Martin Scorsese: The Lonely Raging Bull

Obviously, Scorsese makes disturbing, violent films, but one reassuring element is how grubby and unglamorous he can make it all seem. Unlike Coppola, whose violent scenes have a Machiavellian quality, or De Palma, whose films invariably degenerate into macabre bloodpits, Scorsese has always depicted violence as an untidy mess. The goofy fist fight in the pool hall in Mean Streets, where the camera goes careening around the room chasing a bunch of unathletic dimwits as they try to uncork a decent swing, is a far cry from the stage-managed, choreographed fistfights for which Hollywood is famous. The same is true of Keitel's ferocious explosion in Alice, the chaotic denouement in Taxi Driver, and even the ungainly Sandra Bernhard's deliriously idiotic pursuit of the spastic Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy. The only film in which Scorsese's characters are not graceless and clumsy is New York, New York, his aimless hymn to movies that aren't anything like his own.

The apotheosis of all this mayhem are the two crucifixion scenes in Last Temptation. In the first, when Christ the cross-maker helps crucify a condemned man, Scorsese shows that back in the good old days in Galilee, crucifying people was just a job like any other, so watch out for the spurting blood. In the second, Scorsese wants to show that Christ's crucifixion was no big deal-- no epic pageantry, no Cecil B. De Mille stuff, but just something the Romans did on some back street when they got pissed off at somebody and had a few spare planks lying around. There is never, ever death with dignity in the world of Martin Scorsese. There's just death.

Despite all the unpleasantness in his films, Scorsese is one of the great cut-ups of all time. Woody Allen may be the comedian-turned-filmmaker, but for my money, some of the funniest jokes in the history of cinema are in Scorsese's films. For starters, the scene in Mean Streets where the hoods manqu&#233s from Riverdale ask the two trainee wise guys if they accept checks. And it's a hoot when Cybill Shepherd has to hail a cab to escape from De Niro's nutty-as-a-fruitcake taxi cab driver in Taxi Driver. Finally, for real connoisseurs of mirth, how about Bickle's request for detailed information about becoming a Secret Service agent? And for a good running gag, try this on: In Alice, the fight between the kid and Kris Kristofferson erupts because the teenager can't stand Kristofferson's shit-kicking music. In the very next film, Taxi Driver, Cybill Shepherd asks De Niro if he is familiar with the lyrics from a song by the Krisser. "Who's that?" asks Bickle. De Niro subsequently is seen purchasing a Kris Kristofferson record. De Niro/Bickle buying a Kris Kristofferson album? Where, Neptune?

But Scorsese was also in top form in The Last Waltz when he chose to reject some five hours of footage featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and Van Morrison and instead retain Neil Diamond's where-the-hell-did-that-come-from? lounge lizard act. Toss in the bizarre moment when Neil Young, looking like Keith Richards on a bad day, staggers onto the stage in a semi-coma and sings, appropriately enough, Helpless, Helpless, while backstage, Young's former girlfriend, Joni Mitchell, impersonates the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concealed in silhouette so no one has to gaze directly at her. Is this hitting below the belt or what?

Joni also takes a shot in After Hours when the divine Teri Garr, with her trademark home-fried zaniness, puts Last Train to Clarksville on the turntable while the menaced, bewildered Griffin Dunne quite justifiably sinks into a torpor of despair. When Dunne explains his gloom by announcing that he has just found Rosanna Arquette's corpse, Garr takes off the Monkees, puts on Mitchell's Chelsea Morning (the film is set in Soho) and asks politely, "There, is that better?" Marty, Marty.

Like others before him, Scorsese has found that film is a delightful medium for rewriting history until it comes out the way you like it. The grand example is Last Temptation, which depicts Christ as a somewhat wimpy, confused, diffident guy who's really turned on by Mary Magdalene. That certainly isn't the way Scriptures record it, but in making the story this way, Scorsese has succeeded in doing what every fallen-away Catholic schoolboy has always dreamed of doing: getting back at the nuns. They don't get to make movies.

Revisionism is also at work in Raging Bull, which sanitizes the legend of boxer Jake LaMotta. LaMotta, truth to tell, is not remembered by boxing aficionados because he took the title from Edith Piaf's doomed loverboy, Marcel Cerdan, but because he took a dive for the Mob so he could later get a shot at the title. The fact is, LaMotta is not spoken of by boxing fans in the same breath as Sugar Ray Robinson, whom he beat once, but got pounded by several times. It's worth noting that Sylvester Stallone and Scorsese have both made movies depicting white fighters as tough hombres that legendary boxers Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson wanted no parts of. Of course, that's bullshit; Ah and Robinson ate these guys alive. The only place white fighters ever beat black fighters is in Hollywood.

There is also a congenial brand of revisionism in The Last Waltz, Scorsese's brilliant 1978 documentary about The Band's farewell concert in 1976. Looking at this film today, and not knowing a whole lot about the 1970s, a viewer might get the impression that The Band were as big as, say, the Beatles. Well, they were never as big as Whitesnake. They were, in fact, the world's greatest backup band, a quaint, eclectic, funny little outfit who used balalaikas and fiddles and sang the kind of offbeat songs that Bon Jovi doesn't cover. Who else but The Band would give a farewell concert and then invite a half-dozen superstars to come over and upstage them?

