Casino (1995)
How are you going to make a three-hour narrated montage?
Directed by Martin Scorsese · Written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese · Approximately 178 minutes
Starring: Robert De Niro · Sharon Stone · Joe Pesci · James Woods · Don Rickles
Owner-informed draft. Built from the Letterboxd note dated 14 August 2024, with source checks and provisional expanded analysis. Verdict and advisories remain proposals.
The problem with Casino is not that Goodfellas exists. I have thought long and hard about that explanation. It is not the reason. If anything, affection for the earlier film supplied enough goodwill to finish this one.
The problem is the constant narration, the montages and the cumulative feeling that a nearly three-hour movie would rather keep telling us how its world operates than allow us to inhabit it. “How you gonna make a 3 hour narrated montage?” is an exaggeration about the experience, but a precise statement of the complaint.
Scorsese follows casino operator Sam “Ace” Rothstein, his volatile associate Nicky Santoro and Ginger McKenna through a Las Vegas arrangement built to make money while keeping its real owners at a useful distance. The release record establishes the gangster-casino premise and approximately 178-minute running time.
Before you watch
Severe violence and torture, including graphic beatings and killings. Domestic abuse, controlling relationships, drug and alcohol misuse and discriminatory language are substantial. Strong language is pervasive; sexual content and brief nudity also occur. The BBFC advice corroborates the principal content. The later killing relevant to the narration complaint is discussed behind the spoiler disclosure.
Specific content details (contains spoilers)
- Two men are beaten and buried while still alive.
The explanation keeps getting there first
Voice-over can give a film rhythm, competing perspectives and access to the stories people tell themselves. Casino has clear reasons to use it. The casino is a system whose visible activity conceals another business, and Ace and Nicky have very different investments in its operation.
Those reasons do not resolve the problem. A device can be purposeful and still become exhausting. The explanations repeatedly establish the terms before a scene has had much chance to create its own pressure. Watching starts to feel like receiving an extremely elaborate briefing.
The competing voices also offer a potentially interesting unreliability. Neither speaker is a neutral historian. Yet the volume of information can leave less room for a viewer to experience that uncertainty than to keep absorbing another account of what happened and why.
Movement is not the same as momentum
The editing and music organise enormous amounts of material. Money, work, surveillance, criminal authority and social aspiration pass through the film in carefully arranged patterns. The control is evident.
The difficulty is the effect of that control over time. If another passage arrives chiefly as a briskly illustrated explanation, movement can begin to feel repetitive even when the images and information change. A film can cover years and leave the viewer feeling stuck in the same rhetorical gear.
This is where the almost-three-hour length becomes more than a number. The film keeps returning to the pleasures of comprehensive description. For a viewer who has stopped finding those pleasures rewarding, increased scope feels like more of the problem.
The performers need room to breathe
Sharon Stone gives Ginger an energy that can resist becoming merely another item in Ace's account. Her wants, volatility and attempts to bargain expose the limits of his claim to have arranged a manageable life.
Robert De Niro's controlled attention and Joe Pesci's aggression give Ace and Nicky distinct relations to power. There is strong acting available here. I still do not particularly want to spend this much time with these people.
Ginger's treatment also deserves scrutiny beyond her dramatic function. Ace's belief that money and organisation should secure affection is a form of control, not proof that his wife owes him a particular feeling. Her substance misuse and destructive choices do not make every demand placed on her reasonable.
Goodfellas is not a defence
Comparing the films can explain a shared vocabulary. It cannot demonstrate that the same devices produce the same experience. The dissatisfaction is specific: the narrated, montaged form creates distance and fatigue here.
Listing achievements does not make the experience less tiring. There is craft to discuss and a system worth examining. There is also a perfectly coherent judgment that watching it was a chore.
Corny DNA
Extravagant clothes, bad taste and outsized criminal behaviour are intentional. The frustration concerns narrative form; this was not an evening of affectionate mockery. Numerical Corny DNA remains unassigned.
Verdict
Hard to recommend — proposed. The near-continuous explanation and montage make for an exhausting experience. The film may interest viewers drawn to the mechanics of criminal and corporate power, but that interest is not a general endorsement. Its formal control and strong performances do not outweigh that exhaustion.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the ending and detailed analysis
Even the narrator cannot get out of the cornfield
Nicky's voice-over leads into his ambush and is abruptly cut off by the attack. He and his brother are beaten and buried alive. The story account corroborates the killing; the scene-specific account describes the voice-over interruption.
That distinction makes the complaint about somebody narrating his own death more precise. The voice does not carry on explaining events from beyond the grave. The attack interrupts his control of the story, which is a deliberate formal gesture.
It may be an effective local gesture while still confirming how dominant narration has become. Even a scene designed to take the microphone away begins by handing it to him. The frustration concerns that accumulated dependence, beyond the literal mechanics of who can deliver a retrospective account.
Ace survives and returns to betting work while the casinos pass into a different corporate order. His lament supplies another account of a lost world. The film gives us reasons to distrust his nostalgia; the draft's reservation is that another summary of what it all meant is also a very familiar way for this particular experience to end.
Sources
- Owner's Letterboxd note, watched 14 August 2024; supplied directly and preserved verbatim in the editorial archive.
- BBFC: principal credits, theatrical timing and detailed content advice.
- Screenplay credits and ending corroboration; contains spoilers.
- Scene-specific corroboration of the interrupted narration; contains spoilers.
The owner's judgment is retained; the expanded formal argument and scene wording remain available for revision.