|
A Personal Journey: The Films of Martin Scorsese
"My whole life has been movies and religion. That's it. Nothing else."
Part 3: 1991 - 2005
Cape Fear (1991)
by Ari
Cape Fear represents something unusual for Scorsese, a departure from his realistic and personal works to something purely escapist, a classically made mainstream Hollywood thriller that allows him to demonstrate his abilities in genre filmmaking. Scorsese occasionally dabbles in commercial fare in order to gain more creative freedom for his personal films, and while they may be lesser contributions from a master filmmaker, the results are still more effective than the majority of predictable mainstream releases. This is certainly the case with Cape Fear, a tense and unnerving remake of the 1962 thriller starring Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck (who each have small supporting roles in the remake).
Scorsese displays a natural ease for suspense. Cape Fear isn’t the most complex or thematically engaging of film’s, but because Scorsese understands this, he uses his cinematic tools of visuals and editing to increase tension while directing Robert De Niro to one of his most menacing performances. De Niro’s cruelty and malice is genuinely upsetting, and Scorsese uses it to get beneath your skin and disturb you relentlessly. Watching Cape Fear all these years past its theatrical release, I was surprised at how much has changed for the worse in mainstream thrillers. This film is exceptionally intense - an edgy and disturbing escape into cinematic malice that leaves you irritated and angry, the exact emotions it means to provoke. Not many genre pictures convey that sense of raw emotion in today’s mostly uninspired commercial horror fare, making Cape Fear seem even more particularly skillful and sharp. This is a highly effective Martin Scorsese commercial experiment that manages to fit nicely in a filmography comprised of mostly personal and singular works.
Robert De Niro is Max Cady, a psychopath released from prison after a 14 year rape sentence who plans to exact revenge on his former defense lawyer Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) and his family. Jessica Lange is Nolte’s wife and Juliette Lewis their daughter, all targets of De Niro’s malicious and repulsive intents. The formulaic version of this scenario would involve the usual slasher/killer/psychopath frights, with lots of running, screaming, and gore. But because Scorsese knows better, his Cape Fear is an even more psychologically twisted thriller than its original incarnation, where threat and manipulation terrorize the family and audience. De Niro’s sly plotting is naturally aggravating, and witnessing each stage of it unfold successfully increases your level of discomfort. Cady tortures Bowden and his family for most of the film without ever resorting to violence, waiting for the precise moment when his final acts of vengeance will be released. His main goal is to instill an unbearable fear within his enemy, and he does exactly that much to our dismay. Watching everything slowly unfold becomes a terrific example of pure suspense filmmaking, with Scorsese in full command of his viewers. The film’s best sequence is its most disturbing - Cady’s sinister use of charm to seduce Juliette Lewis’ naive young teenager. There’s a sexual perversity boiling underneath the conversation that makes it almost too upsetting to withstand. Watching Nolte’s lawyer decompose into a spiteful, helpless man who abandons every lawful oath he took is just as provoking.
Besides Scorsese’s expert craft, De Niro and Nolte give tremendous performances. De Niro’s work is one of his most memorable, a devious and unsettling embodiment of cinematic evil. His Max Cady is a worthy follow-up to his Bickle or Pupkin, another great descent into darkness with director Scorsese.
A rousing entertainment.
The Age of Innocence (1993)
by Anna Pulley
Martin Scorsese is a master of portraying New York’s seedy underbelly, from pre-teen prostitutes to Mafiosos to blue-collar workers, but in The Age of Innocence, Scorsese ventures out of his usual territory as a director and co-screenwriter in this lavish tale of unrequited passion and unrelenting politeness. Scorsese himself described The Age of Innocence as his “most violent film,” only in 1870s aristocratic society, the “violence” is that of emotional restraint and well-bred snobbery. Unlike typical Scorsese films, The Age of Innocence is a sluggishly-paced period piece, perhaps to convey the leisurely sort of existence enjoyed by New York’s social elite.
What frustrated me about Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which the film was based on, was namely how much attention was paid to describing the furniture in each of her characters’ surroundings. The film version of The Age of Innocence spares the viewers such details, (hurrah!) even though there is a female narrator, whom one pictures as Edith Wharton herself, filling in the details of the novel that couldn’t be captured visually. I have to admit that I have a masochistic fascination with the Victorian era—the lavish outfits, gossip mongering and eroticism bursting with every invitation to tea. The problem with Victorian literature and film is that nothing EVER happens. They tease you into spending 139 minutes hoping for a scandal of inestimable proportions to emerge from all the talk talk talking and the deep sighing and bodice clutching. But, it seldom does. The sex lies in the interpretation, which is frustrating enough to make any voyeur a little cranky. Viewers must be content to enjoy the lush scenery, the sweeping single-takes, opulent costumes, and the fervid almost-touches of the two wannabe adulterers, Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) and the Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer). And indeed the story is devastating—for Ellen and especially Newland, whose upbringing renders him the ultimate victim of social convention. Even at the end of the film, after May has long since passed away and he has the chance to meet with Ellen in Paris, Newland decides to walk away instead of betraying his stringent ideals of obligation and duty to embrace the only thing that ever made him feel alive.
