2010s, Auteurs, Biopic, Crime/Detective, Historical, Thriller

The Irishman (2019)

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aka I Heard You Paint Houses

Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter: Steven Zaillian

By Roderick Heath

And then, more time had passed than anyone realised, and suddenly things we thought perpetual are lost, and the age and its titans that stood in authority became another dusty annal.

The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese, now aged 77, stands self-evidently as a work both extending and encompassing a key portion of Scorsese’s legacy, his beloved and perpetually influential mafia movies. The Irishman reunites the director with three actors long connected with his cinema, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel, as well as bringing in a fresh young whippersnapper named Al Pacino. The sharp pang of recognised mortality inherent in The Irishman is given a special cruelty by the way Scorsese’s cinema has long seemed, even in its most contemplative and rarefied moods, like American virility incarnate. The clamour of New York streets, the whiplash effects of urban life’s furore and the human organism in contending with it, the buzz of an era bombarded with cinema and television and advertising, written into the textures of Scorsese’s famous alternations of filmic technique, whip-pans and racing dolly shots colliding with freeze-frames and languorous slow-motion: Scorsese’s aesthetic encephalograph. The Irishman has been described by many as a terminus for the gangster movie. That’s fair in some ways, dealing as it does with a basic and essential matter very often ignored in the genre, what happens when gangsters are lucky enough to get old and die, as well as simply recording a moment when a genre’s stars and a most esteemed creator are facing the end of the road, however distant still.

But of course, movies set amongst hoodlums and lowlifes are still pretty common, for Scorsese’s bastard artistic children are plentiful and likely to populate the cinematic landscape for a good while yet. What new tricks could the old dog still have to teach? The Irishman answers that question incidentally as it adapts a book by Charles Brandt, recounting the life story of Frank Sheeran. As biography it includes inarguable factual details, like the time Sheeran spent as a World War II soldier, truck driver, and Teamster official jailed for 13 years for racketeering, blended with assertions and conjecture about Sheeran’s involvement with organised crime, most vitally the claim he personally killed Jimmy Hoffa, the legendary former head of the Teamsters union, who vanished in 1975. The tales in Brandt’s book have been disputed, but the appeal to a filmmaker like Scorsese, over and above the inherent drama in such a story, lies in the way Sheeran claims to have grazed against the mechanics of power underlying American history in the mid-twentieth century, and indeed have been part of the mechanism, the finger that pulled triggers but never the levers. The Irishman becomes, amongst many achievements, a unified field theory in regards to the concerns of Hollywood’s New Wave filmmakers, wrestling with the waning memory of a certain age in political and social life, as well as that cinematic era.

And yet The Irishman is also a project that sees Scorsese negotiating with very contemporary aspects of the moviemaking scene, produced by online streaming giant Netflix and exploiting all the possibilities opened up by such a backer in making a film without compromise, and employing a cutting edge special effects technique, using digital processes to make his lead actors appear younger in sequences depicting their characters in their prime. It’s Scorsese’s longest film to date, a veritable epic in theme and scope even whilst essentially remaining an interpersonal story, arriving as a roughly hemispheric work. The first half, recounting Sheeran’s early encounters with the potentates of the underworld and evolution from scam-running truck driver to hitman and union boss, broadly reproduces the detail-obsessed and gregariously explanatory style of Scorsese’s previous based-on-fact mafia life tales, Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), if rendered in a much cooler, less compulsive manner. The second half mimics the processes of ageing, slowing down until finally reaching a point of impotent and stranded pathos, ticking off fate-making moments of choice and consequence, contending with the ultimate consequences and meanings of a man’s life actions.

If The Irishman’s tone and sense of mortal and moral irony suggests Scorsese’s tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975), the famous epigraph of which Scorsese reiterates in direct and pungent terms, the method is more reminiscent of Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Parts I & II (1944-58), as an expansive and surveying first portion sets up a second that proves a dark and immediate personal drama about power and betrayal. The Irishman’s narrative revolves around what seems initially a scarcely notable vignette, with Sheeran and his friend, associate, and boss Russell Bufalino (Pesci), a cool, wary potentate of the Philadelphia mob with great resources of invisible yet definite power, and their wives Irene Sheeran (Stephanie Kurtzuba) and Carrie Bufalino (Kathrine Narducci) striking out on a road trip on the way to attend the wedding of the daughter of Russell’s lawyer brother Bill (Ray Romano) in 1975. Sheeran’s voiceover narration readily concedes there’s a definite pretext to this trip, as Russell wants to collect various debts along the way. But the peculiarly pregnant, tense mood of the journey betrays something else in the offing, a hidden source of tension and expectation, and of course when it comes into focus the implications are terrible. The road trip accidentally doubles as a trip down memory lane, as they pass the scene where Sheeran and Russell first actually met, when Russell helped the young truck driver when he was pulled over with mechanical trouble, sparking an account of their adventures in racketeering.

The Irishman returns to a motif Scorsese touched on in Shutter Island (2010) in contemplating the mental landscape of the so-called greatest generation of servicemen returned from World War II, men playing at fitting into a suburban world whilst invested with the skills and reflexes of soldiers, all too aware, with niggling import, how thin the membrane between settled life and chaos can be. Sheeran recounts the pathetic details of shooting German POWs with nonchalance, an experience he describes as teaching him to simply accept life and death with an almost Buddhist indifference, only to make sure to be on the right end of the gun. This experience, at once brutalising and transfiguring, proves to have armed Sheeran with not just a skill set but a mindset as well, one that makes him useful to men like the Bufalinos and their associates, including Angelo Bruno (Keitel), and ‘Fat’ Tony Salerno (Domenick Lombardozzi). Sheeran gains his first contacts in the underworld via the lower-ranking Felix ‘Skinny Razor’ DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale), by letting him substitute the high-quality meat Sheeran transports for his restaurant. When a load of meat he’s carrying vanishes before he can steal it himself, Sheeran is prosecuted for the theft. Bill Bufalino successfully defends his case, although he gets sacked from his driving job. After proving himself adept at debt collecting for DiTullio, he gains a more definite connection to Russell and Angelo, who sit in mandarin judgement upon representatives of a tragically unwise world.

As in Goodfellas and Casino, Sheeran’s narrative expostulates the arts of gangsterdom in a succession of illustrative vignettes, as Sheeran begins to make himself reliable with his army-instilled smarts for sabotage and demolition, making him handy at wiping out rivals’ sources of income and power. Such gifts are illustrated in sequences touched with a sense of the ridiculous, as when Sheeran and some other mobsters try to wipe out an opponent’s taxi fleet by laboriously pushing all the cars into the harbour before Sheeran suggests less arduous means. When he’s hired by a laundry boss Whispers DiTullio (Paul Herman) to destroy a rival laundry only to be brought before Angelo who partly owns the rival, Sheeran is obligated to make amends and shoots Whispers in the face, kicking off his new career as a hitman, or, in coded parlance, a man who “paints houses” with blood. Some of the blackly comic hue Scorsese’s long been able to tease out of such grim situations manifests here as Sheeran notes the building arsenal of used weapons collecting on a river bottom under a bridge popular with folk in his line of work to toss away their used guns. Scorsese avoids the adrenalized fervour of his earlier films, however. For one thing, Frank Sheeran is a different creature to guys like Henry Hill or even Jordan Belfort, who delighted in their status as men apart, challenging law and fate with bravura even as they proved much less tough and canny than they wished to think. Sheeran rather fancies himself as a suburban husband and father with an unusual occupation: the circumstances that eventually make him a hitman stem from the need to feed his growing family.

Part of what made Scorsese’s canonical gangster films vibrant was the way they offered innately interesting prisms through which to encompass other, more quotidian things difficult to make popular movies about. Friendships, troubled marriages, domestic violence, gender roles, the structure of civic life and the circuits of power that often hide in plain sight. One reason Scorsese has long seemed to have a specific affinity for the genre, to a degree that tends to drown out perception of his varied oeuvre, is because the gangster in his eyes simply represents ordinary people in extremis, bound by peculiar loyalties of family and immediate community, balancing attempts to retain certain ideals whilst contending with a cruel and corrupting world. Rodrigo Prieto’s photography, with a muted, greyish colour palette, gives the most immediate visual clue to the way The Irishman disassembles the template of Scorsese’s earlier gangster works, contrasting their lush, pulpy hues and baroque evocations in favour of something chillier, more remorseless, like the cancer that eats up the flesh and bones of these old bastards in the end.

Another vital pivot in Sheeran’s life comes when Russell sets up the opportunity to become Hoffa’s enforcer, some hard muscle to back up Hoffa’s battles with rivals and powerbrokers. Sheeran’s first conversation with Hoffa over the phone sees De Niro register with beautiful subtlety the minuscule moment of shock as Sheeran realises Hoffa speaks the rarefied language of mob euphemism, conversant in the harshest facts of such life. But Hoffa manages to retain an avuncular glamour, a sense of righteousness even when swimming with human piranha, through seeming like a general engaged in a long guerrilla war, and he also crucially reaches out to Sheeran as “a brother of mine,” that is, a Teamster. Hoffa isn’t wrong to surround himself with hard men, with lieutenants nominally under his control like Anthony ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano (Stephen Graham). Sheeran recounts how Pro had a rival underling garrotted in a car, cueing one of the film’s most startling visual flourishes, as the murder is glimpsed as the car moves by a moving camera, yawing mouth in silent scream and struggling bodies glimpsed in a flash and then gone. Pro is just one of many creeps and thugs who parasite off the Teamster organisation, a union built to resist the violent resistance to organised labour from management, but which has required and rewarded mob support to do so. Tension builds between Hoffa and his underworld contacts however as he tries to prevent the Teamster union fund, which bankrolled their casino projects, from devolving entirely into a ready cash pool for wiseguys. When a government investigation of Hoffa sees him imprisoned, the mob becomes more inclined to see the union go on being run by more pliable figures, like Tony Pro and Frank Fitzsimmons (Gary Basaraba).

Like an updated version of the same analysis in Gangs of New York (2002), Scorsese considers the tribalism of politics and gangland as they form mutually parasitical relationship through their symmetry of outlook and method, disconnected from the real musculature of the workers whose ambitions and desires fuel their empires. Hoffa’s story has already been told comprehensively on film, in Danny DeVito’s overblown but fascinating Hoffa (1992), which rendered his life as an outsized romantic epic and elegy, in complete contrast to Scorsese’s dolorous and nitpicking realism. Hoffa was upfront in exploring the way Hoffa turned to the mafia for support to counter the overt and unsubtle brutality wielded by big business, where here this aspect is more implied and seen as part of an inseparable organism: wherever human energy is turned, and money’s involved, reefs of strange coral grow, and sharks come to live. The great swathe of The Irishman’s plot encompasses titanic figures like John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert (Jack Huston), whose vendetta-like pursuit of Hoffa drives the union boss to distraction, and finally overt acts of petty defiance like refusing to have the Teamster flag lowered after John’s assassination, whilst it’s heavily suggested the mob arranged the assassination in revenge for the Kennedys turning on them after they helped John’s election.

