A penetrating, profound essay has long cried out to be written about Martin Scorsese, the director critics say made the greatest film of the last decade. This is not that essay.
In 1972, Martin Scorsese directed a film called Boxcar Bertha, which ends with the hero getting crucified. In 1988, Martin Scorsese directed a film called The Last Temptation of Christ, which ends with the hero getting crucified. In 1973, Martin Scorsese directed a movie with Robert De Niro called Mean Streets, which depicts two small-time hoods growing up in Little Italy. In 1990 he will release a film with Robert De Niro called Good Fellas, which depicts two small-time hoods growing up in Little Italy. Styles, budgets, and Harvey Keitel may come and go, but some things stay the same.
There's been a lot of talk about Martin Scorsese lately, not only because he has a new film in the can, but because the people who compile things like 10-worst, 10-best lists have deemed Raging Bull the greatest film of the 1980s. This is a bittersweet tribute to Scorsese, because Raging Bull was released in 1980 (meaning that the greatest film of the decade was made a decade ago), and the intervening 10 years have been a turbulent period for him, encompassing the catastrophic King of Comedy, the quirky After Hours, the financially remunerative but pointless Color of Money, the idiosyncratic Last Temptation of Christ, plus a couple of worthy smaller projects (Bad, Life Lessons from New York Stories). Scorsese has done some cracker-jack work in the 1980s, but not the kind that rivals Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, or Raging Bull. Maybe that's why he's going back to the old neighborhood.
Still only 48, Scorsese is widely thought to be the greatest American director of his generation, winning on points because Francis Ford Coppola's career is a mess, because Brian De Palma has shown us the bottom of his tiny bag of tricks, and because Woody Allen's small, egocentric films fail to address the problems of people living any further west than, say, Columbus Avenue. Another Scorsese contemporary, Steven Spielberg, has made quite a name--and an awful lot of money--for himself addressing bedrock American concerns (Are there 50-foot sharks in the water? Are there extraterrestrials in the garage?) before wandering off to turn great books into so-so movies. All of these people are at least as gifted as Scorsese, but Scorsese is the only one who keeps making powerful, attention-getting movies by remaining generally faithful to his gloomy vision of life. So he gets the ring.
Martin Scorsese has clawed his way to the top by portraying an endless collection of poor role models for our kids. (It should come as no great surprise that he started out working for Roger Corman and John Cassavetes.) The classic Scorsese protagonist is a jerk who, if he plays his cards right, might work his way up to being a schmuck. In Mean Streets, Charlie is a loser and Johnny Boy is a dope. Rupert Pupkin (The King of Comedy) is a schlemiel. Eddie Felson (The Color of Money) is a has-been. Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) is a psychopath. Jimmy Doyle (New York, New York) is a clown. Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull) is a neanderthal. Judas (The Last Temptation of Christ) is Judas. And Scorsese's Christ is a very, very reluctant messiah who has a 9-to-5 job making crucifixes and who would really rather not end up on one, if that could possibly be arranged. As for the women, don't ask.
Obsessed as he is with his galaxy of losers, Scorsese has had a problematic career. The critics loved Mean Streets, his first major-league outing, but audiences didn't, giving Harvey Keitel the first cruel intimations of the direction his career was heading in. After that came Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, a sort of big-screen "Rhoda," which some see as Scorsese's apology to the film industry, the money-making project that saved his career. (He still hasn't apologized to us.) Since that time, he's been in and out, making them big (Raging Bull) and small (Life Lessons), good (Taxi Driver) and bad (New York, New York), successful (The Color of Money) and not-so-successful (The King of Comedy), and he managed to make The Exterminating Angel Comes to Soho (After Hours). He's made three great movies, a couple of pretty good ones, three flawed experiments, a pair of interesting duds, and Alice, which flat out sucks. Grade: A-.
With rare exception, the asthmatic ex-seminarian has continued to dance with the one who brung him: schlubs, and the occasional goofball. Non-Robert Redford types. People you couldn't care less about unless Scorsese was telling you their story. Scorsese makes movies about the problems of troubled urban man, which explains why a lot of critics love his work, because film critics are, by and large, troubled urban men.
