The casino is a place of high-energy fun. With music blaring, champagne glasses clinking and people trying their luck at games like poker or roulette, the place is always buzzing. It’s a place where people come to let off some steam, and the thrill of not knowing what their fortune will be means they are never bored.
As a business, casinos make lots of money. But, unlike hit movies or hot consumer products, they can only keep that success going for a while. Then someone comes along with a newer, fancier, closer or just different casino. In addition, they are competing with non-gambling resorts, on-line gambling and an illegal gambling market that is far larger than their legal operations.
But the movie is still an entertaining gangster flick, and it has some bravura set pieces as well as a memorable performance by Sharon Stone as scheming mobster Nicky Santoro. While De Niro and Joe Pesci are very good here, it’s Stone who really carries the movie.
Like the detective novel that emerged in the gap between confident Victoriannism and epistemologically uncertain Modernism, Casino reflects the tensions between old and new ways of understanding our world. The old ways are represented by gangsters and unions, while big business is antiseptically displacing them. The film is thus both a nostalgic fable and a cautionary tale. Casino reaches its peak in the ’80s, but it has a timeless quality because the dynamics are still very much at play.