Such history also grazes minor yet noteworthy supporting players like David Ferrie (Louis Vanaria), interlocutor for the Mafia support for Cuban exiles trying to retake their nation from Castro, and E. Howard Hunt (Daniel Jenkins), CIA agent and eventual Nixon henchman infamous for his role in Watergate, both of whom Sheeran meets delivering equipment to the Cubans. Sheeran’s encounters with such people illuminate in flashes the great puzzle of power Sheeran perceives without really comprehending. They also contain Scorsese’s winking acknowledgement of the way the film encompasses cinematic as well as political history, for Pesci played Ferrie in Stone’s JFK (1991), whilst the personages and events the film touches on have provided bone marrow for a host of serious modern American movies. Such encounters are nonetheless laced with a droll sense of individual ridiculousness and everyday farcicality contaminating all facades and postures. Hunt gets upset when he thinks Sheeran is staring at his infamously big ears. Hoffa’s unwitting ride to his end, a moment of solemn and skittish tension, is tainted by the smell and run-off of a fish his adopted son Chuckie O’Brien (Jesse Plemons) dropped off beforehand for a friend, taunting all the men present with the reek of ludicrous fortune and imminent mortality. Sheeran’s proximity to Hoffa and the generational struggle he represents is the most concrete and meaningful of his brushes with renown, and even sees him write a page of history.

And yet Sheeran’s presence is actually defined by his absence, his being the incarnation of impersonal power, his carefully maintained readiness to be erased the key to his success as a killer and functionary. There’s an aspect of the self-mortifying and self-annihilating in Sheeran’s makeup, only purveyed for worldly rather than spiritual ends. Hoffa keeps him in his hotel room so his visit to the city for strongarming is completely without record, a trick that’s eventually turned on Hoffa as it’s revealed the true purpose for Sheeran and Russell’s road trip in 1975 is to set up a situation where Sheeran can be flown to Detroit to kill Hoffa. His talents as a killer demand taking some real risks, particularly when he’s sent to take out Joseph ‘Crazy Joe’ Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco), a strutting, defiant figure of the underworld who happily ignores its laws as much as the straight world’s and who’s had a potentially difficult Teamster boss killed during a rally. Scorsese nods back to the gun purchasing scene in Taxi Driver (1976) as Sheeran selects the ideal weapons for the attack and considers how to pull it off with method. Sheeran elects to kill Gallo in a restaurant, avoiding gunning down his family members about him whilst taking out his bodyguard, before chasing Gallo out to the sidewalk to deliver the coup-de-grace as he’s sprawled on the concrete. This scene captures Sheeran’s abilities as a hitman at zenith, as well as illustrating his personal myth, seeing himself as a good guy in terms of the world he lives in, a heroic gunslinger eliminating fools and scumbags and sparing the innocent. It’s a mystique eventually stripped from him in the rudest possible manner.

Although hardly a repudiation of his bravura stylistic flourishes, The Irishman sees Scorsese and his ever-ingenious editor Thelma Schoonmaker delivering a sinuous and measured work of high style. An early shot ushering the viewer/camera down the corridors of the nursing home Sheeran’s exiled to in his dimming days has the quality of a visitation by a reluctant but curious acquaintance; when this shot is repeated close to the end, it has a lacerating effect as now it’s clear that when the camera abandons Sheeran he is left in utter solitude, deserted by all he once claimed as friends and family. Scorsese repeatedly interpolates sequences shot in extreme slow motion, in one case in portraying percussive violence as Gallo’s goon shoots the Teamster official, bullets puncturing his flesh in spurts of red blood whilst hands desperately wrap about the assassin, but in each case with a sense of languorous absurdity even when describing tragedy, like the survey of seemingly mundane but despicable visages at the wedding after Hoffa’s killing: the wistfully twanging tones of a guitar cover of ‘Blue Moon’ and some doo-wop giving such scenes with a sardonic quality, at once melancholy and mocking. Throughout the film Scorsese puts up titles identifying various characters with their nicknames and the date and manner of their death, almost only violent. In the film’s slyest joke, one man is blessed with a title describing him as “well-liked by all, died of natural causes.”

The cumulative effect of this device is to emphasise not just the incredible brutality of the mob world around Sheehan but also his ultimate luck, which might not be luck at all, in outliving all of them; suspense is removed from the equation, and instead we’re made to understand Sheeran as a man living in a city of memory crowded with ghosts. The mob community, one that eats its own, is a perverse family that has its deep rituals of belonging and expulsion. But the rubbing out – erasure – of its members is reproduced in terms of actual family as Sheeran secures his position but with consequences. Of his four daughters, Peggy, growing from a small girl (Lucy Gallina) to a middle-aged woman (Anna Paquin), matures as the mostly silent but incessantly aware ledger of culpability. She regards Russell with suspicion, knowing him for the monstrosity he is, and remains wary of her father ever since witnessing in childhood the spectacle of him beating up a grocery store owner who treated her brusquely, an act that left her feeling less like the well-guarded princess than an unwitting bringer of violence and horror. Peggy’s gravitation to Hoffa, even idolisation of him gives special sting to the way Hoffa embodies for Sheeran a more idealised version of himself, a man with feet planted in the mud and bloodied knuckles but with the stature of a working-class gladiator turned statesman.

The shift of The Irishman from case study review to something more intimate and tragic is managed over the course of a central sequence where Sheeran’s tenure as a Teamster Local boss is celebrated. Hoffa is present, out of jail and pursuing his utter determination to win back “his” union from Fitzgerald, Pro, and the mob heavyweights who want to maintain the new status quo. Hoffa glares daggers at Russell and Salerno whilst sawing up his steak, and carefully fends off Sheeran’s mediating warnings about giving up, insisting with simple assurance that for him abandoning such a cause, so deeply infused with his sense of being and mission, would be tantamount to dying in itself. Peggy watches the play of glances and conversation as she dances, long used to divining through such tells of language and posture. Sheeran is ennobled when Russell gives him a ring that signals his induction into the innermost circle of the mob along with Russell himself and Salerno, a gesture that indicates permanency and security in terms of that family, but which soon proves to actually be a nomination and bribe, as Sheeran is being commissioned without realising to be Hoffa’s assassin.

The vein of pitch black comedy, blended with a forlorn sense of human vileness, is particularly icy here as Sheeran is essentially wedded to Russell via the exchange of rings, a gesture that contrasts in fascinating ways both men’s relationships with their nominal wives and families. Russell is married to a princess of mob royalty, a detail noted as it makes Russell seem for all his gathered strength like someone who just lucked out and married the boss’s daughter, whilst Sheeran almost casually seems to swap his first wife Mary (Aleksa Palladino) for his second, a little like getting a car upgrade. Hoffa’s wife Josephine (Welker White), who gets fired from her Teamster bureaucratic job in the escalating tit-for-tat, winces and imagines a car bomb blowing her to smithereens as she starts her car before the engine roars calmly to life, just another moment in the life of a foot soldier in a game of spousal ego. Late in the film Sheeran ruminates with tragic sting on how another car, one he loved, became responsible for his imprisonment. The men in The Irishman, at least until it’s too late, tend to adopt a fiercer sense of loyalty to the measures of their social status than their human attachments, from Hoffa’s obsession with “his” union to Pro’s anger at losing his Teamster pension despite being already being rich through to that car of Sheeran’s, his personal cross with Corinthian leather seats.

One of the wisest decisions Scorsese made in tackling The Irishman, possibly even the reason he made it, was also one of costliest and most troublesome, in offering a movie that serves as a grace note not only for Scorsese’s career but for his stars. Though he’ll surely make more movies, perhaps many more if he keeps at it like Clint Eastwood, The Irishman relies in a manner reminiscent of something like Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) on emotional association with its stars and the sense of an era ending. Scorsese first worked with Keitel on his own debut feature Who’s That Knocking At My Door? (1967), and his associations with De Niro and Pesci, stars of several of his best regarded works, seem virtually umbilical. Scorsese spent a lot of time and effort on the de-ageing effects even as the stiff and angular movements of the actors, as well as the often plastic look of the effects, betray reality. It’s a more convincing approach than using make-up probably would have been for actors in their seventies, but the artificiality is still patent. In practice it’s clearly just a theatrical nicety, not trying to fool the audience but negotiate with our knowing in a way that Scorsese couldn’t have managed if he’d cast other actors to play his protagonists when young as is the usual practice. Scorsese needs the sense of continuity, wants us to perceive the corporeal reality of old men lurking within facsimiles of young, potent bucks, in a tale where what age does to self-perception is a key aspect of the drama as well as artistic nostalgia. The quality of the mask-like in the effects underscores Peggy’s keen capacity to penetrate such veneers, and time just as assiduously uncovers the face men carve for themselves.

Hoffa conceives time as a literal form of wealth, a notion that provides both a thematic thesis – everyone’s time is running out – and also essential characterisation, as Hoffa’s anger is stoked by nothing quite so much as being made to wait, in part because he knows that waiting is something you only do for someone who presumes to have control over you. Which is why Pro calculatedly infuriates him by turning up late to a meeting, adding fuel to their feud. Pacino, ironically making his first appearance in a Scorsese film despite being very much another Italian-American product of 1960s New York’s cultural vitality and long associated with gangster films, is particularly well-cast not only for his capacity to project potent, larger-than-life charisma but also embodying in Hoffa a being who, whilst capable of speaking over the gap, nonetheless inhabits a slightly different continent to the gangsters, a man corrupt, compromised, but proud, not cynical in his authority even when cynical in many of his actions. Pesci by contrast is intriguingly cast as the most contained and calm of the major characters here after playing eruptive firebrands for Scorsese in the past, his Bufalino charged with terseness edging into easily stirred disgust, as he deals people who can’t work to the very specific rule their world demands, like an aged priest with unruly seminarians. One of the most arresting vignettes in The Irishman is also one of its most casual, as Russell orders Sheeran to hand over his sunglasses before he boards a plane to go kill Hoffa. Russell knows very well that the sunglasses are part of a killer’s uniform and shield, where he knows Sheeran needs the appearance of complete simplicity to pull off the hit, and moreover the discipline imbued by not retaining such a shield. Treachery must be entirely honest.

De Niro’s specific brilliance, in a different key again from his two great costars, manifests in playing a man who feels no particular emotional urgency until it’s far too late for him to do anything about it. This reckoning comes in two great, mirroring moments, first as he regards Russell in silent grief and reproach even as he also plainly acquiesces to his command to kill Hoffa, and then later as he struggles to maintain a feined veneer of bewildered concern through a conversation with his family over Hoffa’s vanishing, before calling Josephine Hoffa to offer reassurances. The film’s heightened commentary on paternalistic values, where old men’s capacity to make conversation is a very obvious marker of their power and various characters ultimately reveal their foolishness and impotence by talking out of turn or too long, crystallises here as Peggy, who has noticed everything whilst adhering to the rule of being seen but not heard, rips off her father’s façade with a few pointed words, “Why?” the question that registers like the point of an ice axe into a glacier. Sheeran makes his call, an action of duplicity and false hope he’s still quietly hating himself for making as he waits around to die decades later: “What kind of man makes a call like that?” he asks of an oblivious priest seeking his confession in the nursing home.

