable, only to stop them repeating themselves. Give it an uninterrupted evening, and do not expect to feel rested afterwards.
