Does De Niro have a script for his career?

Robert DE NIRO has been written about a lot lately, and not in a good way.

Here is perhaps the most celebrated actor of his generation, nominated for six Academy Awards and winner of two, and where can you see him now? The De Niro of “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “The Godfather Part II” is starring in the raunchy comedy “Meet the Fockers,” the “Poltergeist” knockoff “Hide and Seek” and, most troubling to purists, a 30-second spot (albeit a classy one directed by Martin Scorsese and scored by Philip Glass) for American Express.

The frustration at not seeing a great talent working on material worthy of him is understandable. And it’s natural to speculate why. The easiest explanation is the money De Niro undoubtedly will collect from these highly commercial ventures. Even actors need to earn a living, and it is axiomatic in Hollywood that as they age there are fewer opportunities to get substantial paychecks.

Also, while his current slate is hardly a trifecta that will enrich a distinguished body of work, the kinds of films De Niro made his mark in are not exactly thick on the ground in today’s American film landscape. Just what was he passing up to make “Hide and Seek”?

But on another level, to see De Niro’s choices in these starkly pragmatic terms, and to question his choices in a purely reductivist way is to misunderstand the nature of what he does.

The seemingly strange path of De Niro’s career feels connected with the very nature of acting and the actor’s life -- and on much more important levels than the practical one. For acting of De Niro’s caliber is not a profession so much as a calling -- a gift, if you will.

In primitive cultures that did without theaters, people with similar abilities likely became mediums or the tribal shaman. Truly exceptional actors like De Niro should be seen as more than craftsmen with finely honed techniques for delivering lines well. They are, in effect, individuals with intuitive second sight, people who can make you believe they are in touch with other worlds, like the one Travis Bickle occupies when he confronts himself in the mirror in “Taxi Driver.”

Actors, at least those in a league with De Niro, have a need to work, a passion to express themselves as only they can do in front of a camera or on a stage. This ability to take on the appearance of strange and different lives without having to actually live them is one of the things that actors cherish most about their work and why they often gravitate toward outlandish roles in the first place.

Roman Polanski, who acted before he was a director, told me at Cannes in 1976 that he’d made “The Tenant” because it enabled him to play the lead part of a man in a dress who, in a surreal series of failed suicide attempts, repeatedly crawls up multiple flights of stairs to throw himself out of a top floor window. “It’s a great role for me, don’t you think?” he said, surprised that anyone might not understand. What sounds like a nightmarish situation in real world terms is a gift from the gods for performers.

Like any gift, the ability to truly and deeply be someone else can be as much a burden as a blessing. Going outside of yourself and into someone else’s psyche can be enormously draining, as terrifying and exhausting as putting yourself into a trance. You don’t have to look any further than De Niro’s “Godfather” brethren Marlon Brando to see someone whose great gift, in a sense, wore him out.

For an actor with De Niro’s reclusive personality, that must be especially so. I once worked with Joseph Papp on an oral history of the New York Shakespeare Festival and he arranged for a rare extended interview with De Niro, who had just appeared in a festival production.

What I discovered was not an actor who was press-shy, as I had assumed, but something more fundamental -- someone uneasy with language when he is not acting. This tendency still holds true: In introducing a 25th anniversary screening of “Raging Bull” two weeks ago in New York, De Niro reportedly said all of 10 words: “Glad everyone could come to this reunion. That’s it. Thanks.”

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In the real world

Acting, I felt quite strongly after my time with De Niro, is how he communicates, how he interacts with the world. He is so effective becoming other people because, in addition to his tremendous talent, he has so few mannerisms of his own to get in the way. Half-measures are not possible for him.

We can speculate about De Niro’s choices, we can point to possible real-world reasons for them, but finally, like the sources of his talent, this is unknowable, perhaps even to De Niro himself. When someone is so deeply an actor, when the link to being other people is so primal, it is impossible for us to fully understand why he makes the choices he does.

It’s likely, finally, that De Niro wouldn’t be able to articulate the philosophical reasons for his recent decisions any more than Brando would have for his. The mystery has to be respected as part and parcel of the gift, as one mask that even our congenitally prying 21st century eyes can’t successfully look behind.