The most fundamental thread of Scorsese’s cinema has been the hunt for spiritual and aesthetic clarity in desperate conflict not just with the necessities of existence within a society but also with physical and emotional hungers that lead in the opposite direction from sainthood, even whilst stemming from the same impulses. Scorsese knows about such things; he took on Raging Bull (1980) as a project after being hospitalised for a cocaine overdose, and that film’s alternations of dreamy meditation and raw savagery have infused his mature oeuvre ever since. The Irishman follows Scorsese’s masterful study of cultural and religious clash, Silence (2016). Where that film seemed a capstone on a loose trilogy studying belief after The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997), The Irishman rounds out Scorsese’s study of mafia lore in Goodfellas and Casino, chasing their concerns to one logical end. The unexpected quality of The Irishman is that it also unites the two bodies of work. Scorsese returns to the figuration of Judas and Jesus Scorsese wrestled with so controversially on The Last Temptation of Christ in Sheeran’s treachery towards Hoffa. This comes with an inherent sense of irony – no-one here is exactly Jesus – whilst extending Silence’s contention with devotion and betrayal, the costs of adhering to a faith, with inverted propositions, and like so many of Scorsese’s films it contends with a character who eventually faces the essential situation of being left alone to do battle, Jacob-like, with their contending angels and devils.

The ideals of religious faith, humane and yet eternally defined by individual conscience, high-flown, transcendental, necessarily defined ultimately by a person’s solitary confrontation with their conception of eternity, have always warred in Scorsese’s vision with a different brand of faith, a social devotion defined by communal ties, hierarchy, expectation, and ruthless punishment for deviation. Religious faith, which in Scorsese often bleeds into other faiths, like labour organising in Boxcar Bertha (1971) as well as in The Irishman, contends with social faith in direct contrast: religious faith is punishment of self where social faith is punishment of others. Father Rodrigues in Silence suffered just as much and met his end just as solitary and battered as Sheeran, but his retained grip on faith into the grave signalled his most vital stem of being, no matter how tortured, retained a sense of worthiness in his life mission. By contrast Sheehan is left by the end of The Irishman entirely stripped of any illusion his choices have ultimately been worth the cost. The Irishman treads close to proving a classical winter’s tale as Shakespeare might have recognised it, even as it finally refuses to become such a tale. Those are supposed to be about conciliation and natural cycles, stories where the bite of the frigid season matches the gnawing proximity of death and the necessity of making peace to facilitate rebirth. The Irishman is about the consequences of rudely assaulting nature, and instead becomes something far more like King Lear, a tragedy where a once-ferocious king is left bereft and pitiful and exiled from home and kin because of the long, lingering memory of his own lessons.

Hoffa’s actual death nimbly turns from deadpan realism, as Sheeran shoots him in the head in an awkward and rushed jumble of motion, to a precisely composed renaissance pieta, as Sheeran leaves the arranged corpse and gun lying in the foyer of an empty house. Scorsese lingers on the sight after Sheeran leaves, the weight not simply of violence and crime but of dreadful absence, the negation of Hoffa’s presence and will, forces that compelled the world. The hit excises a roadblock to easy business but also echoes as an act of violence that consumes the men who committed it. Sheeran is forever excommunicated by Peggy, refusing to speak to him again even as he shambles after her in withered age in a bank where she works, whilst destabilisation vibrates through the mob world, with authorities prosecuting and jailing everyone they can, including Sheeran and Russell. Their figurative marriage becomes more like a real one as they’re left only with each-other in a cold and cheerless old age, withering within prison walls, two men who quietly despise each-other for the compromises forced and the implied lack of forgiveness in return, chained together in a caricature of amity into the halls of prison and then the grave.

The viewer must watch with both a touch of scorn and half-willing sympathy as Russell, dying, reveals he’s turned to religion as he’s pushed away in his wheelchair for treatment, as if he’s found a way to mollify the big boss. No major American director has dealt so sharply with imminent old age, the reduction of the human form and mind by the entirely natural predation of ageing, although in taking up such a theme in what’s nominally supposed to be a true crime thriller recalls Eastwood’s similar evocation in J. Edgar (2011). Sheeran’s corrosive experience of solitude and humiliation even after being released from prison sees him fending off two calls for purgation by confession, from the priest (Jonathan Morris) and federal agents, whilst he picks out coffins and resting places, still hunting a last echo of worldly status even into the grave. But the framing suggests Sheeran is confessing to someone, perhaps the audience, a surrogate for Brandt, a craned ear hungry for forbidden lore. All these legends lose their immediate meaning as their actors die off, even as the labour they’ve been part of, equated with both the society they comprised and the movie they appear in, persists, carrying lessons that cut many ways for those who follow. Sheeran recounting his story is one last attempt to leave a certain mark, to give experience any form of meaning. Scorsese grants him no absolution, but does offer a small consolation.

2000s, Auteurs, Drama

The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, Bernardo Bertolucci, Carol Reed, Robert Wise, and George Cukor are some great directors who gained Oscar triumph for films that were, by their standards, second-rate or impersonal works. So, Martin Scorsese finally gaining his statuette for a patchy remake of a slick Hong Kong crime drama seems almost appropriate. The Departed, an American remake of Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao, 2002), directed by Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak, was greeted by many as a return to form, as if the last 15 years of Scorsese’s career hadn’t been a series of virtuoso, chameleonlike experiments.

The appeal of Hong Kong genre cinema—Infernal Affairs included—is due to its dedication to the Old Hollywood formula: simplicity of technique, broadness of appeal, rigour of story craft, and adherence to archetypal. Infernal Affairs plays like a James Cagney-Humphrey Bogart vehicle shot with the style of a Sony commercial, and was made watchable largely by excellent, yet resolutely unshowy, acting by Tony Leung as Chan Wing Yan, a policeman undercover in a mob, Andy Lau as Lau Kin Ming, his opposite, a gangland mole in the police department, and Eric Tsang’s Hon Sam, a perpetually smiling, calmly malevolent godfather.

These three characters become William “Billy” Costigan Jr. (Leonardo DiCaprio), Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), and Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), all hailing from the blue-collar, ethnic Irish suburbs of South Boston. What Scorsese and his Bostonian screenwriter William Monahan brought to the material was a sense of local, ethnic, macho culture missing from the original and, for the first hour, a steely sense of social folklore and personal drama, with many unsentimental, amusing observations on class and race in Boston. Scorsese introduces us to the fractured sensibility of the city via news footage of 1960s race riots and the commanding voice of Costello proclaiming “I don’t want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!” Costello, kingpin of the Irish mobsters, struts with untouchable confidence. In the late 1980s, he enters a grocery store, makes obscene advances on the owner’s teenage daughter, and recognises the young Colin Sullivan (Conor Donovan) as a boy of potential. (“You do well in school?” “Yeah.” “Good. So did I. They call that a paradox.”) Soon Costello lectures Colin and other talented tykes in the lore of tough-guy necessities: “When I was growing up, they would say you could become cops or criminals. But what I’m saying is this. When you’re facing a loaded gun, what’s the difference?”

Skip forward 15 years or so. Sullivan is in training to join the Massachusetts State Police; so is Costigan, a hot-headed young man whose mother is dying of cancer. Costigan’s uncle was a crime boss, but his father, despite being superlatively tough, rejected the mob and worked his whole life as an airport baggage handler. His mother was from the more genteel end of town. Costigan thus loathes his blue-blood relatives and his criminal kin equally. He is soon picked as a perfect candidate by two senior officers—the fatherly Queenan (Martin Sheen) and the provocative, profane Dignam (Mark Wahlberg)—to become a mole. Dignam digs at Costigan’s psyche and generally takes the endemic Yankee-Irish verbal abuse to new heights of hilarious insult. Underneath this is a rock-solid commitment to the job at hand, and Costigan is offered some “real police work.” Costigan is to appear to be kicked off the force and jailed for assault, then seek a way to infiltrate the mob.

Simultaneously, Sullivan, smooth and confident, is earmarked for rapid promotion. He joins a squad headed by Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) that is looking to take Costello down. Each man soon is engaged in a paranoid duel with a mystery doppelganger burrowed into their home organisation and threatening the other’s safety. Each has a quasipaternal relationship with the monstrous Costello. In this way, with its highly Irish flavour, The Departed becomes a modern-dress remake of Gangs of New York; as a father figure like Bill the Butcher, resplendent in his masculine prowess, Costello lolls with multiple women in bed (under a shower of cocaine no less) dealing with an inadequate son who is not what he pretends to be—except here the son is split into good and bad twins.

All three figures are characterized with a depth Infernal Affairs avoided—which in the case of Costello doesn’t achieve much. Initially presented as a cool, intelligent, but utterly savage enforcer, rising in the opening as the cynical voice of a tough and fractured city, Costello enjoys deft verbal tussles with Queenan and Dignam and provokes the local clergy with amusingly vicious admonitions about pederasty and breaking one’s vows with pretty nuns. Yet he dissolves into a dull-witted, cartoonish monster—much, but not all, of which is the fault of Nicholson and his latter-day propensity for showboating. Unlike other corrupt surrogate father figures in Scorsese’s films—Bill the Butcher or Paulie or Jimmy the Gent or even Eddie Felson—Costello is required chiefly to be a monstrous foil in a melodrama.

Sullivan, like a classic Scorsese antihero, is motivated by desire to get ahead; for him, being both an exceptionally good policeman and Costello’s agent are complementary ideas. He eyes the gold dome of the city hall with hope and ambition, and buys a swanky flat in sight of it. But inner tension manifests itself in a crippled sexuality. With wit and skill, he romances Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), a state-employed psychiatrist who deals with police trauma and violent offenders. He coaxes her into a relationship that is troubled by his lack of emotional clarity and bouts of impotence. Costello doesn’t help by making sexual threats towards Madolyn if Sullivan fails him. Costigan has to visit Madolyn both to maintain his cover—she is his court-appointed shrink—and as a relief valve for his assailed psyche. Costigan, whilst in her office, is a ball of scarcely compressed rage and desperation, demanding drugs to numb him from his sleepless agitation. Soon he’s yanking off her underwear when she succumbs to a moment of relationship jitters. The idea of two men sharing a life so tightly interwoven that they sleep with the same woman and still don’t know each other’s identity, seems fit for a truly mind-warping psychodrama, but this doesn’t eventuate. Madolyn, despite her spunk and intelligence, doesn’t get to be much more than sideshow in this orgy of Men’s Business.

