Martin Scorsese
The first reviews of Martin Scorsese's Bringing
Out the Dead are the latest evidence of the director's status as a critical
favorite. This is not because the notices have been uniformly glowing--it's
been some time since a Scorsese picture won unanimous praise from
reviewers--but because Scorsese remains, almost uniquely among American
directors, an embodiment of the beleaguered idea that filmmaking, and therefore
film criticism, can be a serious, important, life-and-death matter. Here, for
instance, is Roger Ebert, all thumbs:
To look at Bringing Out the Dead --to look, indeed, at almost
any Scorsese film--is to be reminded that film can touch us urgently and
deeply. Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always
goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not
simply exercising it. He makes movies as well as they can be made.
Never? Always? This is pure ideology--which is not
to say that it isn't, to some extent, true. Even Scorsese's weaker films
bristle with energy and intelligence. But look closely at what Ebert says: To
be reminded of the power of film as a medium is not quite the same as being
moved by a particular film, and Bringing Out the Dead is, for all its
hectic pacing and breakneck intensity, an oddly unmoving experience. Yes, you
think, movies can touch us urgently and deeply. Why doesn't this one? If
Scorsese makes movies as well as they can be made, why does one so often feel
that his movies--especially over the last decade or so--could have been
better?
Above all, to look at
Bringing Out the Dead is to be reminded of a lot of other Scorsese
films. Critics have noted its similarities with Taxi Driver , Scorsese's
first collaboration with screenwriter Paul Schrader (who also wrote The Last
Temptation of Christ and the later drafts of Raging Bull ). Both
movies feature a disturbed outsider cruising the nightmarish,
as-yet-ungentrified streets of Manhattan in search of redemption. In place of
Sport, Harvey Keitel's suave, vicious pimp in the earlier film, Bringing Out
the Dead features Cy, a suave, vicious drug dealer played by Cliff Curtis.
The mood here is a good deal softer: The scabrous nihilism of Taxi
Driver is no longer as palatable--or, perhaps, as accurate in its response
to the flavor of the times or the mood of its creators--as it was in 1976.
Nicolas Cage's Frank Pierce saves Cy from a death as gruesome as the one De
Niro's Travis Bickle visited on Sport, and when Frank does take a life (in the
movie's best, most understated scene), it's an act of mercy.
Aside from these parallels and variations, there's plenty
in Bringing Out the Dead to remind you that you're watching a Scorsese
picture. There's voice-over narration. There's an eclectic, relentless rock 'n'
roll score and a directorial cameo--this time Scorsese provides the disembodied
voice of an ambulance dispatcher. There are jarring, anti-realist effects
embedded in an overall mise en scène of harsh verisimilitude. And, of
course, there is the obligatory religious imagery--the final frames present a
classic Pietà, with Patricia Arquette (whose character is named Mary) cradling
Cage, the man of sorrows, in her arms. To survey Scorsese's oeuvre is to
find such echoings and prefigurations in abundance. Look at Boxcar
Bertha , a throwaway piece of apprentice-work he made for schlock impresario
Roger Corman in the early '70s (if you've never seen it, imagine Bonnie and
Clyde remade as an episode of Kung Fu ), and then look at The Last
Temptation of Christ , the controversial, deeply personal rendering of Nikos
Kazantzakis' novel which infuriated some Christians a decade and a half later.
Different as they are, both films prominently feature 1) a crucifixion and 2)
Barbara Hershey naked.
Well, that may be a coincidence. But it's hard to
think of an active director who has produced such an emphatically
cross-referenced body of work who seems not so much to repeat himself (though
he does some of that) as to make movies by recombining a recognizable and
fairly stable set of narrative, thematic, and stylistic elements. In other
words, Scorsese is the last living incarnation of la politique des
auteurs.
That old
politique --the auteur theory, in plain English--was first articulated in
the 1950s by a group of French critics, many of whom went on to become, as
directors, fixtures of the Nouvelle Vague . In a nutshell, the
theory--brought to these shores in 1962 by Village Voice film critic
Andrew Sarris--held that, like any work of art, a film represents the vision of
an individual artist, almost always the director. The artists who populated the
auterist canon--Howard Hawks and John Ford, pre-eminently--had labored within
the constraints of the studio system. But even their lesser films, according to
auterist critics, could be distinguished from mere studio hackwork by the
reiteration of a unique cinematic vocabulary and by an implicit but
unmistakable sense of solitary genius in conflict with bureaucratic
philistinism.
The auteur theory was quickly challenged, most notably by
Pauline Kael, who shredded Sarris in the pages of Film Quarterly . But
the "new Hollywood" of the '70s--with Kael as its champion, scold, and
Cassandra--was dominated by young directors who attained, thanks to the
collapse of the old studios, an unprecedented degree of creative autonomy, and
who thought of themselves as artists. What resulted, as Peter Biskind shows in
his New Hollywood dish bible Easy Riders, Raging Bulls , was an epidemic
of megalomania, sexual libertinism, money-wasting, and drug abuse--as well as a
few dozen classics of American cinema.
The avatars of the New
Hollywood were mostly "movie brats"--socially maladroit, nerdy young men (and
they were, to a man, men) who shared a fervid, almost religious devotion to
cinema. Scorsese, a runty, asthmatic altar boy from New York City's Little
Italy who traded Catholic seminary for New York University film school, was
arguably the purest in his faith. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, or
Steven Spielberg, "St. Martin" (as Biskind calls him) did not see directing as
a route to world domination but as a priestly avocation, a set of spiritual
exercises embedded in technical problems. Scorsese's technical proficiency won
him some early breaks. While making Who's That Knocking at My Door , his
earnest, autobiographical first feature, independently, Scorsese was hired to
edit Woodstock into a coherent film. His success (more or less) led to
more rock 'n' roll editing assignments--a traveling sub-Woodstock "festival"
called Medicine Ball Caravan ; Elvis on Tour --and then to
Boxcar Bertha , which allowed him to join the Directors Guild and gave
him the chance to make Mean Streets . That movie helped launch the
careers of Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro, and taught generations of would-be
tough guys the meaning of the word "mook."