Though Scorsese's films may reflect the cinematographic influences of visionaries such as Godard, Antonioni, Pasolini, and the rest of that crew, the primary thematic influences are Little Italy, the Catholic Church, and the movies he saw as a kid when he was trying to avoid being suffocated by Little Italy and the Catholic Church. He is an eclectic, a fallen-away Catholic who went to film school, but he is no revolutionary. You want to be a revolutionary, you end up like Kenneth Anger.
Though on the surface it may seem that Scorsese has dipped into a number of genres (film noir, musicals, rock documentaries, romances, and even TV commercials), in reality he has been remarkably consistent in the way he makes movies and the types of movies he makes. If it worked once, Marty's credo seems to be, why not try it again? No, it is not unfair to Scorsese to say that he reworks familiar territory, sometimes because he wants to go back and get it right, sometimes because he probably doesn't even know he's doing it. Taxi Driver is at least partially about a man who wants to save a whore from herself, and so is Last Temptation. Raging Bull deals with a guy who doesn't mind taking a dive; ditto The Color of Money. Mean Streets profiles a hapless individual who, because he's been born into the wrong family, has an unappetizing career path cut out for him; same deal with Last Temptation.
Other similarities abound. The trick endings of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy are cut from the same cloth, cynical afterthoughts which seem to tell the audience: These guys are cruds, but you're idiots. When in doubt, Scorsese always goes to an overhead shot for dramatic effect. If something big is going to happen, look for the color red in a dress, a neon light, a film credit, or a blood vessel (Taxi Driver only got an "R"-rating after Scorsese agreed to tone down the color of the artery-red blood at the end of the film).
As noteworthy as the recurrent scenes, themes, colors, and shots are the consistently amazing soundtracks, the always impeccable work of Scorsese's screenwriters, and the omnipresent talents of De Niro and/or Keitel.
But the greatest constant in Scorsese films is the emphasis on relationships. Basically, Martin Scorsese makes buddy movies-- Keitel and De Niro, De Niro and Joe Pesci, Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel--where women are usually an inconvenience at best. When the women surface--they are often jailbait--they tend to form the third wedge of an uncomfortable triangle. Mean Streets centers on the relationship between Keitel and De Niro, with De Niro's epileptic cousin, Teresa, mucking things up. Taxi Driver has two triangles--De Niro, Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks, and De Niro, Keitel and Jodie Foster. The Color of Money has three competing characters-- Tom Cruise, Paul Newman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Alice has two triangles--Burstyn, Keitel and Keitel's wife, and Burstyn, Kristofferson and the kid. Raging Bull focuses on De Niro's suspicion that his brother has been screwing his wife. The King of Comedy revolves around De Niro and Sandra Bernhard vying for the affection of Jerry Lewis. In Last Temptation, Christ has two relationships: one with Judas, the other with Mary Magdalene. (There is a third, with God Himself, but He never appears on screen.)
Scorsese has been married four times, so he obviously has trouble with women. No, maybe they have trouble with him. It's worth remembering that Scorsese plays the thoroughly unappealing passenger in Taxi Driver who chit-chats with De Niro about blowing off his wife's face. After that scene, it's amazing that Scorsese has had four dates, let alone four marriages.
Given Scorsese's problems with the opposite sex and his falien-away Catholic background, it's hardly surprising that the women in his films, almost without exception, are virgins, goddesses or whores. The only exceptions are Liza Minnelli in New York, New York and Ellen Burstyn in Alice, and those are his two worst movies. The only Scorsese movie that ends with a solid relationship is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, where Burstyn, no looker, improbably gets to keep the ruggedly handsome Kristofferson.
As for kids, forget it: they're either absent, irrelevant, or abandoned. The only time kids intrude are in Alice, where Burstyn's coy geekling is a walking justification for child abuse, and Taxi Driver, where Jodie Foster plays a 12-year-old who takes it all ways. If the world had to depend on Martin Scorsese's characters to repopulate the world, mankind would be extinct in one generation. This is not what you would expect from a Roman Catholic Italian-American. But, of course, Scorsese went to NYU in the '60s.
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 manqués 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.