Costigan deals drugs with his dimwitted cousin Sean (Kevin Corrigan) and gets a reputation for impressive violence. When he beats up two foot soldiers from Mafia-controlled Providence who are trying to enforce protection in Boston, Costello informs him that unless he intercedes, Costigan will undoubtedly end up whacked. In return for leaving the two hoods in a park with bullets in their heads, Costigan is inducted into Costello’s entourage of thick thugs, which includes his intimidating, but soft-spoken lieutenant, Mr. French (Ray Winstone). Costello’s big score for the year is a stolen shipment of microprocessors that he proceeds to sell to some heavies paid by the Chinese government. Ellerby, Queenan, Dignam, and their men uneasily join to arrest them in the act, but Sullivan has given Costello a chance to make his deal (which is a scam anyway) and escape. With both sides realising they have rats in the ranks, an increasingly loopy Costello sniffs out his own men, most specifically new boy Costigan, whilst Sullivan finds himself handed the alienating but highly convenient task of seeking out the mole in the force. Sullivan promptly uses his new powers to have Queenan followed, hoping he’ll be seen meeting with his man in Costello’s mob.

This nearly works; when Queenan meets Costigan in an empty building, Sullivan has Costello’s boys descend on the locale. Costigan slips away, and the frustrated thugs throw a tight-lipped Queenan to his death from the window, prompting a gunfight with the cops watching for him. Most of the entertainment value of The Departed comes from its souped-up cast, all kept on their toes by Scorsese and armed with fierce dialogue by Monahan. For DiCaprio, it’s possibly the best performance of his career; his efforts to be tough in Gangs of New York and mercurial in The Aviator look pallid compared to the lean, mean, half-mad characterization he presents here of a guy with adrenalin so constantly drugging his synapses he can barely tell black from white anymore. Damon, though fine, has an easier time, largely because he’s played variations on this part before—a benign-seeming young man who is actually emotionally closed-off and inherently dangerous, with deep, underlying social and paternal resentments. It’s more impressive for him to play Jason Bourne, who has many of the same characteristics and is still our hero.

Many of the interchanges, particularly those involving Wahlberg’s salty mouth provide classic Scorsese macho confrontations, as cops and hoods gouge each other with insults and epithets, jockeying for supremacy of both competence and attitude, as when Dignam upbraids an incompetent surveillance with “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.” Much of this pleasure drains away in the plot-heavy second half, leaving behind the interesting social and character elements. After Queenan’s death, for which Sullivan is blamed, Dignam assaults him and resigns rather than hand over to Sullivan the password for Queenan’s encrypted computer files that contain Costigan’s details. Sullivan sets up Costello in a drug deal; most of the gang perish in the ensuing battle. Sullivan kills Costello himself. This is not so much because, as with Lau Kin Ming in Infernal Affairs, he realises he longs to be a cop and a good guy, but for the less weirdly positive reason that Sullivan feels betrayed on discovering, thanks to Costigan’s digging, that Costello is a federal informant and also is resentful of his brutal father figure.

When Costello, coughing up blood, says Sullivan’s been like a son to him, the young man provokes him by suggesting Costello needed a surrogate son because, despite his self-trumpeting sexual capacity, he’s been shooting blanks all these years. The shot Costello takes at him gives Sullivan final cause to fill his abusive patriarch with lead. Costigan can finally come in from the cold. Waiting in Sullivan’s office, he recognises an envelope he himself had written on containing all the Costello’s crew personal details on Sullivan’s desk. Costigan realises Sullivan is the mole and flees. Sullivan panics and deletes Costigan’s records from Queenan’s computer. Costigan tries to shake Sullivan’s life to pieces by mailing to Madolyn a recording he dug up of Costello and Sullivan talking.

Madolyn is, of course, less than ecstatic. Sullivan goes to a meeting arranged with Costigan, but he has no intention of making a deal, intending instead to take him by surprise and arrest him. “Just fucking kill me!” Sullivan begs. “I am killing you.” Costigan assures him. But Costigan gets his brains splattered all over the wall of an elevator by another cop, Barrigan (James Budge Dale), who reveals himself as a second Costello plant; he also kills Brown (Anthony Anderson), one of the few other officers who remembered Costigan from training. Sullivan shoots Barrigan in the head, eliminating the last known link of him to Costello. Costigan is given a hero’s funeral after Sullivan reports he and Brown died trying to take in the mole Barrigan.

This almost parodic proliferation of brainless bodies is more or less where Infernal Affairs concludes. Instead of giving us two sequels, however, as followed that film, The Departed delivers a sharp coda in which Sullivan, thinking he has triumphed, continues his everyday life, but returns home from grocery shopping to find Dignam waiting in his apartment, armed with a silenced pistol. Dignam has worked out everything and determined to remedy it in the most direct fashion by shooting a resigned Sullivan in the head. The final shot shows a rat crawling across the rail of Sullivan’s apartment, backgrounded by the gold dome towards which Sullivan had looked with hope.

It’s a symbolic joke that sums up the film itself—gritty, cynical, and funny, but also facile and broad. The self-parodying trend is extended in Nicholson’s performance as Costello literally sniffs out a rat and in one scene, appears bathed in blood with no explanation, like a Monty Python gag. Scorsese’s stylistic imagination is almost entirely quelled, except for some self-referencing snatches, as when his camera makes a lateral dolly past DiCaprio doing push-ups in his cell, a Cape Fear quote. Apparently all a Scorsese film is, according to some people, is swearing, shootings in the head, and Rolling Stones songs played loud. Scorsese felt empowered to make a good genre film by the legacies of directors like Robert Aldrich, Samuel Fuller, and Don Siegel, and his hand on the helm ensures the film is constructed with some fearsomely good editing and structuring.

The experimentation in story-through-montage in Goodfellas, Casino, and Kundun proves useful for commercial purposes in the fleet-footed skill with which The Departed sets up and puts in motion its story. But with its overly long, overly tricky story, and relatively bland style, The Departed is very much a well-done genre film of today, not one of the superbly done genre films of yesterday. In Scorsese’s best works, social context is everything, but in The Departed, it is thoroughly subordinated to constructing a cops-and-robbers drama. Yet, The Departed feels unusually true to the zeitgeist in that it depicts an age where officialdom is infiltrated by the self-serving and disloyal, and the true warriors are isolated, frustrated, and doomed. The Departed is Scorsese’s most financially successful film to date, and seems set for the foreseeable future to remain his most mainstream-appreciated work. If nothing else, it stands as the most honourably foul-mouthed Best Picture winner ever. And yet it’s a minor film in his career, one of his least fully realised, garbled in theme and story.

2000s, Auteurs, Drama

The Aviator (2004)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

The myth of Howard Hughes in his later years, a gnarled weirdo cocooned in a hotel room, casts such a powerful spell that The Aviator’s presentation of the magnate in his youth as a swashbuckling entrepreneur, airman, and lover, was almost bewildering. Inevitable accusations of soft-pedaling dogged it. Indeed, whilst the film is grazing in contemplating genius dissolved by madness, it avoids Hughes the obnoxious control freak, the rabid anti-Communist, anti-unionist, and anti-Semite. The younger Martin Scorsese would have loved tearing apart such a figure and his place in society. But The Aviator was a pet project of star Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off Gangs of New York. The appeal for him was a different Hughes legend, that of the upstart Texan who marched into Hollywood, spent a fortune to make a fortune, and set about doing all the sorts of things we’d like to do if we were young and rich—fly fast planes, make love to gorgeous movie stars, fearlessly boss around money men and politicians, and look good doing it. Michael Mann was originally going to direct, but with Mann tired of doing biopics, DiCaprio offered the reins to Scorsese. The director and DiCaprio’s visions matched in that The Aviator offered Scorsese an opportunity to evoke an era of glamour, electric with cultural action.

Inspired by his dark side and incipient madness, many filmmakers had built stories around that older, troubled Hughes, including Max Ophüls with his 1947 noir Caught, Jonathan Demme and his Melvin and Howard (1980), and even the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever (1971). DiCaprio, screenwriter John Logan, and Scorsese succeeded by realizing that the best way to sell Hughes’ story was primarily as a giddy adventure, keeping one step ahead of Hughes’ assault from within and without. Hughes and the people who jostle in his world, like Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), Errol Flynn (Jude Law), Hughes’ pet what-the-hell plane designer Glenn Odekirk (Matt Ross), are infinitely much more vivid and interesting than the dullards who populate today’s celebrity and business worlds—including the actors who play them. The Aviator follows Hughes’ career beginning in the late 1920s, when he set up the self-financed production of the WWI aviation epic Hell’s Angels, a production that dragged on for years, shifted from a silent to sound production, introduced Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani), and ended up costing so much it didn’t make its money back on its first release in 1930. Hughes is swiftly introduced as a high-powered young man glad to have finally shoved off the mantle of “junior” with his parents’ deaths (perhaps also signaling DiCaprio’s determination to escape his post-Titanic boy heart-throb status). He’s going to spend his fortune from a company that manufactures drill bits as he wants.

Hughes’ independent production is anathema to the Hollywood of the time; Hollywood titan Louis B. Mayer (David DiSantis) mocks his production methods and advises him to go home. At one point, Hughes keeps his fleet of aircraft—the largest private air force in the world—on the ground for months, waiting for clouds, the only way he can communicate to the camera lens, via relative motion, the speed of the aircraft. He hires a UCLA meteorology professor, Fitz (Ian Holm) just to keep an eye out for them. When they finally come, Hughes and his fleet cavort through the clouds to the strains of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in the first of the film’s brilliant aerial scenes. When Hell’s Angels opens, its lavish premiere and rapturous reception make Hughes a star. But cracks are already beginning to show. In a vintage show of Scorsese’s technique, Hughes’ march along the red carpet with Harlow on his arm is a nightmarish experience, as flashbulbs explode (a Scorsese fetish) and shatter under his shoes, the crowd screams deafeningly, a woman hurls herself in front of him, and Hughes, deaf in one ear, can barely hear an interviewer’s questions. His brow, slick with pomade and jazz-baby style, wrinkles with fierce concentration of will just to make it through. It’s the first sign that though he loves courting adulation, it assaults his fragile senses.

Nevertheless Hughes launches a career as a Hollywood producer and playboy. He gets a date with Hepburn using the direct approach—he flies a seaplane to a beachfront set where she’s working with George Cukor and Cary Grant and asks her for a game of golf. In the course of this contest, however, she quickly outpaces him, with her mannish gait and motor-mouthed confidence: “Now we both know the sordid truth: I sweat, and you’re deaf. Aren’t we a fine pair of misfits?” Although their affair was possibly not much more than a fling, The Aviator pitches the Hughes/Hepburn romance as the centerpiece of his romantic life largely for the chance to explore oppositions—Hughes’ Texan industrialist rough edges against Hepburn’s Brahmin poise. Blanchett’s sharp, if initially broad, performance (the fifth in a Scorsese film to get an Oscar) aids her creating a portrait of Hepburn patterned after her signature character, Tracy Lord, from The Philadelphia Story—an apt characterization as Lord was in turn built around Hepburn’s persona. Hughes snares Hepburn by treating her to uncommon pleasures, like flying her by her night over Los Angeles, and keeps her dazzled with his energy. She quickly deduces Hughes’ underlying fragility, and warns him: “Howard, we’re not like everyone else. Too many acute angles. Too many eccentricities. We have to be very careful not to let people in, or they’ll make us into freaks.”

