Is he going to be remembered as an embarrassment?
His movies have become embarrassing, and his weird performances in public equally so.
shareIf you like his politics...no problem there....but...
...its sort of like Marlon Brando in HIS later years. Brando ended up with a spectacular weight problem which got him a lot of shaming, but he also got weirder and weirder in his public pronouncements.
DeNiro is edging that way.
I think his biggest "image problem" is that when he started out, he played a lot of roles being largely silent, a man of few words, brooding.
And now as he talks all the time -- and how he talks (not terribly intelligently), and what he talks about (politics is such a lesser topic these days, the candidates are largely subpar) -- the "actor's mystery" is going, going...
But his reputation is solid, the legend is there.
And unlike Brando, he's kept the weight off.
>"and how he talks (not terribly intelligently)".
Indeed. He's one of my (if not my) favourite actor, at least until the late 90's, clearly a supremely talented and intelligent actor, but I was always surprised by how inarticulate and uninteresting he was as a person in almost every interview or public appearance (compared say, to a Pacino or a Nicholson, to cite a few major stars from the same generation) for most of his career.
He was never able to speak intelligently or provide any kind of valuable insight into anything related to his craft, which is fine -he's paid to act, not talk about it, and he was one if not the greatest actor of his generation. But Pacino, for example, who is at least DeNiro's equal in terms of greatness as an actor, was always so much more interesting to listen to in interviews...
I understand he has an autistic son and, I don't know if genetics is a factor at all there, he seems to be somewhere on the autistic spectrum himself, hence maybe his difficulty to articulate his thoughts on camera, as himself?
Whenever the topic of 'different kinds of intelligence' arises (artistic vs. emotional vs. procedural, mathematical, etc.), I always think of DeNiro.