Robert De Niro has been self-parodying his glory days for most of the past decade, so it’s unfortunately not surprising he would consent to get back behind the wheel of a taxi again for the maudlin “Being Flynn.’’
It’s not a great idea. De Niro’s Oscar-mongering performance is undermined by reminders of the earlier film — his late wife’s name is Jody (as in Jodie Foster), she has a boyfriend named Travis (as in Bickle) and at one point De Niro’s character sleeps on a bench with the advertising slogan “since 1975’’ (when “Taxi Driver’’ was filmed).
The real coup de grace for this would-be serious-minded drama is the sledgehammer-subtle direction of Paul Weitz (who is also the screenwriter), who enabled his star’s paycheck mugging in the execrable “Little Fockers.’’
This adaptation of Nick Flynn’s memoir “Another Bulls – – t Night in Suck City’’ is dominated by De Niro’s look-at-me-I’macting-again performance as Flynn’s father, Jonathan, an alcoholic who’s also a racist homophobe increasingly given to paranoid, delusional rants and fits of violence.
When this finally gets Jonathan thrown out of his cluttered apartment, he calls Nick — whom he hasn’t seen since he was sent to jail for passing bad checks 18 years earlier — for help putting his belongings into storage.
Nick, underplayed by Paul Dano — who doesn’t stand a chance against his showboating co-star — has his own issues.
An aspiring writer like the father who abandoned him, and wounded by the suicide of his single mom (Julianne Moore, seen in extended flashbacks), Nick goes to work at a homeless shelter.
One of Weitz’s many missteps as the film’s writer was moving the action from Flynn’s native Boston to a fantasy version of Manhattan where Jonathan’s disheveled, alcoholic cabbie somehow finds it easy to sleep with his middle-aged female fares.
At least until he’s forced to sleep alone in the cab, which he loses (along with his license) after a drunken accident.
After descending from sleeping on couches to subway grates, Jonathan inevitably lands at the shelter where Nick works.
Up to this point, the movie’s most genuinely affecting scenes have been taking place there as Nick nightly faces clients trying to hold onto their dignity, and often their sanity.
But the arrival of Jonathan and the movie star playing him destroys the mood.
When Jonathan talks to his battered self in the mirror, it’s hard not to think we’re looking at an older version of his “Taxi Driver’’ character, Travis Bickle.
You keep expecting him to say, “You talking to me?’’ — a line De Niro has parodied in everything from “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle’’ to “Meet the Fockers’’ (movies that, like “Being Flynn,’’ his company produced).
Martin Scorsese certainly wouldn’t criminally waste the talents of Olivia Thirlby (as a co-worker whom Nick is sort of dating, at least until he starts doing blow) and Lili Taylor, Flynn’s real-life wife, in do-nothing roles.
Taylor, as a recovering crack addict and the shelter’s resident philosopher, is called upon to deliver the most blunt line of the typically too-on-the-nose dialogue: “We catch them on the way down — their next step is the morgue.’’
And then there’s the pretentious narration delivered alternately by father and son, which probably worked much better on the printed page.
“Don’t worry, you’re in the hands of a master storyteller,’’ Jonathan assures us.
Sadly, De Niro’s Jonathan delivers a more accurate critique of “Being Flynn” when he tells a fellow street crazy who thinks he’s being filmed, “That would be one boring, redundant piece-of-s – – t movie.’’