I just watched “Midnight Run” and came to that conclusion. Not that I haven’t come to the same conclusion before, like every time I’ve ever seen him in a film. It’s actually not a bad film, about a hard boiled bounty hunter (Robert DeNiro) who’s actually a tough but honest ex-cop who got on the wrong side of some powerful people.
Here is Grodin, not acting
Charles Grodin is a soft-spoken accountant who ripped a mob boss off from 15 million dollars and then gave it all (or almost all) to charity.
DeNiro has to bring him in, but the Feds want him mostly as a witness against this big mob boss.
Anyway, as they travel across America, Grodin lectures DeNiro about not eating healthy food, and smoking cigarettes, which DeNiro does with such casual abandon you might think you were watching a 1950s movie, and DeNiro spends a great deal of the film telling Grodin to shut the fuck up. But they start to like each other, of course.
Actually, Grodin’s just fine for the role, all I’m saying is he can’t act. He was also appropriately cast in “The Couch Trip,” which Dan Aykroyd and Walter Matthau made into a seriously hysterical movie. Even right wing nutcase Victoria Jackson makes an appearance in that film, as a ditzy secretary.
But Grodin, himself, can’t act. He just plays a grumpy, dour, humorless person that bad things happen to. Which leaves two possibilities. Either he is a limited actor, and has just learned this one shtick well, and is really a bright, jovial character at barbecue parties, or he is that character in real life and not acting at all.
Whichever. I’ll still watch movies with him in them because they are often good movies – great Hollywood actors, apparently, enjoy working with him.
Funny story – back when I was studying journalism at a community college in the Southern California area about 20 years ago or so, I was dispatched to review the film “Beethoven,” about a family with a grumpy dad (Grodin) and a cute St. Bernard. I wrote an absolutely scathing review, saying something along the lines of “You’d have to have the mentality of a child to enjoy this film,” thus proving that, long before writing a daily blog, I had already developed a marvelous talent for completely missing the point.
But Charles Grodin really can’t act.
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