Hepburn comes from an arty old-money Connecticut family (her ex-husband lives with them). When she takes Howard to meet them, his true pride in his work and talents is swamped by familial blather and pseudo-intellectual talk. When Hepburn’s mother (Frances Conroy) casually says, “We don’t care about money here,” Hughes irritably ripostes, “That’s because you’ve always had it!” This places Hughes firmly among Scorsese’s socially resentful heroes. Though rich from birth, Hughes sees himself as combating “high-hat Ivy League assholes” and corporate giants like Pan-Am with earthy grit and old-school American can-do. His mix of neurosis and down-home intransigence spectacularly annoys Hepburn. One fight between the combustible pair results in her heading to a film set in tears, where Spencer Tracy (Kevin O’Rourke) asks her what’s wrong. “There’s too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes.” she sniffs, focusing on the actor who will soon fill her life instead. When she officially busts up with Hughes, he is snaky: “Don’t you ever talk down to me! You’re a movie star, nothing more!” Yet later he will intervene when a photographer (Willem Dafoe) plans to publish pictures of her and Tracy, who is still married to someone else.

Simultaneously, Hughes is conquering aviation. He achieves tremendous fame when he flies around the world. He and Odekirk work on a racing plane, which eventually becomes the fastest aircraft in the world. The H-1, which, when he flies it, breaks a speed record before running out of petrol, forcing Hughes to crash-land in a beet field; Hepburn at first mistakes the juice caking his legs for blood. Soon he’s taking over TWA and competing with Pan Am’s lethally smooth boss Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) for the future of commercial aviation. Key to his efforts is the new fleet of Lockheed Constellations. He also helps the U.S. Army’s war effort by producing the spy-plane XF-11 (“My Buck Rogers ship”) and his behemoth transport plane, the H-4 Hercules, also called the Spruce Goose. Such efforts anticipated today’s tactical and commercial airships, but were pursued with wild abandon; Hughes orders his frazzled manager Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) to hock assets, ignore shareholders, and generally spend fortunes on his latest wild idea. Hughes approaches business like a sport, delighting in defying belief and beating competitors, even as it slowly tears his mental muscle to ribbons.

Scorsese goes to town in evoking the thrill of Old Hollywood, as when Hughes and Hepburn visit the Cocoanut Grove, playground of Hollywood’s A listers, where dancing girls ride on swings and gloriously corny 1930s-style singers perform. Hughes and Hepburn are pestered by Errol Flynn (Law), who picks a pea off Hughes’ plate, preventing Hughes from being able to touch his meal, before Flynn gets in a fight with a man who calls him a “Limey bastard.” “I’m a Tasmanian bastard, you ignorant prick!” Flynn responds before ironing him out. It’s the most entertaining scene of Law’s career. The film’s visuals reproduce the effect of two-strip Technicolor, which Hughes used to shoot some of Hell’s Angels. He moves to the ripeness of three-strip Technicolor, making for gloriously weird effects, as the peas on Hughes’ plate appear turquoise. DP Robert Richardson won an Oscar for the film, though these effects were done post-production. Oddly enough, considering cinephilia has powered so much of his oeuvre, The Aviator is also the first Scorsese film to portray film-making and the movie world.

Hughes’ mental state begins to deteriorate after Hepburn leaves him. He incinerates all his clothes and searches for a new starlet to mould, interviewing ingénue Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner) at night in a hangar. Hughes is seated in forbidding shadow, foreshadowing his ultimate retreat into monstrous isolation. When she tells him she’s 15, he mutters “Holy Mary, mother of God.” This doesn’t stop him romancing her and Ava Gardner simultaneously. Gardner, fiercely independent, resists Hughes’ romantic style of buying a girl, and mocks his personal cheapness. When Hughes takes Gardner out to dinner, a furiously jealous Domergue crashes her car into theirs—if only she’d ever been that spunky in her acting career! Later Gardner physically assaults Hughes and drives him from her house when she finds he’s been bugging her place: “What do you mean, all the microphones?”

Hughes finally cracks in the wake of a terrible crash—a tremendously powerful cinematic sequence in which the XF-11 falls from the sky and crashes into suburban Los Angeles. Hughes is almost pulped, and spends months recovering. His ambition for TWA to compete with Pan Am in post-War transatlantic trade results in Trippe calling in favors from bought-and-paid-for Maine senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), who proceeds to hound Hughes through several Senate committees and reinforce Pan Am’s monopoly with legislature. The Civil Aviation Board grounds all Constellations after a crash, threatening TWA’s future. Treating Howard to a luncheon in his New York hotel room, Brewster presses him to sell out to Pan Am, before he spills the dirt he’s collected and brands him a war profiteer for money Hughes made on the XF-11 and the Hercules. Brewster coolly assumes the mantle of government authority: “We just beat Germany and Japan. Who the hell are you?” The combined effect of all this drives Hughes to lock himself in his office for months, spiraling into a prolonged obsessive-compulsive fit.

Although efficient, Logan’s script is one of the most standard and Hollywoodish of Scorsese’s films. And yet, under the candy-colored gloss of The Aviator is an acute portrait a man in whom genius and mental illness were intricately linked. Hughes’ business in the 1960s reflected his own paranoia, as he made listening devices for the government. The Aviator opens with a warm yet creepy scene from Hughes’ childhood, where his beautiful mother Allene (Amy Sloan) washes him down at a disturbingly advanced age in a tin bath, making him spell the word “Q-u-a-r-a-n-t-i-n-e” and harping on about outbreaks of illness. From this point of textbook Freud onwards, Hughes’ obsessions are delicately entwined, especially his sensual thrills.

The erotic satisfaction Hughes gains in flying—he needs to fly in front of clouds that look like “giant breasts full of milk,” and caresses the skin of the H-4 like that of a woman—matches his fixation on large breasts and his desire for cleanliness. He swills milk, both because of its maternal and sexual associations and because it’s reliably disease-free. He alternates design discussions over the Hercules with blueprints, indiscernibly different, of the cantilever bra he’s designed to show off Jane Russell’s boobs when he directed her in her debut film, The Outlaw. Hughes’ eroticisation of technology predicts a strong tendency today in everything from advertising to pornography. He can swap bodily fluids with all the women in the universe, yet still fear touching a steering wheel because of the association he has between sleek curves and cleanliness. “I want her clean, Odie!” he commands in reducing the wind resistance of rivets on the H-1.

Scorsese reveals Hughes’ brain as working like a supercomputer in one scene when he refocuses his attention to the Hercules’ design; Scorsese inserts quick-scrolling blueprint images. Shortly thereafter, Hughes fixates on a sweeper, his simple acts imbued with alien quality, establishing a direct link in film-making between Hughes’ mind working precisely and Hughes’ mind working faultily. His commitment to detail underpins both his success and his ultimate collapse into obsessive-compulsive disorder. Increasingly, Hughes deals with moments of romantic or business trial by retreating to the bathroom and furiously scrubbing his hands with a cake of soap he keeps in a tin. In a grimly funny scene, after such a cleansing session following a run-in with Trippe, he realizes he can’t touch the doorknob to leave the washroom.

Once Howard locks himself in his office, his disease runs riot as he endlessly repeats phrases, strips naked, and fills up precisely placed milk bottles with his own urine. He watches his films in endless loops, Jane Russell’s lips constantly zooming up like an offering of sexual annihilation, or violence from Hell’s Angels projected on his body evokes his mental and physical agony. Hepburn’s entreaties at his door are ineffectual. He receives a provocative visit by Trippe, promising his destruction in public hearings Brewster is holding. Trippe even blows smoke through the keyhole to irritate him. Hughes soon gathers himself together enough to leave his office, and lets Ava clean him up. Hughes proceeds to reduce Brewster’s interrogation to comedy, turning all of his questions back and effectively answering all charges. He proceeds to give the Hercules its first and only flight, managing to coax the mammoth plane whose size and shape predicts the airbus, into the air.

A rousing moment, but Scorsese delivers a mean sucker punch of an anticlimax, as Howard, raving to Gardner, Dietrich, and Odekirk about the coming jet age, spies white-gloved handlers who his brain processes once again as alien, and begins repeating the line, “The way of the future,” over and over. And over and over. Escorted into a toilet to get a grip, Howard gives up trying to control it, staring at himself in the mirror, still repeating “The way of the future”—a phrase that winds together his vision of progress and an acceptance, even an embrace, of his fate, retreating into solitary, self-obsessed dissolution. The portrait of a man who wins everything but loses to himself is heartland Scorsese territory, but The Aviator lacks the lacerating weirdness of Raging Bull or his other portraits of humans who stake their souls on victory in the rat race. That’s not to condemn the film, which, though Scorsese’s brilliance comes in short bursts rather than rapid fire, moves sleekly and with huge entertainment value for nearly three hours. The film is much like DiCaprio’s performance at the center; dynamic, sustained, delightful, but lacking the manly muscle and loopy, personal force of its precursors.

2000s, Auteurs, Drama

Gangs of New York (2002)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

“The blood stays on the blade,” Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson) tells his young son Amsterdam (Cian McCormack) as he slices his cheek with a razor blade, inducting the boy into a creed of macho lore. Priest shows him a medal of St. Michael: “He cast Satan out of paradise!” Father, holding an iron Celtic cross, leads Son and a gathering army of jostling tribes—Celts, Africans, sheer barbarians—out of an underground labyrinth. These warriors inclue Hellcat Maggie (Cara Seymour), who’s filed her teeth into fangs, McGloin (Gary Lewis), and Happy Jack (John C. Reilly). Their rise to the day passes through eons; from Neolithic depths to the medieval squalor of the Old Bakery building, used as a home by immigrant families. Pounding on the soundtrack is a “shammy,” a military march with a syncopated tin whistle, a Civil War style that eventually mutated into jazz. Like a negotiation between Agamemnon and Achilles, Priest briefly discusses payment to take part in battle with Walter “Monk” McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), who wields a club riddled with notches for men he’s laid low, before Monk kicks the doors open on the snow-crusted amphitheatre of Paradise Square, the Five Points, New York, 1846.

This great opening sequence lays out the scheme of Gangs of New York, a devolution of American society and a study of the nature of myth—the way cultural memory is transmitted through legendary narrative. Its plot evokes The Iliad, Gilgamesh, Saul and David, and many other legends, tied to a factual work of social history. The germ for the film was planted when, as a boy, Scorsese heard a piece of Catholic New York folklore, of communal resistance to an attempt by Protestant Nativists to burn down a Catholic Church. Scorsese re-encountered the tale in the book The Gangs of New York by demimonde historian Herbert Asbury, published in the 1920s. For 31 years, Scorsese tried to turn that work into a movie. He finally got the money from Miramax, shooting the film on detailed sets at Cinecitta, home of the Italian film industry and of so many epic film productions. The film was supposed to do for Scorsese what Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan did for Steven Spielberg—garner him an Oscar, which, of course, it did not. Scorsese wanted The Clash to act in the film when he tried to make it in the 1970s, and heavy doses of such punk spirit, period cynicism, and black comedy drive the film, rather than an easily laudable “quality” aesthetic.