Ironically titled, The Age of Innocence is a world devoted to denying its hypocrisy at the same time that it engages in its own subversion. May, for example, displays all the pretenses of a young female socialite, pretending to be ignorant about Newland’s work and dealings with Ellen. Her comments, gestures and timing, however, indicate an exactitude of insight and intelligence. She knows precisely how to maneuver the labyrinth of social sumptuousness to her advantage and she proves this time and again. When Newland first discovers his feelings for Ellen, he rushes to May and tries to hasten their wedding. May immediately becomes suspicious and asks if there is another woman he has fallen for. Then, later in the film, Newland comes up with a story about a court case that he must tend to in Boston in order to see Ellen. May sees through the fraudulence of his case by reciting court details that she pretended to be too ignorant to understand the night before. And lastly, May tells Ellen of her pregnancy at the precise moment when Ellen and Newland are to consummate their desires, effectively squelching their plans and causing Ellen to abruptly return to her abusive husband in Europe, never to see Newland again. May’s hypothetical innocence is also illustrated through Scorsese’s trademark use of slow-motion entrances, white outfits and angelic lighting for his female protagonists.
Taking a slight detour, but keeping with the spirit of treachery embodied by The Age of Innocence, I’d like to add my own little gossipy footnote about Edith Wharton—she had a scandalous affair herself, which led to her divorce and was perhaps the reason she spent her remaining years in France, far from prying Old New York eyes. The passionate love-making of her new lover was well-documented in her journals, but unfortunately nowhere to be found in The Age of Innocence. The chaise-lounges, however, were divine!
Casino (1995)
by Scott
Scorsese's overlong, wildly ambitious depiction of Vegas in the 1970s means well. There is a lot to like here, but for all of its cinematic bravura and technical excellence, Casino still feels somewhat like a lesser Scorsese film. Perhaps it only feels this way because there are quite a few similarities to Goodfellas (a more superior film). From the almost excessive (yet effective) use of multiple voice-over narrations, period-specific pop music, and the almost non-stop camera movement, there are plenty of echoes of the filmmaker's past looks at crime, greed, and corruption.
The performances are top notch all around. Robert DeNiro does what he does best as casino manager Sam "Ace" Rothstein. It's not nearly as groundbreaking as his work in previous collaborations with Marty, but it's solid work nonetheless. The same can be said for Joe Pesci. It's almost as if this is the film in which the two of them sealed their destiny to be typecast in similar roles. I'm not saying this to diminish either of them, but they're just so good at these types of characters. Sharon Stone hams it up as far as she can go, but it works for the character.
Where Casino really works best is in its first hour and it's final 20-30 minutes. The time spent in the Tangiers provides some of the most interesting moments in the film. Seeing the way that Ace and his crew catch cheaters and cut down the winnings of high rollers is far more exciting to me than watching Sharon Stone shouting obscenities in a cocaine induced rage. Also, the multiple narrations work best here, allowing the viewer to come away with various viewpoints on the chaos. When the film finally makes its way to the end, the demise of each character is heartbreaking and painful to watch, despite how despicable they all are. Even though Rothstein survives the car bombing, there is still an air of bittersweet melancholy to how his story winds up. He's still a gambler and he's still wealthy, but now he's aging, alone, and wearing hideously large sunglasses. His description of Vegas's eventual descent into "Disneyland" cheesiness is quite memorable as well.
Even when the film doesn't quite work, there is still fantastic direction. A lesser Scorsese film is still better than the best film by a mediocre director. Anytime one decides to make a three hour film, they had better make sure it is worth the time. As far as Casino is concerned, I would have to say that too much time is spent dealing with the three main characters stabbing each other in the back and yelling at each other over and over again. All in all, it isn't a poor film in any regard, but will always end up playing second fiddle to Goodfellas in my book.
