Latter Day Saint

An interesting fate: Martin Scorsese, whose career-long love-and-hate struggle with the Hollywood studio game is deservedly the stuff of legend, has finally reached the Promised Land of commercial impunity and critical immunity just as his films have largely shed their individual ambition. There’s a knee-jerk cynical connection waiting to be drawn there, the half-validity of which I’ll get to in a moment, but even as my direct interest in the old man’s latest works has increasingly waned, my fascination with them as Event Films has only deepened. At this point, I’m equally interested in looking at our reactions to Scorsese films as the films themselves, as his cross-fertilization of awards-bait banality and genre-steeped cinephilia is poking us in a very interesting place.

Gangs of New York, for example, remains a most intriguing failure, which is about the most polite thing I can say about it. Scorsese threw himself headfirst into the eternally tricky game of historical filmmaking, and to my mind, came up empty (at best) every step of the way. His depiction of American religion was superficial and inert, his take on the bloody political transitions of the 1860s felt pandering and simplistic, and his visual and physical re-creation of his beloved city’s past stood out both garish and cheap, putting me in mind of an over-ambitious high school play (or, more relevantly to modern Hollywood, an over-faithful comic book adaptation). Above all, the film’s hammered-upon connections to 9/11 were tenuous, forced, substance-free, and more than a little insulting, especially given Spike Lee’s utterly committed, utterly faithful, and utterly successful 25^th Hour that same year. Yet there’s something about Scorsese’s stubborn, catastrophic ambition, his undeniable panache for artfully loaded mise-en-scène, and his excavation (however clumsily) of a deeply embarrassing and easily forgotten time and place in American history that reminded me of what drew me to his films in the first place.

The critical community at large reflected a similarly confused unease. The film’s historicism and connections to modernity were faintly praised, but most reviews quickly honed in on the safest elements of Scorsese’s deranged spectacle: the fastidious design, Daniel Day-Lewis’ camera-magnet performance, and, of course, Marty (Still) Hearts NY. The film was dutifully nominated for Best Picture, but unlike Goodfellas or Raging Bull, nobody expected it to win, pulled passionately for it to do so, or was enraged when it didn’t. Gangs of New York seemed both more and less than what had been expected, and nobody was sure what to do with it; this isn’t the mark of a great, or even passable, film, but it did mark Scorsese out as a still-interesting, if not still-vital, figure in American film culture.

Indeed, the man was rapidly becoming larger than his movies, a trend which overtook The Aviator entirely. Scorsese’s filmmaking-as-OCD metaphor made for an instant talking point, and again, an excuse to talk about Scorsese’s career in facile macro terms. Ludicrous Citizen Kane comparisons were made early and often (because Marty loves old movies, doncha know), and older critics went into endless spasms of delight over Cate-playing-Kate (younger critics decrying Hollywood’s Broadway-style self-cannibalization were few and far between). Aviator remains a prime example of the growth of self-referential Hollywood hype machines. The film hadn’t even been released before writers were breathlessly wondering if this would be the one to deliver Marty his Lifetime Achievement Award Oscar, while the Academy, of course, increasingly takes its cues from that same overeager buzz. Certainly, there was more than a little retconning flop-sweat in the unanimous praise offered Scorsese’s (dull, fanboyish) biopic; as the director’s older masterpieces were increasingly being canonized as such, the Academy, among others, was almost explicitly looking to make up for lost time before the old man died on us.

As I said, it’s easy to argue that the Academy, et al only fully opened their doors to Scorsese when he started playing by their rules and letting his art suffer in the process. It’s also partially correct, as hinted at by his paint-by-numbers scripts and his films’ politics, alternately awkwardly forefronted and dangerously subsumed (the lack of attention paid to The Aviator’s Rove-ready conservatism remains a staggering critical gaffe). Still, I’m suspicious of any argument that casts Scorsese and the studios in rigid opposition. Like peer John Carpenter (now there’s a fun juxtaposition) he’s often spoken wistfully of his admiration for the studio-savvy directors of the ‘40s (Ford, Hawks, Hitchcock) and has always demonstrated willingness, even eagerness, to work within popcorn context. Keep in mind that the superficially auterist theories used to set Marty against Oscar are descended from the work of the Bazin acolytes (and Nouvelle Vague directors worshipped by a young Martin Scorsese) who filled the pages of Cahiers du Cinema with radical defenses of…Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock. Skip forward to the ‘90s, and Cahiers scribe and medium-shattering filmmaker Olivier Assayas is leading the charge to artistically recoup Clint Eastwood, whose superb drama Million Dollar Baby, unimpeded by studio pressure, would go on to upset The Aviator at the 77^th Academy Awards.

