Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) is a remarkably good gambler. He doesn't make a bet unless he knows it's a sure thing, and he knows a sure thing better than anyone else. He makes so much money for his bosses that when they use the Teamsters Union to build a casino in Vegas, they send him in to run it. And run it he does. He makes sure things go like clockwork. He knows the best way to keep his bosses happy, and thus keep himself alive, is to keep bringing in the dough. Eventually, Vegas becomes so lucrative that Rothstein's childhood friend Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) decides to move out there. As soon as he does, he whips all the bookies and drug dealers into line, all paying him fees. At the same time, Rothstein meets and falls for Ginger (Sharon Stone) a hustler who gives most of her income to perpetual lowlife Lester Diamond (James Woods). As time goes by, their lives intertwine and they slowly tear themselves to pieces, along with the empire they built.

While Goodfellas was a frantic tale, told with mounting urgency and paranoia, Casino is a slow burn of a film. A full half of its three-hour running time is devoted to Rothstein's rise to prominence in the Vegas community. For the first hour and a half of the film, Rothstein seems untouchable, and the film delves in to the minutae of what it means to run a casino. The first half of the film is so good at setting up just how sweet life can be at the top that it makes the second half all the more tragic.

The turning point of the picture comes when Ginger, who has been told by Ace never to see Lester again, steals $25,000 to give to Lester when he comes to visit. Ace catches them, and has Lester brutally beaten while Ginger watches. From that point on, the film deals almost exclusively with the degrading relationships between Ace, Ginger, and Nicky. Nicky, for his part, gets banned from every casino in Vegas, so he goes back to doing what he does best: organized crime. Nicky becomes the top crime boss in the city of Vegas, a city where money is everywhere. However, he becomes so good at his job that it starts to call Ace's reputation into question.

The lynchpin of Casino is Robert De Niro's performance. While De Niro has always been an acclaimed actor, he hasn't carried a film of this weight since Raging Bull, but he's lost none of his powers. His performance in Casino is one of the most nuanced, controlled, and complex of his career. Especially in the second half, where you can almost feel how he's trying to desperately tighten his grip on the people and things he considers most valuable. He is by turns frightening, funny, and pitiable. This performance is one of the crown jewels of his career.

But the supporting cast aren't asleep on their feet. Joe Pesci is especially spellbinding as the short-fused Nicky Santoro, a man so vicious that grown men cower in front of him. Pesci always does his best work with Scorsese, and this is no exception. He stands as an excellent foil to De Niro's more straight-laced portrayal. And Sharon Stone gives the highlight performance of her career, playing Ginger as a three-dimensional person. It would have been so easy for Ginger to become a screaming shrew, annoying the audience and the other characters. Instead, she comes off as vulnerable and scared, giving her character and her situation a pathos a lesser actress couldn't have pulled off. In fact, her performance in Casino is so involved that she literally had to take a break from acting afterwards, because she couldn't find a role as good again.

And then, of course, there's Scorsese himself. If he shot Goodfellas as a young boy's idealization of gangster life, then Casino is a different kind of idealization: that of the gambling life. He shows us Vegas through Ace's eyes, seeing it as a haven for people like himself. He respects the old Vegas, but doesn't hesitate to show the bloodthirsty brutality that came about as a result of the mob's involvement. As Ace's world begins to crumble around him, Scorsese sublty changes things so that we as the audience go along with the the downfall, we feel as if we too are losing something precious. And while the sprawling style he employed in this film might put some people off, I think it suits the subject matter perfectly. I couldn't imagine it being done any other way.

The HD DVD:

The Image:
Drawing on the recent 10th anniversary remaster, Universal's 2.35:1 1080p transfer is stunning. The picture is crisp, sharp, and detailed. The bright Vegas lights shimmer and sparkle. Aside from a few specks of dirt (maybe three, four instances of it, nothing more), the film looks brand new. When Ginger wears a sequined dress, you can count every sequin. When coins are being tossed onto machines to be processed, you can see every individual coin. Lines on faces are as easy to read as giant posters. The scenes where Scorsese purposely brown out all but a single character are all beautifully rendered, as well. This transfer is so good that you can easily see the dummy in the exploding car at the beginning the moment it cuts from De Niro to the De Niro mock-up. Gorgeous.

The Audio:
The audio is similarly strong, with all the sounds of the casino ringing all around you. This Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 mix is rich and teeming with great sounds, from the rock score to the shuffling of cards, car engines humming to silenced pistols "thwipping." The audio does a great job engrossing you in the picture. Also included are DD+ 5.1 Spanish and French tracks.

The Supplements:
Scorsese commentary tracks can, at times, be hard to come by. He did commentaries for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and New York, New York on laserdisc, and ever since then, he's only done a couple more, which is a shame, because he's a walking encyclopedia of film, and he's so breathlessly entertaining to listen to. For this release, we get comments by Scorsese, Nicholas Pileggi, Sharon Stone, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and Frank Vincent. These comments were not recorded as scene-specific commentaries, so they're just sound-bites taken from other sources. Considering that a good amount of the information here can also be found in the accompanying documentaries, you might want to skip this in favor of the latter, unless you specifically want to hear the comments while watching the movie.

The rest of the features are essentially one long documentary cut up into smaller featurettes. The first is "The Story," which details how the film came to fruition in the first place. Scorsese makes several comments about his intentions for the film, which explain why the movie is three hours long, and confirmed some of my suspicions about what he was trying to do stylistically. The best part is Pileggi talking about how the book and the movie were being made almost concurrently, and he couldn't get any of his real-life interviewees to discuss their lives with him, until he mentioned that the movie would be starring Robert De Niro. Suddenly, people who had been shutting doors in Pileggi's face were scrambling to get interviewed by him. Classic.

The next is "The Cast and The Characters," which is fairly self-explanatory. Lots of great stories and insights here from Scorsese, Pesci, Stone, and De Niro. Pesci and De Niro in particular are very eloquent about working with Scorsese and their philosophy on acting in general, while Stone talks about how different it was to work with such high caliber people after doing movies that were more "lowbrow." Then comes "The Look," where Scorsese talks about the difficulties of trying to do a period piece on location, and we hear some about the cinematography style and the production design.

The final documentary is "After The Filming," which, as you might guess, discusses post-production and the release of the film. Some excellent interviews with Thelma Schoonmaker can be found here, discussing how Scorsese got exactly what he wanted out of the picture. Producer Barbara De Fine talks about the trouble that distributors had with the film's length, and we get to hear some wonderful things about the film's opening credit sequence, created by the incomparable Saul Bass, best known for creating credits for Alfred Hitchcock.

Finally we get some deleted scenes that don't amount to very much at all. None of the supplements are in high definition.

The Conclusion:
Casino is a unique entry in Scorsese's catalogue: a gangster movie that is actually a facade for a fascinating character study. De Niro gives a fantastic performance, as does Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone gives the best of her career. The whole thing is wrapped up in a package too good not to try. With a stunning high definition image, this HD DVD comes Highly Recommended.

Daniel Hirshleifer is the High Definition Editor for DVD Talk.