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)
by Ari
Martin Scorsese’s contributions to film extend beyond his invaluable body of fictional narratives. Scorsese is simply one of the most important voices in the preservation of classic films and their historical significance. His knowledge and insight into the many facets of filmmaking is immeasurable, matched only by his enthusiasm and determination to have cinema respected as the vital artistic expression it is. Scorsese lives for movies, and his passion is infectious. A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies is exactly what the title promises, a nearly four-hour exploration into the historic cinematic achievements that shaped his creative sensibilities and passion for filmmaking. As Scorsese makes clear, he can only discuss the American movies that influenced him personally, and a great many of them there were. A Personal Journey is a fascinating, exhausting, invigorating, and plain entertaining examination into the evolution of American cinema from the silent era to the late 60’s, a wondrous love-letter from Martin Scorsese to a selection of his favorite filmmakers and their accomplishments.
Scorsese separates his three-part examination into subsections, some about specific genres, others about the development and role of the director. Scorsese discusses gangster films, musicals, noirs, and westerns (among others) while delving into the complexity of the director’s job to express his or her vision. Sections include “The Director as the Illusionist”, “The Director as Smuggler” and “The Director as the Iconoclast”, with Scorsese providing potent examples of the many abilities and difficulties great filmmakers face in order to successfully realize their dreams. Between Scorsese’s narration are interviews with such icons as Billy Wilder, Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood, George Lucas, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola, along with archival interviews with such masters as Frank Capra, Sam Fuller, John Cassavetes, and Orson Welles. It doesn’t get any more diverse and insightful as this. Most enjoyable about Scorsese’s narration is his passion towards the movies that moved him most. Hearing him discuss the overt sexuality and hot, intense imagery of Duel in the Sun, or the incendiary thematic force of Kiss Me Deadly, or his praise for Vincente Minnelli and The Bad and the Beautiful. Even better is seeing footage from The Great Train Robbery and noticing similar imagery to his masterpiece, Goodfellas. Listening to his dissertation of the gangster film, from the wildly violent Scarface (1932) to the sympathetic, tragic nature of The Roaring Twenties. Scorsese approaches these films with a feeling of urgency. These works are pivotal, and Scorsese makes sure you understand it. Val Lewton and Cecil B. DeMille, Allan Dwan and King Vidor - Scorsese wants you to know and appreciate these filmmakers. He is the absolute best guide to the movies, and listening to his expert knowledge is truly humbling.
When his Personal Journey approaches the four-hour mark, Scorsese smiles and concludes, knowing full well his audience is thirsty for more, and that he’d love nothing more than to continue.
Kundun (1997)
by Lons
Many of Scorsese's films center on the intersection of religion and human nature, how our conception of ourselves and what we stand for collide with the realities of who we are and what we do in order to survive in a corrupt and corrupting world. Usually, the protagonists are informed by Scorsese's own religion, Catholicism, like Harvey Keitel's Francis of Assisi-obsessed hoodlum in Mean Streets, which makes Kundun, a biography of the 14th and current Dalai Lama, something of a departure for the director, at least in terms of geography and culture.
Like The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun looks at the inner conflict between human desire and divine aspiration by focusing on an individual human who combines the sacred and the earthly. Last Temptation was controversial in its day, in part, for suggesting that Jesus, the human embodiment of God on Earth, would have had human thoughts, feelings and, yes, temptations. The Dalai Lama, the reincarnation of the Buddha in human form, is commonly understood to be a man, so the film's perspective is not equally transgressive.
However, unlike Jesus of Nazareth, the Dalai Lama is not only a spiritual leader but also a head of state, the secular leader of the nation of Tibet. This presents some entirely separate and fascinating conflicts. Though he must live a quiet life of introspection and meditation, the Dalai Lama must also concern himself with affairs of state and diplomacy. Though the life of a monk is solitary and carefully considered, a leader must come to know his people and work towards what is best for the majority. A Chinese general informs Kundun that the army of Chairman Mao has come to liberate the people of Tibet from the tyranny of the imperialists. Kundun reponds by playing on the meaning of the word, switching from the political to the spiritual - "You cannot liberate me, General. I can only liberate myself."
Throughout the mesmerizing, lyrical film, Scorsese will return to this central conflict again and again. Buddhism teaches that life is suffering, that there is no escape from the suffering save the freeing spiritual enlightenment that comes with meditation and compassion. But for the Dalai Lama, this escape cannot come. Just as his spirit will die and then return to Earth so long as there is life, in order to teach and uplift others, so the 14th Dalai Lama will spend his life shuttling between the silent introspection of the monastery and the frenzied conflict of the outside world. (He's initially identified as Dalai Lama by recognizing what items he owned in a previous life, not by his personality or his memory of actual events. This embodies the notion of a man split between this world and the next.)