Such are the feverishly creative confusions upon which Martin Scorsese has made his career, which is why “cross-fertilization” seemed to me an apt descriptor of his contemporary studio-flicks-cum-passion-projects. If his filmography poses questions about the relationship between passionate artists and bottom-line studios, there are (as usual for that relationship) no easy answers to be found. Besides which, the aforementioned flattening trend among studios, critics, and awards ceremonies over the last decade is bigger than any one director, as 2010’s horrifyingly communal cheerleading of mediocre-to-awful American products (Inception, Black Swan, The Kids Are All Right) demonstrated. Ultimately, The Aviator’s soporific success has more in common with Dances With Wolves, the po-faced snoozer that beat out Goodfellas for the Academy’s top prize, than with anything in Scorsese’s oeuvre.

I’ve talked a lot about The Departed on this blog and elsewhere, which is odd given that it’s a rather unsurprising film that I mildly enjoy. Such is the fascinating and maddening nature of the triangulation among an aging, nostalgic Scorsese, an adoring public including both lifelong fans and curious relative newcomers, and the fungibility of the films themselves. What The Departed is (a superbly edited, otherwise unremarkable crime flick) isn’t nearly as interesting to me as what it represents: a remake of a Hong Kong blockbuster that nicked its aesthetic from Hollywood in the first place, a stodgily mounted genre entry that still reeled in younger audiences who’d seen Pulp Fiction before Goodfellas, an almost ideologically generic box-office smash that nonetheless rode the vapor trails of its director’s signature obsessions. The Departed, in its genesis mythos as much as its guns and Catholic crosses, is perhaps the definitive modern film product, almost grim in its determination to deliver a good time, squeezing the world and its medium dry to do so, and only barely succeeding.

Yes, it’s his best feature since Casino, but what’s the competition? Bringing Out the Dead? More importantly, notice how much it took to drag a decent film out of latter-day Scorsese: a framework on loan from Asia on loan from younger Scorsese, a script stuffed with as many rapid-fire quips and as much “local color” (the go-to critical buzzword for the recent slew of Boston crime flicks) as possible, a cast list overflowing with fame and testosterone, and a Sisyphean effort by longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker (who earned her Oscar far more than the director) to tie the whole damn thing together, all for a final product I’m comfortable giving a B- to, and then watching Inside Man for the 25^th time instead. There’s simply too much loaded on to The Departed, by filmmakers and fans alike, and the flimsy, work-a-day material can’t hold it. Which is a shame, because unlike his prior two features, The Departed’s ambition is more mechanical than theoretical, and as Saturday-night male genre porn, it holds up just fine. But neither I nor the Academy can nudge the film from out of the maker’s shadow. Witness his old buddies Spielberg, Coppola, and Lucas handing Marty his Best Picture trophy, and his knowingly self-deprecating acceptance speech. The Departed had just few enough flaws, and faced just little enough competition, to hop the fence. Not exactly cathartic.

Which brings me, finally, to Shutter Island, which I saw nine months ago but have resisted writing about until the wave of popular reaction had long passed the film by. And so it has: Shutter Island, being the most genre-specific, least awards-ready, and (to my mind) most representative of its maker’s unmistakable headspace among the recent pack, offers significantly fewer overarching talking points than its predecessors. The critical reaction has been muted and split, resembling more Gangs confusion than Aviator/Departed rapture—which didn’t stop Shutter Island from becoming the highest-grossing Scorsese film ever. Of course, his first three Leo vehicles had accomplished the same feat, indicating that the director has finally achieved that coveted Spielberg status: whatever else they do, his movies will keep making money, and keep allowing him to make the next one and make it the way he wants to. That last point is a particular coup. Scorsese’s name is so ingrained in generations of moviegoers and movie-lovers that the notion that, at the onset of the 21^st century, he still had significant careerist terrain to conquer may sound absurd, but his story is full of disappointments, compromises, and films that simply aren’t his. His venerable reputation among critics, cinephiles, and especially fellow filmmakers has been cemented since Goodfellas (if not sooner), but not until Shutter Island outlasted The Departed was his stability as a commercial warhorse truly tested and fully established.