In The Last Waltz, Scorsese, who seems like a congenial fellow, tried to jump-start the mercifully brief acting career of his friend and subsequent collaborator Robbie Robertson by putting him on center stage in a series of up-close-and-personal interviews. The result is a bug-eyed Robertson, who, as we would subsequently find out in Cainy, has no real cinematic appeal, sounding like a white, "thirty something" Blind Lemon Jefferson, with Scorsese feeding him big, fat 45 mph hanging curve questions right down the middle of the plate. (The two would atone for their offenses in the uproariously vicious This Is Spinal Tap, where Scorsese is brutally parodied by Rob Reiner.) None of this changes the fact that The Last Waltz is a terrific movie.

Nobody working today can start a movie with more of a jolt than Scorsese. From the majestic opening credits of Raging Bull to the big yellow taxi opening of Taxi Driver, Scorsese knows how to get his hooks into an audience, and keep them there for a good, long while. But the openings sometimes write a check that the rest of the film can't cash. De Niro's schtick to Minnelli at the beginning of New York, New York is the high point of the film, and in many other cases Scorsese's films seem overly long and languid, as if the middle is just filler between the TNT at the beginning and the nitroglycerine at the end. He also seems to have trouble bringing down the curtain, often because he wants more than he's entitled to. A lot of people feel that the surprise ending of Taxi Driver, where the murderous Travis Bickle becomes a hero, pushes the envelope. The Color of Money is another film flawed by a disappointing and ambiguous ending. This film cries out for Tom Cruise to kick Paul Newman's ass, but instead, Scorsese takes a page out of Stallone's book, and leaves the issue undecided, creating the possibility that an outclassed has-been could perhaps whip the top gun, suggesting that we might even see a sequel to what is already a sequel. The movie did get Scorsese a nice deal with Disney, so learning all that stuff about hustling may have paid off.

Given Scorsese's problems with endplay, Nikos Kazantzakis's controversial finale in Last Temptation was just what the doctor ordered. Here, the audience is teased with a bogus ending in which Christ comes down from the cross, marries, has a family, and lives out his career in middle-class serenity, before the real ending takes place, with Christ crawling back up on the cross and redeeming mankind. The ending also has Scorsese reiterating the fundamental misogyny in Kazantzakis's worldview: that given a choice between a wife, kids, and a house in the country, men would still rather be crucified.

Like the rest of the film school squad, Scorsese is forever quoting from the movies that influenced him. Thus, scenes from The Wizard of Oz or Citizen Kane or Roger Corman's horror flicks pop up all over the place. The result is movies that are as much about other movies as they are movies themselves. Sometimes that comes in handy; if you need to make a dramatic exit from a flick, what better way than having Robert De Niro play Jake LaMotta impersonating Marlon Brando playing Terry Malloy?

Okay, it works in Raging Bull, but this obsessive post-modern repackaging of other people's work--the quotes, the parodies, the appropriations, the use of inside jokes that only 37 other people in the whole universe are going to get--doesn't make the films any better. Nobody's going to come to see The Last Temptation of Christ because you used the same set-ups as Roberto Rossellini. This whole thing about film school inside jokes is a tad annoying coming from a guy who ruthlessly eviscerates Soho bohos for being part of a cabal.

Anyway, about Marty's place in history. Is he a great director, like Renoir, Fellini, Hitchcock, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard? Well, let's be careful about how we use the term "great." Dan Marino is a great quarterback; he's just not as great as Joe Montana. Scorsese is in the same boat: He's not one of the all-time greats, because there aren't enough colors in his palette, there aren't enough gears in his gear box. No, he's more like the American Chabrol, a maker of lurid, disturbing films, or like Herzog, a colorful eccentric. They, like Scorsese, need lots of gimmicks to make it work, and when in trouble always resort to pyrotechnics. But Chabrol and Herzog are still pretty fast company.

Scorsese himself does not seem ready for enshrinement in the pantheon; as he remarks in Scorsese on Scorsese: "I think all the great studio filmmakers are dead or no longer working. I don't put myself, my friends, and other contemporary filmmakers in their category. I just see us doing some work."

Yeah, but it's some pretty good work, isn't it? It's a personal vision, and it may not be a huge one, and it may be too much about one city, and one class, and even one ethnic group, but it's still probably the biggest we've got right now. Scorsese is a filmmaker who makes reasonably commercial, accessible films that always seem like they got started in his head, not in somebody's market research department. They're brutal and they're disturbing, but they're never stupid, condescending or trendy, and they always make you leave the theater knowing you've spent a couple of hours in the presence of somebody who knows what the hell he's doing. If we had 10 more directors like him, we'd be living in a Golden Age. But we don't, and we ain't.

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Joe Queenan writes for Spy, Rolling Stone, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal. He wrote Movieline's February cover story on Keanu Reeves.

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