The first half of Scorsese's film, made up largely of musical sequences and ceremonies with minimal dialogue, relates the discovery of the 14th Dalai Lama in a remote village and his education in Lhasa, Tibet's capital city. For Kundun, even his birth is political. (Another monk asserts that his birth near the Chinese-Tibetan border is a message that the Buddha claims the entire land of Tibet as his own, re-establishing the boundaries of his homeland).
Scorsese and screenwriter Melissa Matheson take the Buddhist religion at face value, neither insisting on the verifiable truth of these rituals and dogmas nor rejecting them outright. Perhaps this young child, who certainly seems to have some kind of odd memory of past lives and possesses a knowing, old sort of soul, really is a reincarnation of a dead religious leader. Or perhaps he is some child who will now be educated and groomed into a much-needed icon. What matters more than the unprovable mythology is the importance he will have for the people of Tibet, who see the Dalai Lama as a tangible representation of their nation itself.
As Kundun retreats to a monastery on the border with India, monks pour out, blocking his caravan, begging him not to leave the country. It's as if they fear Tibet will cease to exist should the Dalai Lama step across its border. Other shots of Kundun superimposed over Tibet's mountains, lakes and cities further implies his sacred connection to the land itself, another indication that he's not meant for the human life of an entirely mortal man.
The second half becomes more plot-driven, as Kundun comes of age and immediately becomes embroiled in Tibet's fight for independence against the aggressive Chinese Communists. (Kundun is played by different actors at different ages, with Tenzin Thuthb Tsarong as the adult Kundun for the second hour of the film.) Mao (Robert Lin) sees Tibet as little more than a source for resources, supplies and labor. He professes great respect for the Buddhist religion (assuring Kundun that he was raised on a simple farm and his mother was a strict Buddhist), and a trusting Dalai Lama initially comes to trust the man at his word. He even tells his mother that Buddhism and socialism seem to have much in common, particularly a respect for the downtrodden and impoversihed.
Of course, Tibet is soon betrayed, leading to bombing raids, massacres in the villages and eventually the Dalai Lama's mandated exile to India that ends the film. The real turning point comes when Kundun meets with Chairman Mao face-to-face, and the Chinese dictator tells him that "religion is poison." For the first time, he sees that these people mean to do him harm, that they have been lying to his face when they declare noble intentions to help Tibet. It's a hard reality for him to face, as the Dalai Lama detests lying almost as much as he detests violence. (Late in the film, a Chinese general invites him to a party where it's plainly obvious an assassination attempt will be made. Kundun lies to get out of the invitation, and immediately feels guilty.)
Scorsese switches styles dramatically in the two halves. The opening, with Roger Deakins' sun-drenched cinematography draped in deep reds and golds, presents Tibet as a land of peaceful serenity. Kind-faced old men in robes perform ancient, mystical ceremonies in candle-lit temples, surrounded by finely-woven draperies and all manner of baroque artifacts. Scorsese takes his time and really infuses the film with Tibetan dance, music and culture. (His use of mainly amateur Tibetan actors highlights the natural realism of these sequences.) Frequent point-of-view shots from the perspective of Kundun as a child show him taking in all the spectacle and wisdom of his religion, first learning the rituals and philosophies that he will enact later for the benefit of others.
One scene finds Kundun meditating in a small chamber with several other, adult monks. They are all lost in thought, but their child ruler grows bored. He notices a mouse drinking from a ceremonial cup filled with water, resting at the bottom of a huge gold statue of the Buddha's smiling face. Once more, he's pulled from the otherworldly realm of the mind and back into the world of life, where nothing can be kept pure or sacred for very long.
In the second half, this elegaic calm is interrupted by warfare. The colors get muted, the music gets louder and the editing more jumpy and intense. The point of view shots now show us Kundun's violent nightmares, in which he sees his countrymen slaughtered by foreign raiders. In one of the film's boldest and most haunting images, Kundun sees himself standing amidst hundreds of corpses, dead monks still dressed in their familiar red and gold robes. He has become truly divided within himself - between fleeing the country for his safety and remaining behind with his people, between his appreciation for the culture and people of the West and his neccessary distrust of outsiders, between his love of life and of the people around him and the expectation that he will sacrifice everything to save his country. In short, between being a man and being the Divine's representative on Earth, that essential Scorsese conflict.
The final 15 minutes, a nearly-wordless montage of Kundun leaving Tibet on horseback in disguise, reuses all the film's central imagery to express the monk's pain and sorrow at leaving his homeland. He removes pebbles from the intricate sand paintings within his temple and scatters them into a river. He curls up to sleep on the floor of modest huts, remembering how deeply he slept on the floor of his childhood home. He passes through villages and listens to the sound of the local musicians for the last time. At the border, he takes one last look at the snow whipping around the mountaintops before turning around and leaving his country forever. The film may move more slowly than some of Scorsese's other films, and may lack some of the raw, naked honesty of Taxi Driver or King of Comedy, but these final moments carry with them a melancholy emotional resonance that's, if not unique, at least rare among his films.