I can’t begrudge him this success, especially as I’ve yet to fully sort out my feelings about Shutter Island itself, as confounding a mediocre film as I’ve ever seen. And it is mediocre, make no mistake: ludicrously untenable in its narrative twists and turns, laughably histrionic in its pacing and constant, breathless upping of its wholly internalized stakes, while simultaneously (yet again) dubious in its period-piece absorption of history (including arguably the most unnecessary Holocaust divergence in recent memory, which is seriously saying something). Still, I find it easier to forgive “more! MORE! Flashbacks and HUAC and the hydrogen bomb!” than “whatever, just hit the 4/4 and don’t waste the producer’s money.” Ferocious, giddy pulp, even if largely unsuccessful, is vastly preferable to the sort of ham-handed, cool-hearted genre trash that seems to be all Hollywood can come up with lately.

I’ve somehow managed to get this far without talking specifically about genre, and that’s as silly as Shutter’s anagrammed climax. Scorsese doesn’t just “work within” or “wrestle with” film genre, he loves it, deeply and excitedly; this unabashed geekdom, as explicated in his documentaries My Voyage to Italy and A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, is arguably more central to his legacy than stunted gunplay or conflicted Catholicism. (Just ask Quentin Tarantino.) Shutter Island is fully fermented in its maker’s adoration of the hardboiled pulp flicks made in the 1950s, the decade Shutter can’t escape. As such, the film never comes close to establishing a distinctive identity, but I still enjoyed the experience of watching it unfold far more than Gangs or Aviator, if not as much as The Departed. Scorsese’s latest genre fixations (horror and period thriller) are rooted in the sensorial rather than the pseudo-intellectual (Gangs) or familiarly emotional (Aviator); as such, Shutter Island “just works” in a way those others didn’t. It’s difficult to argue with a jump or a flinch, and Shutter delivers plenty of both. It’s also hard not to admire the loving visual flairs (rusty, dangling manacles, rain lashing furiously against patterned windows, a still-lit cigarette on the edge of a cliff) and the Robbie Robertson-curated score, but even Shutter’s most acute pleasures are never grounded the way the generic and political are intertwined in Polanski’s masterful The Ghost Writer.

Scorsese’s film is the sort of half-competent drivel best enjoyed with a wandering mind, letting the eyes drift to the corner of every shot and doing one’s best to ignore the nonsense being spouted and visualized up-front. Lord knows I love watching masterful craft applied to B-movie aesthetics—my alltime favorite filmmaker is Brian de Palma, who could’ve taught his old pal Scorsese a thing or two about how to make this particular movie. (Remember The Fury? C’mon, let’s go watch it. Haha, John Cassavetes is exploding, awesome! Rewind!) Although Shutter Island as a whole betrays a director running seriously low on ideas, the (relative) lack of self-seriousness here is undeniably refreshing. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can give it: Shutter Island may be the first Scorsese picture in over a decade not to be nominated for Best Picture.

The great irony here is that Martin Scorsese, a richly experienced cinephile whose aged perspective could hold many lessons for young filmmakers, appears to have embraced the worst aspects of many young filmmakers: unfiltered reverence for complex subjects, overstuffed mise-en-scène that reflects carelessness as much as obvious talent, tasteless politics, too many punchlines (of various kinds), and most painful of all in relation to Scorsese, a banal, overly stagey treatment of star performers. Decades distant, the Scorsese-DeNiro project stands as the most fruitful director-actor collaboration in film history. What’s to be said about Marty-Leo? Not much, beyond the self-duplicating aura of spectacle.