The germ for the core subject of Gangs of New York was found in the true tale of Bill Poole, a Nativist-affiliated enforcer, probably assassinated by the son of an Irish immigrant he had murdered. Scorsese had screenwriter Jay Cocks pen a script, refined later by Kenneth Lonnergan and Steven Zaillian, telling the story of William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis), who leads the Federation of American Natives to challenge Priest’s Dead Rabbits and allied Irish gangs in a fateful rumble. Bill claims the mantle of his father, killed in the War of 1812, as a defender of his nation from “the foreign hordes.” The gang members, outcasts and victims of Empires, drag power out of the earth and wield it fearlessly in this recklessly created New World. Their titanic street battle is a whirl of cracked skulls, torn mouths, gouged eyes, bitten-off ears. Bill kills Priest, whom he declares an honourable enemy. He outlaws the Dead Rabbits and orders Amsterdam committed to Hellgate Asylum.

When Amsterdam has grown into the glowering adult form of Leonardo DiCaprio, he is released from Hellgate, given a bible by the warden, and told “God has forgiven you. Now you must learn to forgive.” Amsterdam throws the bible off a bridge as he walks back to Manhattan, and retrieves from the now-emptied caves below the Old Bakery his St. Michael medal and a knife of his father’s. He is assaulted by, but easily beats, Johnny Sirocco (Henry Thomas) and Negro pal Jimmy Spoils (Larry Gilliard Jr.); Johnny had, as a boy, aided Amsterdam in his attempt to escape the Butcher’s men, and Amsterdam falls in with their gang of petty thieves. Monk now runs a barber shop. Amsterdam learns that Bill, in an annual act of political theatre, commemorates his killing of Priest by drinking a flaming glass of alcohol before his assembled court. Amsterdam determines to kill him in the act.

New York is kaleidoscopic with nationalities, brisk patricians and vigorous plebeians, a seething society trying to cut out its two cancers—slavery and poverty—before they become terminal. The Civil War is hurting. Irish immigrants streaming off the boats are shoved into uniforms and shipped off to fight the Confederates. The first draft in U.S. history is about to begin, spreading discontent amongst the poor who can’t cough up the $300 to be exempted. Bill likes to throw knives at Lincoln’s posters as his bully boys, who now include McGloin, assault Negro freemen. McGloin typifies the racism of Irish immigrants, displacing the loathing directed at them onto blacks.

Presiding over the city is the Tammany Hall boss William Tweed (Jim Broadbent). He governs through bribes, vote-cramming, dirt-dealing, and back-stabbing. Tweed makes overtures to Bill, wanting him to aid the Tammany machine with muscle work, clobbering political opponents and mustering the voting power of the slums. “The appearance of the law must be upheld,” Tweed asserts, “especially when it’s being broken.” Bill perceives himself the emperor of the underclass, his strength, the streets that converge on Paradise Square: “Each of the Five Points is a finger. When I close my hand it becomes a fist. And, if I wish, I can turn it against you.” Public utilities are a tool of such politics; volunteer fire services in the town war with each other and rob burning houses. A brawl between a team sponsored by Tweed and another gives Amsterdam and Johnny an opportunity to brave the flames and get the loot. From the window, Amsterdam catches sight of Bill riding on a fire engine to Tweed’s aid, bathed in demonic red with Melvillian portent. Amsterdam and his gang must share spoils with Happy Jack, now an extremely corrupt policeman, and with Bill, whom Amsterdam and Johnny pay off at Satan’s Circus, the saloon he holds court in. They’re treated to the sight of Bill stabbing a man he plays cards with in the hand for making small bets, then assuring the boys, “Come closer, I won’t bite.”

Bill gives the lads a lucrative score, a Portuguese ship in the harbour. They find the crew’s been massacred by another gang. Amsterdam steals away the captain’s body and sells it to science. Bill congratulates them: “They made the Police Gazette, a periodical of note.” He soon finds himself drawn close by Bill, a trusted lieutenant for his well-proven smarts and toughness; Bill clearly fancies Amsterdam as a surrogate son. Bill, who really is a butcher by trade, educates him in the finer points of knife fighting on a pig carcass. The Natives attend a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which an actor playing Lincoln preaches harmony. They pelt the actors with missiles. In the ruckus, an assassin tries to shoot Bill. Amsterdam reflexively tackles and kills him, and Bill’s wound is slight. Amsterdam is stricken over his confused impulses, and Monk, having recognised him, questions him pointedly about his intentions.

The link between the Democratic Party and the Irish that eventually produced JFK begins here, when Bill, having rejected entirely the idea of courting the immigrant vote (“If only I had the guns, Mr. Tweed, I’d shoot each and every one of them before they set foot on American soil!”) forces Tweed to reject the Nativists and embrace the Irish. “You’re turning your back on the future,” Tweed warns. “Not our future,” Bill replies. The soundtrack jostles with folk music, Irish shanties, African laments, field-hand chorals, and Chinese melodies, all of which one day will be compressed into American pop music. Scorsese’s camera laps up the antique, pimped-up styling the gangs affect, eyeing the roots not just for his own films’ social studies, but for the popularity of gangster and Western films, punk music and gangsta rap, in the power-defying showiness of these criminal-warriors.

The film mixes physical realism and grand theatricality. Scorsese references Visconti again—he frames advancing soldiers after the Battle of Palermo sequence of The Leopard (1963). His staging of fights and baroque sense of period style evokes Sergio Leone, John Ford, even Samuel Fuller, as he has singers walking through shots, for example, when Finbar Furey, as a publican, plays to the camera like a congenial host to a patron, sings the period ditty “New York Girls” as we explore Satan’s Circus. Pitch-black comedy gives the film idiosyncratic punch, like in a public execution where the bailiff disgustedly announces crimes that includes “sodomy!” or when Bill pretends to cry over the corpse of a “poor, defenceless little rabbit” Jenny Everdeane (Cameron Diaz), a pickpocket, comes into Amsterdam’s life. Rescued off the street as a child by Bill, she became his lover before having an abortion that left her scarred, something Bill can’t abide. Amsterdam and Jenny’s encounters are fraught with mutual loathing and sexual attraction, which comes to a head when she steals his St. Michael medal, prompting him to trail her across town to get it back. When churchmen who are rebuilding the Old Bakery as a Church hold a dance, everyone flocks there, including transvestite prostitutes who solicit incredulity from the ecumenical Minister (Alec McCowen). Johnny, severely smitten by Jenny, is heartbroken when she chooses to dance with Amsterdam. Their later attempt to rut on the docks ceases abruptly when Amsterdam realises she is “the Butcher’s leavings.”

After the assassination attempt, Bill and Amsterdam retreat to a brothel; Jenny tends Bill’s wound as the men lounge with bare-breasted prostitutes and smoke opium. Bill watches Jimmy Spoils dancing to a jig, and comments, “An Irish ditty mixed with the rhythms of a dark continent, stirred to a fine American mess.” Despite himself, Bill is aware of what is happening to his country. He beds three women, each a different colour, whilst Jenny and Amsterdam have a noisy quarrel (“Is there anyone in the Five Points you haven’t fucked?” “Yes, you!”) that turns into vigorous sex. Amsterdam awakens in the morning to Bill, seated by his bed with Old Glory wrapped around his shoulders, recalling how Priest had given him a severe beating in their first fight. Bill punished himself for flinching from Priest by plucking out his left eye (he now sports a glass one with an bald eagle painted in place of the pupil) before returning strong enough to kill Priest. At 47, Bill says he has kept power by “the spectacle of fearsome acts.” Jealous, Johnny spills Amsterdam’s ancestry to Bill. When, finally, Amsterdam throws a knife at Bill as he’s drinking his fiery liquor, Bill parries the blade with dazzling skill and plants his own in Amsterdam’s belly. He offers a spectacle of murder for the baying crowd, but, respecting the chance Priest gave him, restrains his abuse of Amsterdam to beating him terribly and scarring him.

Jenny spirits Amsterdam away to the caverns, where he spends months recuperating. He is visited by Monk, who gives him what he secretly preserved, Priest’s straight-razor, his symbol of blood responsibility. Monk expects to answer to God for his killings, as opposed to Bill, who considers himself a divine wind. “Your father tried to carve out a corner of this land for his tribe,” he recalls. “That was him, that was his Dead Rabbits.” Amsterdam re-emerges from underground and hangs slaughtered rabbits in the square to announce his return and the return of his father’s ideals. Soon Amsterdam draws all his friends back, hiding in and defending the Catholic Church’s construction. They embrace their religion as well as a mission to build a safe Irish enclave. When McGloin visits to pray, he’s outraged that Jimmy Spoils is present; when he squeals about it to the church’s long-haired, one-armed, radical priest (Peter-Hugo Daly), the priest wallops him over the head. In retaliation, Bill and the Natives come to incinerate the building, but find it protected by massed ranks including families. Even Bill won’t go that far. Johnny and Happy Jack soon die in tit-for-tat killings. Tweed proposes to Amsterdam that he swing Irish support behind Tammany. Amsterdam proposes Monk for the office of Sheriff. With the aid of Tweed’s electoral shenanigans, Monk gains “a Roman triumph.” But Bill, before shocked onlookers, viciously assassinates Monk.

Bills and Amsterdam’s relationship, like several in Scorsese’s oeuvre, is as a surrogate paternal relationship, man and boy drawn to each other through mutual appreciation of the others’ strengths, and ultimately drawn to destroy each other, loaded with jealousies and sexual strife. DiCaprio inhabits Amsterdam with a fair intensity, though he lacks indelible grit as a young hard case or ease with his deliberately weird Irish-American accent. Bill and Amsterdam act out several forms of division, with Amsterdam a man straddling Bill’s dinosaur bellicosity and thoughts of a new, more hopeful world. Jenny, daughter/lover to Bill, mother/sister/lover to Amsterdam, loves each in different ways. Her attraction is Amsterdam is at first that between two rodents—tough, cunning, ruthless, but morally innocent. Violence in this embryonic world flavors all things, including sexuality. Jenny kisses Amsterdam’s scars, marks of survival from Hellgate, after showing him her Caesarian scar, a sacrament of flesh for their physical and mental pains. Written on their bodies is the violent growth of their selves and the world about them.