Kael called Mean Streets "a triumph of personal
film-making," and even though it may be the single most imitated movie of the
past 30 years--cf The Pope of Greenwich Village, State of Grace, Federal
Hill, Boyz N the Hood , etc.--it has lost remarkably little of its freshness
and power. Watching it, you feel that you are seeing real life on the screen,
but real life heightened and shaped by absolute artistic self-assurance. Or, to
quote Kael again, "Mean Streets never loses touch with the ordinary look
of things or with common experience. Rather, it puts us in closer touch with
the ordinary, the common, by turning a different light on them."
This kind of realism
marks Scorsese's next two films, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore --his
best piece of directing-for-hire, and one of the half-forgotten gems of the
period--and Taxi Driver , both of which were critically and commercially
successful. But the medium-budget, artisanal, personal filmmaking of the early
'70s soon gave way to grander visions. To be a New Hollywood director was to
flirt with hubris. Biskind's book, accordingly, concludes with a litany of
spectacular flameouts: Coppola's Apocalypse Now and One From the
Heart, Spielberg's 1941 , William Friedkin's Sorcerer, and, of
course, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate . According to Mardik Martin,
Scorsese's erstwhile writing partner (as quoted by Biskind): "The auteur theory
killed all these people. One or two films, the magazines told them they were
geniuses, that they could do anything. They went completely bananas. They
thought they were God." Scorsese's own Götterdämmerung came with New
York, New York , a hugely ambitious jazz epic starring De Niro and Liza
Minelli (Scorsese's mistress at the time), and the first of a series of flops
that continued with Raging Bull and The King of Comedy .
Of these three, Raging Bull has been singled out for
vindication. It's the highest-ranking of the three Scorsese films on the
American Film Institute's Top 100 list, and it's widely considered to be his
masterpiece. But it remains exceedingly hard to watch, not so much because of
the repulsiveness of De Niro's Jake La Motta as because of its overall sense of
aesthetic claustrophobia. It's a movie lacquered by its own self-importance, so
bloated with the ambition to achieve greatness that it can barely move. If it
convinces you it's a masterpiece, it does so by sheer brute force.
Raging Bull is
undone by its own perfectionism. New York, New York and The King of
Comedy stand up rather better, in my opinion, in spite of their obvious
flaws. (So does The Last Waltz , a documentary of the Band's last concert
done simultaneously with New York, New York , thanks to the magic of
cocaine.) For one thing, New York, New York is virtually the only
Scorsese movie (aside from "Life Lessons," his crackerjack contribution to the
Coppola-produced anthology film New York Stories ) to have at its center
the relationship between a man and a woman. For another, it ends with Liza
Minelli parading through a series of phantasmagoric stage sets singing a
pointedly ironic song called "Happy Endings"--a sequence every bit as dazzling
(and as mystifying) as the ballet from An American in Paris . Just as
Mean Streets is an unparalleled demonstration of the power of film to
convey reality, "Happy Endings" is a celebration of film's magical ability to
create it. A moviegoer's dream, but good luck seeing it on the big screen.
For its part, The King of Comedy , a creepy reprise
of Taxi Driver --played, this time, for laughs--is a movie made before
its time, back when celebrity-stalking was a piquant metaphor for our cultural
ills, rather than the focus of our cultural life. De Niro and Sandra Bernhard
kidnap Jerry Lewis (playing, brilliantly, a famous late-night talk show host),
Bernhard steals the movie, and the ending is guaranteed to provoke long,
excruciating arguments about the difference between fantasy and reality.
In Biskind's account of the tragedy of the New
Hollywood, Spielberg is the villain, Hal Ashby the martyr, and Scorsese the
scarred survivor. After the failures of the early '80s, he picked himself up
and made some more movies: the quirky, proto-Indie downtown comedy After
Hours , The Color of Money (a respectable sequel to The
Hustler ), and his long dreamed of The Last Temptation of Christ . His
fortunes revived with GoodFellas , which was hailed as a return to form,
and floundered again with The Age of Innocence , one of his periodic
attempts--like The Last Waltz , Temptation and, most recently,
Kundun --to defy expectation. Next came Casino, one of his
periodic attempts to defy the expectation that he would defy expectations.
Casino blends Raging
Bull with GoodFellas and can
be interpreted as a wry allegory of Hollywood in the '70s--a time when "guys
like us" (i.e., the free-lancing gangsters played by De Niro and Joe Pesci)
were allowed to run things without interference. Of course, they got too
greedy, screwed everything up, and the big corporations turned their playground
into Disneyland. At the end, De Niro's character, the scarred survivor, picks
himself up and goes back to work.
Scorsese keeps working too--upcoming projects
include Gangs of New York , with Leonardo DiCaprio, and a Dean Martin
biopic starring Tom Hanks. His extracurricular good works--overseeing the
re-release of classics such as El Cid and Belle de Jour ,
campaigning for film preservation, narrating a BBC documentary on his favorite
movies--are testament to his abiding faith. But his movies more often than not
feel cold and mechanical. They substitute intensity for emotion and give us
bombast when we want passion. Why do we go to the movies? Pauline Kael used to
say it was to be caught up, swept away, surfeited by sensation, and confronted
by reality. Some of us keep going to Scorsese's movies because we still want to
believe in that, and we leave wondering whether he still does.