It’s that sense of a navel-gazing industry and artist that I keep returning to, as Scorsese’s constant teasing out of film-as-commercial-industry, film-as-genre-storytelling, and film-as-personal-project has stopped leading to soul-shaking cinema unlike anything before it and started leading to movies so schizoid and self-reflexive that they barely exist on their own, in ways both fascinating and deadly boring. Spread himself thin, losing his touch; pick your cliché, and then wrestle with the fact that Marty’s more successful at the box office than ever. Again, this isn’t a case of a simple binary between critics and audiences, or between hardcore and casual fans. This is a case of a truly strange artist becoming a little less strange, and thereby becoming something even stranger, practically unique in our time—with the exception, again, of Spielberg. Again like Spielberg, Scorsese has become a brand while keeping the personal and (perhaps more importantly) ever-evolving nature of his work alive. Even as I increasingly appreciate Scorsese more as a social phenomenon than a vibrant artist, and even as I stop enjoying putting my money towards his next seat-filler, I’ll keep showing up to watch.

Three Voices

"It was tribute, just like in the old country, except they were doing it here in America."

An experiment: try watching the first 15 minutes of Goodfellas with the sound off. Those lush colors, those expertly coordinated pans, those impossibly graceful cuts spanning days, months, years...it's suddenly the film I always wanted it to be. Goodfellas was the first Scorsese film I actively sought out once my timidly burgeoning cinephilia pushed me in the old master's direction. The film's M.O., as I understood it, intrigued me: a gangster film focused on a lifelong sprawl rather than a rigid vertical arc, built around the mid-level careerist types rather than the tortured self-examination of the bosses (The Godfather) or the fireworks antics of the street rats (Christ, take your pick). All that and Joe Pesci--how could this fail to be the best movie ever?

I know, of course, that it is exactly that for many people. But Goodfellas dies for me the second the camera freezes on Ray Liotta's blank schmuck face and his grating, flat voice stumbles into the movie. It proceeds to stick around for the next two and a half hours, saying dumb, clumsy, and hilariously unnecessary things, distracting from and gutting the (increasingly threadbare) film playing out underneath it.

It would only perpetuate my boredom to list this all of the voiceover's particular sins against the film's momentum and mise-en-scene, and I'd rather ask: why does it exist? Certainly nothing happens in Goodfellas that requires overt explication. There's no confused perspective or opportunity for ironic contrast. A voiceover can become an essential element of an unforgettable aesthetic; Terrence Malick has wrung as much passion and Edenic tragedy out of off-camera monologues as he has out of montages of trees. Yet the voiceover is still more often a crutch, adding ill-fitting omniscience, distracting from a film's visual lyricism, and reducing that which should be mysterious, ambiguous, or playful to dull narration. I'd argue that Goodfellas is guilty of all of the above. But if Liotta's VO is a crutch, what is it a crutch for?

Take a look at the DVD cover (or what have you). That's Liotta simpering on the left; that's Robert de Niro, arms folded and badass, in the center. Watch the credits. Liotta's name follows De Niro's. Return to Scorsese's early masterstrokes, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Unlike Goodfellas, they're stark and unsparing in their depictions of their protagonists' frustrated brutality. What saves them from becoming mere exercises in ugliness is the blinding charisma of the man at the center of both--and that man is Robert de Niro, for all that he brilliantly disappears into Travis Bickle and Jake LaMotta. With his irreducible grace, the flashes of warmth and humor and unshakable intelligence in his eyes, de Niro pretty much single-handedly saved the classic cinematic tough guy from kitschy irrelevance, and took him to places more mean, twisted, and hopelessly sad than he'd ever imagined possible.

So, of course, he couldn't be the mouthpiece for Goodfellas. Henry Hill's delirious arc requires an avatar of insinuating stupidity, a stumbling wannabe who falls into murder and coke without a hint of reflection. Naturally, Ray Liotta couldn't even pull that off. His featherweight performance only makes that dead-weight voiceover worse, underscoring his utter unworthiness of the spotlight. De Niro is given the greater weight, voiceover duties shift more and more frequently to Lorraine Bracco, and every attempt is made to emphasize how non-individualist this story is. It's about a family, a pattern, an eternally translatable arc. It's the sturdy old American Dream, taken to its proper position. It's the "old country," but now it's "America:" the ultimate personal-tribal-universal conflation. The voiceover ties those ideas together, binding Hill's perspective to the accepted gangster template while keeping Liotta's character transparent enough that anyone in the audience can imagine themselves saying those lines.