Bill dominates the film, and not just because of Day-Lewis’s epic, perversely witty performance. He is one of the last Titans, a creature of great physical prowess with a warrior-poet’s soul belonging to a premechanical age. He is obsessed with purity, physical, racial, and cultural. In this regard, he resembles Travis Bickle. Bill’s sense of the physical is intensely spiritual, and enacts totemic punishment on flesh—cutting out his own eye, searing Amsterdam’s face for failing to act like a man. He cannot touch Jenny’s torn body lest it speak to him of the violence, decay, and waste that otherwise surrounds him. He respects the code of honorable warriors and detests the cult of commonality, which is why he feels justified in assassinating Monk dishonorably. It’s also one of his “spectacles of fearsome acts,” a declaration that he will not yield to Amsterdam’s efforts at egalitarianism without a fight. The death of the warlords will come by the sword.

Incensed by Monk’s death, Amsterdam challenges Bill to a gang fight. Simultaneously, the beginning of the draft causes New York’s working classes rise up with virulent fury. In all of Scorsese’s films, class and ethnic tensions simmer; here is a nightmare vision of when America’s mostly closeted skeletons of race and caste resentment emerge. Scorsese observes the root of American distrust of high culture; pop culture emerges from the chaotic swirl of the lower classes. The rich propagate high culture in their mansions; as rioters torch their shiny elegance, troves of classical-style paintings burn up. So, too, do political fliers showing the linked faces of Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Jimmy Spoils is lynched by the mob along with many other blacks. Jenny only avoids being murdered by shooting a woman.

Warships pummel the city, soldiers shoot rioters, and the streets run with blood. McGloin is gunned down, and Amsterdam and Bill fight in a dust cloud before another shell plants a shard of shrapnel in Bill’s side. “Thank god, I die a true American,” he says before allowing Amsterdam the coup de grace; he dies clutching the young man’s hand. The city is a burning, shattered mess, corpses laid out in long lines. Amsterdam attests, “All that we knew was mightily swept away.” The final shot is as great as the opening, as Amsterdam and Jenny pay tribute at Priest’s and Bill’s graves, side-by-side in a graveyard overlooking lower Manhattan. As they leave the frame, the burning skyline of a haunted city fades through phases in the Manhattan skyline, finally resting at the end of the 20th century, the Twin Towers still in place.

1990s, Auteurs, Drama

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

By Roderick Heath

1999 was one of the most important years for modern American film, as a rash of works by new auteurs and entries from older ones sparked controversy and conversation right across the new audience of cinephiles. In contrast with end-of-millennium positivism and alt-capitalist dreams of the dot-com boom, political and social cynicism reigned in films after the wasted opportunities of the Clinton administration; the year of the Seattle anti-globalization riots found much rhyme between street and screen. Several of the year’s most striking films, as diverse as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, David Fincher’s Fight Club, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix, and Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, presented noir-influenced portraits of social disintegration, wars of anarchy and nihilism played out within psyches, societies, and individuals, in hallucinations and digital realms and fantasy worlds, often within a compressed time period—a dark night of the soul indeed.

Scorsese’s impact on other filmmakers was finally becoming indelible, though audiences seemed to prefer him present in spirit rather than in new works themselves. Taxi Driver’s sociopathic spirit possesses Fight Club; Magnolia marries the disparate influence of Scorsese’s with that of his most serious rival for greatest modern American director, Robert Altman. After Casino, Scorsese made two aggressively noncommercial films that expanded his high-montage aesthetic to examine in the conscientious souls of the world. Kundun (1997), a portrait of the young Dalai Lama, is Scorsese’s most abstract film, conjuring a visual tapestry in observing his hero attain a state of grace in the face of suffering and massive loss. Bringing Out the Dead is intricately linked with Kundun, and also with Taxi Driver, to which it stands as a kind of response or repudiation whilst diving back into its nocturne-New York landscape. Scorsese had Paul Schrader pen the script, their first collaboration in 11 years, adapting a novel by former ambulance medic Joe Connelly detailing the pressures of that job in early 1990s New York. Where Travis Bickle surveyed his surroundings from his taxi with utmost misanthropy, Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) feels soul-crushing sympathy for the city that pulsates around him with crime, social disasters, and countless ghosts. Frank’s worked as an ambulance medic for five years, on graveyard shift. It’s been months since he saved anyone, since his ill-fated encounter with 18-year-old streetwalker Rose (Cynthia Roman), where attempts to get her breathing again resulted in her oxygen tube constantly going into her stomach instead of her lungs.

Now Frank is assailed by troubled sleep and nights at work alternating between near-hysteria and catatonic observation, jolting back shots of bourbon to get him through, seeing Rose’s face projected onto every potential patient on the streets. The film unfolds on three nights, on each of which Frank has a different partner; on Thursday, chubby, cheery, ambitious Larry (John Goodman); on Friday, evangelizing sex-obsessive Marcus (Ving Rhames), and on Saturday, sleazy nutball Tom Wolls (Tom Sizemore), Frank’s ex-permanent partner, with whom he was once “legends in their own lunch hour,” as their sarcastic dispatcher (Scorsese) recalls. On the Thursday night, hot and greasy, with a full moon to boot, Frank and Larry are called to a family residence to treat a mannamed Burke (Cullen Oliver Johnson) who’s suffered a heart attack. As the medics labour to restart the man’s heart, Frank advises his family to play music the man likes—Sinatra—mainly to give them something to do. Lo and behold, the man starts to respond. Amongst the family, it’s daughter Mary (Patricia Arquette) who seems both the most anguished and alert; she wants to ride in the ambulance, but Frank instead advises her to drive her family, who need her composure.

Frank and Larry truck Burke to Our Lady of Mercy Hospital, called Our Lady of Misery by the mordant medicos, a Hades whose Cerberus is fierce security guard Griss (Afemo Omilami). He constantly faces down a jabbering army of relatives and hangabouts with his signature threat: “Don’t make me take off my sunglasses!” Inside, charge nurse Constance (Mary Beth Hurt) sarcastically interrogates myriad alcoholics and junkies; the hallways are crowded with casualties; the patient’s arrival is greeted with groans from the doctor on duty, Hazmat (Nestor Serrano); “You told me he was dead, flat-line!” “He got better.” Mary recognizes one patient, Noel (Marc Anthony), pest to everyone else but someone her father had let stay in the family flat in his troubled youth. Noel’s strapped to his stretcher, crying for water, which no one will provide as Hazmat has diagnosed him with a liver condition. Mary unties him, and Noel runs to a fountain to guzzle. Mary explains with glassy tears that she can’t stand to see anyone, let alone Noel, tied down.

Partly out of pity and partly because he’s attracted to her bruised and melancholy beauty, over the next two days, Frank buys Mary pizza in between jobsand gives her rides to the hospital. In one gorgeous moment, the pair sits in the rear of the ambulance, rocking against each other, and Mary can barely restrain laughter. Mary offloads her anxieties to the routinely receptive Frank, explaining her and her father’s troubled relationship with her father—she had wished he would die, but now only longs for a chance to talk to him once more. Mary’s a recovering drug addict. “You probably picked me up once or twice,” she muses to Frank.

The medics like to ride to the rescue in life-and-death situations, and feel insulted when, too often the case, they merely cart around a regular clientele of substance abusers, mentally ill, and homeless. Also troubling them is a deadly new street drug, Red Death, that is causing a procession of ODs. With Scorsese’s customary propelling soundtrack, most importantly Van Morrison’s scorching blues “T.B. Sheets”, the film moves within tones of blood red and bright white light against molasses black; Frank feels like he lives in an underworld, and Robert Richardson’s camera aids Scorsese in conjuring an urban tale told by Poe.

Frank and Larry soon deal with Noel again; he’s suicidal and lays in the middle of a street to be run over. Frank gets him to come back to the hospital on the promise of giving him his choice of suicide methods (“Pills. Definitely pills!”). They’re diverted to a multiple shooting in which two young men have been wounded, Red Death vials scattered around them. Frank drafts Noel’s help as he tries to save one in the race back to the hospital; they arrive just as the man, who tearfully vows that he does not want to die and will join the army, expires. Noel promptly runs off at the sight of raw death.

Bringing Out the Dead shows impeccable tonal command. The film could have been a grueling or boring exercise, but Scorsese handles beautifully the alternation of adrenalin-provoking jobs and nocturnal chaos—the sheer visceral thrill and black humor of which keeps the medics, and us, interested—with moments of calm and melancholy, bleary daylight exhaustion and peace-seeking. Frank hopes he’ll be fired by his frazzled, motherly, male boss Captain Barney (Arthur Nascarella). But no one gets fired from this job, they’re too hard-up for staff, and wear and tear on individuals is inevitable; “I promise, I’ll fire you tomorrow!” Barney assures.Frank meditates on the pleasure of saving a life: “Saving someone’s life is like falling in love. The best drug in the world. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, you walk the streets, making infinite whatever you see…God has passed through you…why deny that for a moment there, God was you?”

Frank’s three partners all contrast Frank in their ways of coping, or not coping. Larry plans his meals assiduously and anticipates a day when “it’ll be Boss Larry calling the shots.” Marcus radiates religious passion, and the film’s black comedy highlight has Marcus making a bunch of Goths hold hands and pray whilst Frank resuscitates one of their friends from a Red Death overdose. He also taunts prostitutes with handfuls of cash and flirts relentlessly over the CB with Love (Queen Latifah), the alternate dispatcher whom he once took out on a date that ended with her hitting him over the head. When Marcus decides, against Frank’s pleas, to make an extra trip for the night and guns the motor, he crashes, flipping the vehicle on its side, a wreck from which Frank crawls in giddy laughter. Tom Wolls is completely split at the seams, on the far side of the chasm Frank’s trying to avoid falling into; Tom plans to beat Noel to death for being a nuisance.

The film is littered with wry observations of modern American racial and sexual politics; Griss can be seen reading a book called Black Robes, White Justice; Marcus claims “I never mixes my seed;” Mary, in her druggy daze, questions if Frank his Galahad attentiveness means he wants to fuck her (“Everybody else has…”). But despite the social-realist concerns of the film, Scorsese gives the film a surreal, voodoo-noir edge. Religious imagery and references are implied constantly—from the Plague cites (its title, the Red Death) inward—not with a proselytizing purpose, but with a conscientious irony. The names of the hospitals, even the schools Frank and Mary attended, present ingrained religious ideas that underlie these strenuous efforts to survive and heal. The pair are both from this neighborhood, but where Mary’s family stuck around, Frank’s took the path of white flight and may account in part for his guilty zeal. Frank encounters a “virgin birth” when he and Marcus help two Hispanic kids in a crack house, the male of whom assures them his girl can’t be pregnant because, as he proudly announces, “We’re virgins!” Frank also attends resurrections—of Burke and the Goth boy—and equivalents of crucifixions.