My Voyage to Italy (1999)
by Yuki
An all-embracing mix of autobiography, documentary, and close film analysis, Martin Scorsese's "My Voyage to Italy" takes the viewer through the Italian movies that affected him growing up in an immigrant community. In the prelude to the bulk of the film, Scorsese returns to his neighborhood in New York to describe his childhood memories watching Italian movies on television with family and friends, of whom the older generations were deeply moved by images of their war-torn homeland. He splices in footage of the neighborhood of that era along with old family movies and some arresting film clips from "Open City" and "The Bicycle Thief," which he later returns to. In doing so, he effectively converts the disperse influences in his life – the personal, historical, and artistic – into the singular visual language of film; a sort of collage-like map of his development as an artist. The interest of this work is in the intimacy of Scorsese's analysis, and as the title suggests, this documentary is not only about the films, but also the process by his own identity was shaped. Through examination of the great Italian directors Fellini, Rossellini, Antonioni, De Sica, and Visconti, Scorsese comes to a better understanding of himself in relation to his Italian heritage, which must have felt distant and inaccessible at times. These films acted as a vehicle through which Scorsese could communicate with the older generations in his family, and with his heritage.
His extensive analyses can become a bit pedantic at points, and this work is probably best watched in installments rather than in one sitting. Though they maintain a personal quality, I sometimes felt as though I were in a lecture hall, due in part to the matter-of-fact quality of Scorsese's dry, raspy voice perpetually linking the visual image to meaning in each clip. Mainly, however, I found his commentary engrossing and enlightening, stopping to comment on little details, on the movement of a skirt, or the impact of negative space in Antonioni. His analysis is heartfelt and thorough, and the fact that he has taken the time to give these films a new voice and pass them on to younger generations is a moving testament to his deep regard for the art of filmmaking. And there are plenty of moments where he lets the film speak for itself, like a clip from Rossellini's "The Flowers of St. Francis," where the compassionate monk Francesco comes across a leper walking in a sunny field of flowers. The scene is silent except for the soft jingle of a bell worn by the leper, and Francesco tries to take his hand, then embrace him in an act of compassion. The unaffected leper gently pulls away and walks on, and Francesco collapses in tears in the field.
All of the films Scorsese chooses, with the exception perhaps of Fellini's 8 1/2, are grounded in the historical circumstances of postwar Italy, and this is perhaps the lynchpin of the work. The narrative themes that grew out of Italy's rubble were in direct reaction to the devastation the country had suffered, and Scorsese in adamant that we be made aware of the conditions these filmmakers were working in. It was a period of vast physical and moral devastation. Without the same resources enjoyed by Hollywood, Italian directors turned to the street for their characters and sets, and gave up the conventional, plot-bound narratives for more organic character-driven themes and creating a whole new genre known as Neo-Realism. This new drama dug deep into the essence of humanity by plunging it in the depths of loss, and Scorsese picks up on this theme in every film. The implication being that all film, and for that matter all art, should hold human nature up to a close lens.
Certainly an enjoyable watch for any Scorsese fans, and a rich resource for anyone concerned with the art of storytelling.
Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
by Anna Pulley
Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage) is a jaded, hackneyed ambulance driver who works the graveyard shift in Hell’s Kitchen. The psychological impact and frenetic lifestyle of being an EMS has finally taken its toll on Frank, who hasn’t saved a person’s life in months. The sunken-cheeked, bleary-eyed Frank is haunted by the ghosts of people he did not save, particularly a teenaged girl named Rose, whose silhouette appears on numerous street corners and in the faces of passersby. Each dispatch (which comes from Scorsese and Queen Latifah on a two-way radio) leads Frank further and further into the depths of poverty and desolation.
The stasis of Frank’s life is paradoxically embodied by unrelenting motion. He hardly sleeps or eats, instead subsisting on booze, bantering with his fellow ambulance partners, whose doses of crazy increase with each day and each new partner, and dealings with Mary (Patricia Arquette), an ex-junky whose father Frank helped resuscitate but remains comatose. Mary and Frank complement each other’s hapless voids and urgent needs for redemption, but their fulfillment gets swallowed up by the high velocity rage of the film’s cracked-out, neon-light-screaming “Open All Night” mise-en-scene. Scorsese’s maniacal intensity is supplemented by bursts of dark hilarity, particularly by Ving Rhames, whose evangelical tirades and sexual asides are deliciously entertaining.