I call bullshit. This film, supposedly about a specific group in a specific time and place, goes out of its way to avoid alienating any of its audience, and so avoids the specificity of drugs, character, and, yeah, ethnicity. Scorsese adequately conveys the lifestyle's addictive nature, but he never comes close to approaching Scarface's compelling/cautionary cocaine-as-aesthetic, even in the scenes involving, uh, cocaine. Italian heritage is converted to hastily assembled good-ol'-boy American-ness, until the Jewish characters are made to seem more alien to this country than the gangsters. Perhaps the film's greatest disappointment lies in that incongruously leading name: De Niro just phones this one in, trotting out greaseball cliches without the slightest hint of his usual rueful self-deprecation, let alone ruthless self-critique. Far from reveling in Scorsese's intimate memories of the time (as is the usual interpretation), Goodfellas takes every opportunity to smooth the mob out and make it palatable. This isn't a case of cutting away from blood--that would hardly please audiences. This is a case of cutting away from humans worth watching and thinking about. The voiceover serves as a reminder of what a weak facsimile the film hangs on, and what a slapdash job the filmmakers did covering that emptiness up.





"I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me."

Jack Nicholson's dry monologue launches The Departed straight into Goodfellas territory. Jack's cackling mob boss is a cracked kaleidoscope of potential loyalties, carrying with him ambiguous relationships to the church, Irish pride, American dominance, and his own uneasy ur-father status. He's the obvious locus point for all the film's zany, speedy plot loops, and the only one who ever seems to have the time to wittily comment on the sheer anarchic madness exploding all around. Giving him a voiceover might make narrative sense. That is, if The Departed were interested in narrative sense, or ethnicity, or religion or America or fatherhood, or anything at all, really.

If Goodfellas (along with its immediate predecessor, The Last Temptation of Christ) marked the beginning of Scorsese's attempts to fuse his signature individualist focus with explicit explorations of collectivity and real history, The Departed finds him gently mocking his own seriousness. In the sixteen years in between the two films, he certainly gave himself plenty to mock. The Age of Innocence was a total misfire, mired in groaner period fetishes and far too humble in the face of its Wharton source material (Scorsese being accustomed to biographies of assholes, after all). Kundun was resplendent in red and yellow, thanks to the always-gorgeous work of cinematographer Roger Deakins, but Scorsese was again too polite, focused on translating the Dalai Lama legend (in English, durrr) for us wiseguy American dumbasses while letting his searching humanity lapse. When the new millennium dawned, he turned to Leo DiCaprio for rejuvenation, but his new obeisance to stale context grabbed him by the ankle. Gangs of New York was a self-righteous mess of laughable "history", losing Leo completely in a stew of clumsy, half-thought ambition with all the craft and gravity of a high school theater production. Sadly, The Aviator proved that individualist focus would work no better as long as Scorsese remained lost in nostalgia, this time for the old Hollywood his early films provided an energizing antidote to.

Leo does his best, but it's becoming unmistakably clear that he and Scorsese will never quite have the same synergistic spark the director had with DeNiro, that perfect fusion of ambition and specificity that makes character studies larger than life. The Departed, easily the most successful of Scorsese's new wave, cheerfully dodges that nuanced characterization. Context remains, but it becomes "context," elements randomly tossed in and juggled for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of it all: dubious accents, random ethnic slurs, phrases like "lace-curtain motherfucker" that sound utterly delightful--and delightfully meaningless--when spat out by a never-better Mark Wahlberg. Substance gets sacrificed along the way, and the film becomes forgettable even as you're watching it, but it's the best Scorsese's likely to produce from the corner he's backed himself into (as the dead-end Shutter Island recently demonstrated), and it ably serves up loving, if empty, fun calories.

