Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar.

Robert De Niro has two Oscars and will likely never win another. His first, a Best Supporting Actor trophy for 1974’s The Godfather Part II, felt like the confirmation of an important new actor’s arrival. He picked up his second, Best Actor for Raging Bull, at the arguable peak of his career, though not in terms of great performances. Many more of those lay ahead of him. But in 1980—after Taxi Driver, 1900, The Deer Hunter, and others—De Niro had become the actor who set the pace for everyone else. Each movie, even the ones that didn’t quite work, revealed new aspects of his craft.

Make the Case: The 2024 Oscar Winners We Want to See

Ringer writers have lots of opinions about the Oscars: Barbie should get Best Adapted Screenplay; Robert De Niro deserves Best Supporting Actor. Follow along as we make our best arguments for the Oscars we want to see ahead of the 96th Academy Awards on March 10!

• Daniel Joyaux: Barbie Turned the Abstract Into a Cohesive Script. It Deserves the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar. 
• Keith Phipps: Robert De Niro Continues to Evolve, Persevere, and Challenge Himself. He Should Win Another Oscar.
• Adam Nayman: From Superhero to Villain: Robert Downey Jr.’s ‘Oppenheimer’ Turn Was Undeniable
• Paul Thompson: Just Do It Already. Give Bradley Cooper a Damn Oscar.
• Julianna Ress: ‘May December’ Found a Delicate Balance to Tell a Disturbing Tale

But that was a long time ago, and much has happened since then. De Niro’s made numerous more movies, not all as venerated as his ’70s classics. He’s also changed as an actor, in both the sorts of films in which he appears and the performances he delivers, though his best can easily stand beside the work that made him a star. De Niro almost certainly won’t win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work in Killers of the Flower Moon. (The smart money’s been on Robert Downey Jr. pretty much since Oppenheimer’s first screening, though a Ryan Gosling upset remains within the realm of possibility.) But De Niro should win, and not just for his work in that film, but also for persevering, evolving, and continuing to challenge himself—even if those challenges sometimes involved plunging into the depths of mediocrity.

I think it was the mid-1990s when I first heard someone posit that De Niro had “lost it,” citing, if I recall correctly, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That’s not the worst movie on which to build that sort of argument. It’s a mostly wretched film that often plays like a vanity project for director and star Kenneth Branagh. But De Niro, who plays the monster billed in the film as “The Creation,” is never the problem. He delivers an intense, layered, psychologically complex interpretation of the familiar character. A mid-film (and Branagh-free) stretch in which the Creation explores the world, learning to speak, read, and otherwise be human by observing a family from a distance, is lovely and sad, as if cut-and-pasted from a better, more patient movie.

Heat, Casino, Jackie Brown, Ronin, and other films put the “lost it” talk to bed for a few years, but it stirred again when De Niro made a swerve toward comedy with Analyze This and Meet the Parents (and, perhaps more relevantly, their lesser sequels). That this swerve coincided with his increasing inability to tell good scripts from bad—or at least to care one way or another—helped stoke such talk. The 2000s, in which De Niro starred in 15 Minutes, Righteous Kill, Showtime, and other best-forgotten films (with only a few minor gems to offset them), weren’t kind to the actor. The ’10s weren’t much kinder, even if the right film—usually one made by a skilled director like David O. Russell or Nancy Meyers, who knew how to make good use of their star—could stir memories of better times.

It was in the middle of this ’10s stretch that Anne Helen Petersen wrote the BuzzFeed article “The Shaming of Robert De Niro,” which sought to understand what had happened to De Niro, and why so many had soured on the once-revered actor. The short version of Petersen’s argument: De Niro likes to work, there are only so many parts available for actors of his age and price range, and he takes what he can get. Also, times had changed and the low- to mid-budget dramas in which he excelled just didn’t get made anymore. De Niro might have wanted to make another Awakenings or The Mission or better-crafted genre movies like Midnight Run or Backdraft, but he had to settle for Last Vegas and Red Lights instead.

There’s a bit more to the story, however. The De Niro of the 2010s was not the De Niro of the 1970s, ’80s, or ’90s. Christopher Frayling’s biography of Sergio Leone, Something to Do With Death, details De Niro’s decision-making process before signing on as the Jewish gangster “Noodles” Aaronson in Once Upon a Time in America. The actor spent two months researching the role and traveled with Leone to Rome, where the bulk of the film would be shot. Then he gave it some more thought before saying yes, hesitating not because he had doubts about the movie, but because he knew his preparation work and the shooting of the film would take two years of his life. This wasn’t unusual at the time, an era in which De Niro regularly turned out one, maybe two, films a year. But that pace accelerated, and De Niro’s approach started to change, as well. He hadn’t stopped being good, but his performances largely stopped being surprising.