Frank romanticizes his job, believing that saving a life is “like falling in love” and garners a sense of entitlement and power from each person he successfully revives. In the three days the film tracks Frank’s movements, however, Frank is struggling with the overwhelming sense of powerlessness that comes from bringing out the dead night after night in the decadent squalor of New York’s ghettoized neighborhoods. Increasingly desperate as each day progresses, Frank begins to play a kind of Angel of Death role, offering suicide instruction, participating in the beating of the mostly harmless street menace Noel (Marc Anthony), and taking Mary’s father off life support. The power Frank once felt from saving lives is restored by taking lives away.
Before that, though, Frank does successfully save two people: Mary from the drug house, albeit against her will, and Cy (Cliff Curtis), the drug dealer who’s impaled on the railing of a balcony after trying to jump to his death. With resounding Catholic overtones, Frank holds Cy’s head while he is being rescued from the balcony, pieta-style and comforts him. This is paralleled later in the film also with Mary, who consoles Frank in the aftermath of all that has occurred since they met. This is one of the few instances where Frank is completely at rest during the two hours of Scorsese’s stylized, video game-esque, nocturnal frenzy. While one gets the sense that Frank’s relief will be short-lived, there is a resemblance of hope that echoes in the final scene, where the ghosts of New York are momentarily brought to rest.
Gangs of New York (2002)
by Lons
Aside from Italian heritage, Martin Scorsese and Sergio Leone have a lot in common. Uncommonly intelligent, natural filmmakers, their movies tell intimate, personal stories against sweeping, epic, historical backdrops. The movies create a world of beauty and meance, recognizing that a human story must fill in the moments between battles, romance and breathtaking scenery, but not overly focused on anything so mundane as taut storytelling.
Of course, Scorsese's oft-maligned "Gangs of New York" works better as a spirited historical tableau than a nail-biting revenge thriller or period melodrama. This much seems obvious. And yet, so much that works about the film, from the brutal poetry of Daniel Day-Lewis' performance to the gorgeous sets of Dante Ferretti to the graceful cinematography of Michael Balhaus to screenwriter Jay Cocks' remarkable ear for colorful 19th century dialogue, gets lost in the common criticisms.
On one level, "Gangs of New York" recreates the New York of the Civil War era, a tightly-clustered budding metropolis simmering with economic, social and racial tension. Whenever Scorsese's not piecing together the film's ramshackle plot, he's focused on the everyday struggles that have come to define life in the slums known as "The Five Points." The Nativists (led by Bill the Butcher, inhabited more than performed by Day-Lewis) attack the Irish immigrants, the "foreign hordes" who apparently threaten those Americans "born rightwise to this good land." Politicians, particularly Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent in another terrific, charmingly villainous turn), deliberate on how best to exploit and subjugate the poor. Pickpockets and thieves (like Diaz's streetwise Jenny) invade the homes of the wealthy dressed as maids to make off with expensive trinkets. There's even competing fire departments, rushing to the scene of a fresh blaze moments apart and then fighting in the street over who will extinguish the increasingly out-of-control inferno.
Like Henry Hill in "Goodfellas," Ace Rothstein in "Casino" or any number of other Scorsese protagonists, Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) descends into a world of violent struggle he can't really begin to understand. As in these films, Scorsese spends his time fostering a strong sense of community. These films don't exist in the standard character vacuum of mainstream American film, where only those characters who directly influence the plot are permitted into the ensemble. (Critic Roger Ebert calls this "the Law of Economy of Characters.")
Sometimes, characters are just around for texture, to make the Five Points richer and more detailed, and to give a sense for how life was lived in the New York of the past. An extended elegant tracking shot shows immigrants arriving in America, enlisting with the Union Army and boarding another boat to go fight in the war, an ideal visual metaphor for individuals caught up in the forceful movement of history.
In the film's much-discussed final act, the Draft Riots rather surprisingly intrude on the film's main storyline. Amsterdam and Bill meet for a final showdown (years before, Bill had murdered Amsterdam's father during a street fight), but their clash never gets to truly take place. Instead, ships anchored in the harbor rain cannonfire on them in hopes of quelling the insurrection and the scene becomes open-ended and chaotic. Speaking from a strictly narrative perspective, one could argue that Scorsese means to underline the shock and suddenness of the Draft Riots for his main characters. (Just as Amsterdam's closure is quickly and irritatingly interrupted, so we in the audience are denied our moment of catharsis at seeing the revenge angle paid off.)