Jack drops the voiceover after that opening yarn, and the film promptly drops the issues he waves so tantalizingly before us. Scorsese's just having fun here, with all fun's attendant cell phone drama. The voiceover's just another tool in his box now, something to drop into the mix so "Gimme Shelter" doesn't get lonely. Hey, there are worse fates.




"They...cannot...touch...her..."

But there are better ones, too. Taxi Driver establishes its sinuous subjectivity as quickly as Goodfellas exposes its personal-collective fusion and The Departed builds and destroys its red-herring ambitions. While those two, however, use the voiceover as a launching pad for their towering narratives, Taxi Driver first establishes its groundbreaking aesthetic (flashing eyes, blurry lights, an eternally shifting score) and sets up its voiceover to act as counterpoint. Travis Bickle lavishes desperate praise on Betsy, and the camera seems to confirm it, drawing her out of the anonymous crowd as someone finally worthy of individual attention. Then Travis' speech slows, and he struggles every word out. Cut to the would-be philosopher scribbling laboriously in his diary, his controlling gaze and authorial flair undercut by his human limits--one of which is catastrophic mythologizing, of himself and others.

Several scenes later, Betsy shows Scorsese's hand: "A walking contradiction. You are that." Travis, of course, focuses on protesting that he's not a pusher. That's the tragedy of Taxi Driver: even sadder than Travis' relentless, futile search for a philosophy to call his own is his seeming unawareness of his own rootlessness. The contrast between what we hear and see of him clue us in to the disconnect. He raggedly admits to not following music, movies, or politics, but clings to his increasingly vague voiceover rants against the "scum" and the "filth" of the city streets. Here's a man...here's a man...here's a man who would not take it any more. Just before he introduces Betsy to the narrative, he admits that he has to "try to become a person like other people," but his attempts at doing so, all centered around women stronger than he is, are unqualified disasters. Travis' voiceover both humanizes this weirdo and clashes with his story, leaving Taxi Driver a fragmented, exhilarating trip both around and through a pathologically slippery psyche.

More simply put, it's a mess; but The Departed's mess was one of creative and cultural chaos, a jumble happily devoid of a frame beyond the even more convoluted storyline of its Hong Kong source material. Travis Bickle is a carefully curated shamble, running up hard against the world outside himself. That world, one of urban decay and bleak post-Watergate politics, resonates as very real, but is never as hermetic or self-satisfied as Goodfellas' memory machine--there's no comfortable wiseguy to hold our collective hand and include us in his banter. The world is perceived only via the chameleon protagonist's perspective, and we quickly come to understand it through his tortured eyes: confusing, forbidding, both faintly nauseating and casually, heartbreakingly beautiful. His voiceover, then, compartmentalizes his reactions, distilling Travis' desperate bravado and his need to craft his own polemic. But he can't even match "We Are The People," and by the end of the film, he's sunk into wordless violence, and thereafter into pure fantasy.

That last post-massacre sequence has, of course, been the subject of much debate. I side with those naming it a fantasy as a matter of course--the whole film is practically hallucinogenic in its loyalty to Travis' perspective and, more crucially, his inflated imagination, and it only makes sense that after his traumatic catharsis, his angry, unfocused id would take full control. I'm more interested in the film's last use of voiceover, which doesn't belong to Travis. It belongs to Iris' father, thanking Travis for rescuing his daughter and praising the taxi driver to the heavens. As we hear his narrated letter, the camera pans along a series of newspaper articles declaring Travis a hero. For the first time in the film, the internal polemic matches the fractured reality. So maybe I'm cruel, but that's what convinces me of this scene's complete unreality. The voiceover in Taxi Driver is both more revealing and more simplified than what's seen on screen, exposing Travis, but only in terms of the lies he tells himself. The cinematic voiceover at its worst is pure excess and laziness, either drowning the film in overly staged artifice or revealing the material as tragically underwritten. At its best, though, the voiceover is a careful balancing act of realities and points of view, and while Scorsese would go on to abuse it and gleefully desecrate it, he never employed it with more careful grace than in Taxi Driver, still his finest film.