In this he wasn’t alone. As with many of his contemporaries, history and familiarity made it hard for De Niro to disappear into parts like he used to. At a certain point, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, and other actors of that ilk stopped sinking into characters and started playing variations of their established screen personas (often brilliantly, it’s worth noting). That never really happened to De Niro, but he did tend to rely on a few familiar tools, simmering quietly in dramatic roles and mugging freely in comic parts. But even in a film like last year’s About My Father, a broad, sentimental comedy costarring stand-up comic Sebastian Maniscalco, De Niro never discards his gravity and integrity no matter how gross the indignities the film puts him through are. It says everything that needs saying about De Niro’s late-career skills that the 2020 comedy The War With Grandpa contains a scene in which De Niro plays trampoline dodgeball (alongside Cheech Marin and Christopher Walken) and a genuinely moving scene between De Niro’s grandpa and the boy with whom he’s at war. We are tearing up at The War With Grandpa? What the hell?

If any film should have settled the “lost it” questions forever, it was The Irishman, a long-awaited reunion with director Martin Scorsese. De Niro delivers an extraordinary performance as Frank Sheeran, a union rep and mob hit man who served as witness to (and sometimes instigator of) some of the late 20th century’s most pivotal moments. The film’s breathtaking final stretch features some of the best work of both De Niro’s and Scorsese’s careers, though maybe not the most unexpected. It’s reflective, mournful, elegiac, the sort of final statement made by artists who know they’re far closer to the end than the beginning.

Which brings us to Killers of the Flower Moon, in which De Niro, as Oklahoma patriarch, cattleman, crime boss, and mass murder orchestrator William King Hale, delivers a performance nothing like his work in The Irishman. In fact, it’s at once nothing like anything he’s ever done before and a synthesis of lessons learned over the past few decades of appearing in comedies. It’s intense, scary, ridiculous, magnetic work that could be created only by an actor who’d done time in both Raging Bull and Dirty Grandpa.

Like the David Grann book it adapts—and, for that matter, the actual historical event it depicts—Killers of the Flower Moon hinges on Hale’s ability to play the part of the genial, sympathetic friend to members of the Osage tribe while simultaneously exploiting and killing them, in a series of schemes to claim their wealth as his own. Hale’s good at playing the part of the smiling, supportive white ally, speaking the Osage language publicly and treating the Osage like he treats everyone else: with warmth, affection, and good humor.

He even keeps this mask on behind closed doors, at least at first. Reuniting with his nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), Hale smiles as he carefully tries to feel out Ernest’s sensibilities and get an idea of his abilities and how he might best be put to use. Hale suggests that Ernest might be able to get into some profitable trouble if he’s careful about it, but he never says it out loud, keeping plausible deniability in all he does. He can call the Osage “the finest and most beautiful people on God’s Earth.” He might even mean it. But that doesn’t mean he minds being the monster who kills them.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a film of many strands, including a depiction of what happens when that mask of plausible deniability melts away. Hale’s story becomes that of a cascading meltdown, as schemes he used to pull off effortlessly stop working and his pawns, Ernest chief among them, start screwing up the game. But it’s a slow-motion meltdown. Hale brings just a little too much enthusiasm to a community meeting demanding an investigation into the murders. And as his malevolence becomes harder to conceal, and his frustration mounts, De Niro’s performance becomes increasingly comic without losing its sinister edge.

It’s a balancing act De Niro keeps up throughout the film. Infuriated with Ernest after a murder intended to look like a suicide goes awry because the assassin shot the victim from the back, his blustering delivery of “The front is the front and the back is the back” provides Killers with one of its biggest laughs and most chilling moments. Calling on the comic chops he’s honed in movies good, bad, and mediocre over the past few decades, De Niro plays it like a frustrated restaurant manager fed up with a waiter who keeps screwing up orders. But the loss of a human life—the life of a man he knew well—doesn’t seem to enter his thoughts. And when Ernest swears on the life of his children, Hale takes offense.

Hale’s not amoral, at least by his own standards. He doesn’t think of himself as a bad man. He’s so skilled at compartmentalizing that he doesn’t even seem to see any contradiction between killing a man and calling him a friend, or of mourning with people he’s eliminating one by one to steal their money. It’s psychopathy with a smile. It’s also, the film illustrates repeatedly, exactly what it takes to succeed in America. De Niro embodies this, giving the film a jolt of black humor whenever he’s on-screen without ever breaking its tragic mood. It’s bold, stunning work—revelatory, even, given how easy it’s become to take De Niro for granted. As he enters his 80s, De Niro’s seemingly discovered he still has the capacity to surprise, an exciting development that suggests this next stretch of his career could be one of its most exciting. Let’s put to rest talk about what De Niro’s lost over the years. It’s time to start talking about what he’s gained.

Keith Phipps is a writer and editor specializing in film and TV. Formerly: Uproxx, The Dissolve, and The A.V. Club.