But I don't really believe this to be the case. I think it's more like Scorsese simply grew tired of building towards the expected conclusion - the hero taking his revenge of the deserving foe - and wanted to focus more on the Draft Riots themselves, a significant, bloody and fascinating window into our history that's largely unknown to modern Americans. "We all know where this stuff is going," his slack build-up to the final battle royale seems to say. "How about I get this bit of business out of the way with some conveniently timed cannonballs and we get back to the real history?")
In particular, he depicts the racial tensions of the time, as whites use the riots as a context for lynching and attacking blacks. (Black people were seen as somehow "responsible" for the War against the South, but of course no genuine cause was needed for white-on-black violence in the mid 19th Century.)
In fact, some criticized "Gangs of New York" as racist for its frank and horrifying depiction of hate crimes and racially-motivated violence. Of course, Scorsese's intent couldn't be further off from promoting violence between whites and blacks, or anyone else. Instead, he's pointing out how that clash, along with all the other aforementioned struggles, defined the development of modern-day New York in millions of subtle ways. (Thankfully, the movie resists the urge to actually connect dots and indicate how these events would change history, leaving such theoretical concerns to the viewer alone.)
The last shot, in which historical New York morphs into the present-day version (complete with Twin Towers) hits on this theme too forcefully, and along with a woefully poor U2 song, threatens to undermine the potency of the film as a whole. But it just feels churlish to hold that sort of slight misstep against a film that's such an overall achievement, with moments as beautifully-rendered, powerful, droll and kinetic as anything in the Scorsese catalog.
The Aviator (2004)
by Yuki
Scorsese's epic about the rise and fall of director and aeronautic innovator Howard Hughes is true to its form: sweeping, majestic, emotionally satisfying, and with a nice, tragic arch. Being wholly ignorant of Howard's Hughes' life, I can't comment on the accuracy of the content, but as a film the work is hugely successful. It did however make me want to know more about him, (which is what any story based in truth ought to do) and I wondered why I hadn't known more of Hughes' significant contribution to aviation.
My main issue with the film is that even Scorsese could not completely save it from the same heavy-handed storytelling and lack of subtlety that has been infiltrating Hollywood of late. The beginning features some seriously unimaginative dialogue, particularly in the early scenes where Hughes' character is being overeagerly established in a series of throwaway lines designed to reveal his obstinate and obsessive nature. This dialogue is not suitable for DiCaprio (Hughes) whose physical acting, I have always felt, is basically flawless- he is one of those rare actors who is able to totally empathize with their character, but whose spoken language is somehow not on the same level of expression, as though his voice has never fully matured. In an early scene Hughes takes Katherine Hepburn (played by Cate Blanchett) in his airplane over L.A. It's a beautifully intimate scene, but marred with obtuse language. Kate notices that Hughes is using tissues to hold the plane's wheel:
Howard: "You never know what kind of crap people have on their hands."
Kate: "What kind of crap?"
Howard: "You don't want to know."
Is this really necessary in a film this long?
Or later, when Howard confesses his mental deterioration to Kate in another beautiful scene, she tells him not to worry; "You taught me how to fly Howard, I'll take the wheel," a reference to their airplane flight that she repeats later in the film, when Howard undergoes a mental meltdown. The metaphor ties the scenes together nicely and throws their relationship into relief, but it is just a bit too cheesy for such an otherwise finely wrought film.
Luckily there is plenty of wonderful distraction from the actors' words; swooning music drenches most of the picture, the sets and cinematography are breathtaking and vivid, and the many shots of crowds or parties are finely tuned and choreographed so as to flow nicely. The electric atmosphere of Hollywood at that time, with all its sordid and absurd traits, is palpable.
Another imprudent symptom of Hollywood these days is gratuitous celebrity casting. The cameos by Rufus Wainwright, and Gwen Stefani, though exciting, were also off-putting. Gwen Stefani, who makes a brief (thankfully) but glaring appearance as the bombshell Jean Harlow, looks like a pop-star making a cameo appearance in a high-profile movie by a high-profile director. I was only a little less disturbed by Jude Law and Willem Dafoe's tiny roles, whose fame (and great ability) inevitably overshadow their characters. One wonders why these roles weren't given to some unknown talents, who could have done both the role and the film more justice.
The one role where this actually happens is that of Faith Domergue, played by 22 year-old Kelly Garner, who gave a great performance in Larry Clark's disturbing film, "Bully." Faith is Hughes' neglected fifteen-year old lover who one night slams her car, crying and screaming into Hughes', while he and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) are sitting inside. Garner's scene is a burst of raw emotion in a world that is constantly covering it up.
Leonardo's portrayal of Hughes is commendable. The most convincing parts are oddly those of Hughes' crippling struggle with paranoia and OCD, rather than his moments of lucidity. As he starts to crumble, the music and editing becomes increasingly frenetic. Interior spaces, like the bathroom of the Cocoanut Grove, appear more grotesque, claustrophobic, and hallucinatory. We can sense his own horror and despair at seeing himself crumble.
