Hide and Seek
With Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, Kamke Janssen, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, Dylan Baker, Melissa Leo, and Robert John Burke
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I can’t read that quote without laughing, because it so perfectly captures the psychotic dimension of De Niro’s screen persona. But even the most charitable observer would have to admit that for the last few years the revered actor, now 61, has been going home early. His last really good run was in 1997, when he played a buttoned-down internal affairs investigator in James Mangold’s Cop Land, a Washington spin doctor in Barry Levinson’s Wag the Dog, and a dangerously dumb hood in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown. Since then he’s given good performances in decent dramas like City by the Sea (2002) and The Score (2001), his only pairing with Marlon Brando. But the past eight years of his career are littered with schlock: bad action movies like 15 Minutes (2001), buddy films like Showtime (2002) with Eddie Murphy, or clumsy horror flicks like last year’s wretched Godsend and the new Hide and Seek.
Twists like these force a viewer to reevaluate the entire movie up until then, and once I’d done so, I was both more impressed by De Niro’s technique and less moved by his character. The psychologist dotes on his daughter, but he’s also strangely passive; he says he wants her to get better, but he’s actually trying to keep her quiet. At first glance it must have seemed an interesting role, someone who appears concerned but turns out to be monstrously controlling, and De Niro delivers a subtle characterization. The impulse it serves, though, is so stupidly dark that ultimately one has to wonder who’s reading scripts for him. A decade ago he was willing to produce and direct Chazz Palminteri’s excellent father-son drama A Bronx Tale, which gave him a much more successful paternal role as a middle-aged bus driver whose boy becomes infatuated with a local hood. Now he green-lights movies like Hide and Seek, dragging fine supporting players like Dylan Baker, Elisabeth Shue, Amy Irving, and Melissa Leo down with him.