The film does a wonderful job of focusing in on a figure whose life straddled so many bodies of influence: Hollywood, aviation, the media, the industrial military complex, and ultimately, the law-makers in congress. Scorsese gives appropriate weight to each of these, treating them with the same nuance as he would a character. You are never quite aware that so much is being incorporated into one story, which is truly an amazing feat. For me it was this all-encompassing perspective that was the most fascinating: that one man's passions were so entangled in the forces that run the world, even though he was the least capable of handling the pressures of inhabiting this world.
No Direction Home (2005)
by Lons
Scorsese really serves more as a conductor for this nearly 4-hour look at the early life of Bob Dylan than as a director. He's collected interviews, an immense amount of archival footage and old sound recordings and the works of other documentary filmmakers into an overwhelming experience, a movie not just about the greatest American songwriter of the last century, but about American history and mythology, what this country says it means and what it actually means.
And the soundtrack kicks ass.
What No Direction Home does isn't just re-tell this iconic fable of Dylan life but attempt to see through it, not just to "the man behind the myth" but what mattered about the myth in the first place. Through contemporary interviews with Dylan himself, we can start to see his process, his creation of the persona of "Bob Dylan" from the inside out.
Dylan talks about his feelings of being born in the wrong era, how he relates to old-time "roots" music better than anything he hears on the radio. (We're shown a clip of Bing Crosby brightly performing "Accentuate the Positive" as an indication of what a young Dylan rejected about popular music). He decides to leave home, that Minnesota has done all it can for him, and to never look back, to give up on the very idea of having a history. He wants to make music of the kind that inspired him, music which is all about living an individualistic, heroic and quintessentially American life, so he has to go out and live that life.
The conscious decision to take on this lifestyle, to make himself into a traveling troubadour purposefully as a persona, looms over all of Dylan's subsequent decisions in the film. Dylan no longer lives at a time when musicians commonly travel around the country listening to and playing folk music, yet he decides that this is who he wants to be and goes for it, unironically. This plays into some kind of archetypal romantic fantasy, the idea that a person can choose to live a certain way and then undergo some kind of radical transformation, to shift into this new persona they have just created, but part of what makes Dylan so fascinating is that he seems to have succeeded where so many others have failed. Unlike, say, Beck, who tries on various hats but always remains the likable, nerdy kid from Southern California, Dylan genuinely fashioned himself into a mysterious, shadowy and wise folk legend by sheer force of will.
Scorsese and Dylan are clearly aware of the hypocracy of their mission. They are here to carefully document the past, when so much of Dylan's ethos in his early years was a rejection of this kind of note-taking and analysis. In various inteviews with the press (particularly with the strange, desperate-for-intimacy and frequently baffled European press), Dylan pointedly refuses to look introspectively into his songs for "meaning." Usually, when someone wants some insight into his music or his personality, he turns their questions around on them.
"Do you think of yourself as a protest singer," a man will ask?
"Do you think of me that way?" Dylan parries.
And yet now, here we are, 40 years later, scanning this archival footage looking for...what? Meaning? But wasn't the whole point that the music was the meaning? That the songs were what mattered, and anything else Dylan had to say would pale in comparison?
Many, many more contradictions abound. That's really what the guy is all about, when you get right down to it. A moody eccentric genius who's also funny and incredibly charismatic. A writer of some of the most brilliant political songs ever written who denies caring at all about politics. Perhaps the most influential entertainer of his generation, yet he claims to feel like an outsider. A man who, at the peak of his fame and popularity in the mid-60's, was going on stage every night to thunderous cat calls and boos.
Scorsese spends a lot of time on the fan reaction to Dylan's famed switch from acoustic to electric guitar, and addition of a blues band to his live show. He interlaces footage of Dylan's infamous Albert Hall performance, where his set with the musicians who would become the legendary The Band was greeted with shocking negativity, throughout the entire film. Perhaps he sees this as Dylan's defining moment: his utter refusal to bow to the pressures of his fan community and his willingness to turn his back on his strongest supports in order to fulfill his own artistic goals.
Additionally, the film explores Dylan's sidelong involvement in the civil rights struggle, his often contentious relationships with other artists of his time, like Allen Ginsberg (who discusses his long-standing friendship with Dylan at length in an old interview), the Beatles, Johnny Cash and Andy Warhol, and even some of his odd personal ticks. When it's all over, you hardly have a complete picture of Bob Dylan, but you're probably about as close as anyone's going to get any time soon.
|