There’s also a seductive devil. Mary spends a second grinding night at the hospital, with her father constantly going into cardiac arrest, fighting for his life. In the morning, she goes to see Cy Coates (Cliff Curtis), a local drug kingpin, in desperate need of some emotional numbing. Frank promises to watch out for her and eventually follows her up to Coates’ apartment, a tranquil harbor where Cy holds court with his afro-haired girlfriend and various henchmen. Cy is a silk-tongued, effetely friendly magician of intoxicants who decries the Red Death as “poison”; he has his boys looking to deal with its dealers, and proposes himself as a community-minded man, which Mary later ridicules, knowing that Cy or one of his goons put the bullet in Noel’s head that has made him crazy. With Mary unconscious, Frank lets Cy slip him a downer. Frank plummets into a hallucinogenic dream where he struggles to aid an army of ghosts in escaping the earth, and then relives Rose’s death, where snow rises back into the sky. Frank awakens in screaming rage and drags the stoned Mary from Cy’s place, before collapsing in her apartment. When he awakes, he muses beatifically on the joys of washing his hands with her scented bars of soap.

Cage was in one of his periodic disgraces for appearing in too many action films (around this time, I heard Cage described by one critic as a ham and by another as wooden) after his Oscar win for the tawdry, faux-realist Leaving Las Vegas (1996). But Cage fulfills his role as Frank with a haunted grace and hard emotional commitment. Like another underrecognized, late-career classic, Kurosawa’s Red Beard, Bringing Out the Dead is a statement of the necessity of human relationships and altruistic responsibility. Frank seeks fulfillment from helping people, a dedication little rewarded and brutally self-abnegating. As in Casino, Scorsese uses the fate of the villain as a catalyst, except that where Nicky’s grim end underlined a disgust in violence, here Cy presents Frank an opportunity to save a life when the Red Death dealers shoot up Cy’s flat, driving Cy to try leaping from his balcony. Cy ends up skewered on the railing, dangling floors above a crowd crying for a spectacle. The police rescuers who don’t care if he falls or not; Frank risks his life to prevent him plummeting to earth as Cy crows joyfully as the sparks of their cutting torches light the sky like fireworks.

But saving a life doesn’t relieve Frank. He decides what he wants is violence, and, by now terribly strung out, lets Tom talk him into helping him assault Noel, everyone’s victim. This involves following Noel into a red-soaked labyrinth where the homeless sleep. It’s like walking into hell; the image of sin that confronts him is Tom cracking Noel’s bones with a baseball bat. Frank drives Tom away and takes Noel to be patched up. Frank realises he needs to learn to let go, which he enacts by plugging Mr. Burke’s monitors to his own body and letting the man, whom he has imagined is begging for death, die. He then goes to tell Mary of his death, in the course of which he imagines he’s apologizing to Rose as well. “It’s not your fault,” Mary/Rose replies.

The final shot is of Mary cradling Frank on her bed, white light flooding the frame. It’s the most hopeful final image of any Scorsese film to that point, especially for Scorsese’s most likable, if troubled, male-female partnering since Charlie and Theresa in Mean Streets. Frank, like Jesus and the Dalai Lama before him in the Scorsese canon, is a selfless figure who is rewarded for his sheer courage in the face of intimidating odds; but Frank is an ordinary guy, rather than a religious icon. He is great simply in his willingness to recognize and still fight his limitations to serve the people around him. Bringing Out the Dead effortlessly outclasses the shallow social commentary of Fight Club or that year’s Best Picture winner, American Beauty, not just in technique, but for its feel for the gnarled, aching landscape of modern urban life. It has a breadth of heart and mind to grant its heroes a true sense of the world beyond their own tawdry frustrations.

1990s, Auteurs, Drama

Casino (1995)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

Casino presents the rare, inspiring sight of a director pushing his capacities, obsessions, and stylistic experimentation to the limit. Scorsese’s attempts to shunt narrative and explore worlds through montage and voiceover, to fuse high and low culture, to gain panoramic insight into America, to show violence as harsh and ugly as possible—all pushed to the far edge in Casino. If The Age of Innocence is Scorsese at his most poised, Casino is Marty gone primeval. It’s a film where a shot from within a cocaine snorter’s straw, white flakes hoovered up towards the camera like a sandstorm, seems subtle. The film that erupts in its opening scene—literally, as Robert De Niro seems to be blown sky high by a car bomb to strains of Bach’s “Matthaus Passion”—becomes an opera of the sordid (the credits also represent the last work of the great film editor and title designer Saul Bass). Scorsese’s first film in 12 years without Michael Ballhaus is instead filmed in the bolder colors and light-diffusing style of Robert Richardson. Richardson’s camera drinks in a landscape of bad wigs and make-up caked faces, cocaine and blood, phony glamour and phonier humanity.

For all this, Casino is a film about marriage—bad marriage on a Shakespearean scale undone by what kills most marriages: money, distrust, and infidelity. Casino is another logical step up from the street-level quasi-hoods of Mean Streets. It pointedly lacks the comforting blue-collar attitude of the Goodfellas crew; Jimmy the Gent, Tommy, and Paulie are lovable when contrasted with the at-all-costs obscenity of Las Vegas and its resident hoods. In its cut-up aesthetics and spurning of the subtle, Casino was Scorsese’s angriest, most punkish film since Taxi Driver and joined two other exciting films from the mid 90s—Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls —in offering a purposefully excessive take on the city of excess; like those films, though not as severely, Casino was greeted without adulation.

But Casino is Scorsese’s great burn-it-down statement, the furthest end of his disgust and delight in everything seamy in American culture. He films Las Vegas in all its Technicolor glory and grotesquery, a symphonic swirl of lights, sex, currency, and gore. The film follows the true story of alleged mob tool Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Chicago mobsters Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, and Frank Cullotta, rendered here as Sam “Ace” Rothstein (Robert De Niro), Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), and Frank Marino (Frank Vincent). Sam and Nicky are boyhood friends, the closest the film gets to the “years ago back home” vibe of Goodfellas or Mean Streets. Sam is a great gambler, a scientist of chance, who has, up to the early 70s, made his living as a bookie at the behest of the mob. He leaps at the shot at managing the new Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas, theoretically controlled by developer Phillip Green (Kevin Pollak) who’s borrowed financing from the infamous Teamsters Pension Fund. This, of course, means it’s a mob-controlled development. The Mafia dons, headed by Remo Gaggi (Pasquale Cajano), won’t venture any closer to Vegas than Kansas City, the future of their cash cow requiring a squeaky-clean image whilst their finely calibrated skims bring in titanic revenue.

Sam does his job with micromanagerial finesse and ice-cold authority. His awareness of systems— systems of control, systems of surveillance, and the systems of luck—is brilliantly spelled out by Scorsese’s ever-mobile camera. He knows that, for all the illusions the town presents, the house almost always wins, and even when it doesn’t, it can be dealt with. He can sabotage big winners, as he does with a Japanese high roller, keeping him stranded in town until he gambles away all he has won, and ruthlessly punishes cheats. One gets his hand smashed with a hammer by his partner, who is offered a choice between “the money and the hammer” or walking away. In a fashion, Sam and the rest in Casino also have chosen the money and the hammer.

Sam enjoys his apparent acceptance into elite circles, his status, wealth, and power, which he’s never been allowed before. “Vegas was like Lourdes. All our sins were washed away.” Yet Sam isn’t a happy pawn. He wants to be legitimized, gain a Nevada gaming license—requiring years of bureaucracy and bribery—and a wife. He sets his eyes on Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), the most beautiful, sexy, clever, greedy hustler in town. Sam uses the omnipresent surveillance system of the Tangiers to watch her bilking a gambler and steps in to save her when he gets uppity. Ginger is a virtual personification of the city, a mesmerizing surface over a heart of steel, greedy, dishonest, and perversely attached to sleazy beginnings. Sam proves his ardor with a nest egg of a million dollars’ worth of jewelry, which Ginger fawns over with childish glee before it’s locked in a safe deposit box at the bank. For Sam, it’s a pledge of trust and fidelity; for her it’s the golden egg from a goose ripe for the dinner table. He doesn’t marry her until they have a daughter together, Amy (Erika von Tagen), a sure way, he thinks, of binding her close.

When Nicky arrives with his crew of heavies, including brother Dominick (Philip Suriano) and Marino, he’s been sent by Remo to protect Sam and the operation. But Nicky has a very different idea of his Vegas mission. He establishes kingpin status, robbing and intimidating left, right, and center. Nicky soon gets himself banned from every casino in town, and attracts an army of police and FBI agents, forlornly trying to catch him on something. Sam knows what the pint-sized psychopath is capable of: he has seen Nicky stab a man in the neck with a fountain pen for a flash of brusque attitude. Nicky thinks nothing of threatening bankers, working over bookies, or shooting Phillip Green’s litigious ex-business partner—a middle-aged, middle-class woman—in the head. When a gang shoots up a local diner, Nicky is ordered to punish them. He tortures their leader, eventually putting his head in a vice and popping an eyeball from its socket, before cutting his throat. He also gets up every morning to make his son breakfast and eagerly chats with cops watching their sons at Little League games.

Sam is unable to restrain Nicky, and is even resented for his attempts to play Mr. Legit: “We’re supposed to be robbin’ this place, you dumb fuckin’ hebe!” Nor can Sam maintain authority over Ginger, who keeps a flame for her first lover and pimp, Lester Diamond (James Woods, defining “sleazeball”), who cajoles her for money whilst keeping her psyche on a short leash. He can hypnotize her over the phone by recalling the “young colt with braces on her teeth” he sold. Sam detests the man as much as Ginger pities and adores him. When Lester taps Ginger for $5,000, Sam gives it to him, but then has Nicky’s goons work him over, to Ginger’s hysterical protest. Ginger descends into drugs and drink. In her unstable, paranoid state, she convinces herself that Sam will have her killed, and begins coming on to Nicky as a potential protector, an act that can only have evil consequences.

Cue what was voted the worst sex scene in screen history by one newspaper’s readers: Joe Pesci screwing Sharon Stone. It’s logical in this film exploring a world of sensual excess. Here, indulgence has long outstripped desire, a substitution which, consistently in Scorsese, is the worst possible sin, and one too readily tempting in rich America. Not for the first time, Scorsese dragged a career-best performance from a star, here Stone, who inhabits her half-mad minx with bodily force. In comparison, Pesci is close to parodic and De Niro’s Sam is a much cooler performance than he usually delivered for Scorsese, fittingly as Rothstein’s relative sympathy contrasts his surrounds, but with some lurches into familiar tics (“Can I trust you?…Can I trust you? Answer me, can I trust you?”). It’s also Scorsese’s last collaboration with De Niro until The Irishman (2019).

The poisonous threesome of Sam-Nicky-Ginger sends this tale careening into insanity, but other events help, like when FBI agents, bugging the grocery store of put-upon don Artie Piscano (Vinnie Vella), overhear him bitching about his responsibilities to his curse-shy mother (Catherine Scorsese, in her last part for her son before dying in 1997). Nicky can still run rings around them. Agents watching Nicky in a light plane run out of petrol and have to land on a golf course where he and his goons are playing; they happily pelt the plane with golf balls. But Nicky has unbalanced Vegas’ stability. The casino cash-counters who perform the skimming soon begin pilfering for themselves. Marino soon finds himself piggy in the middle, having to answer questions from Remo over the dwindling revenue and whether Nicky is screwing Ginger. Worse, Sam gains far too much attention when his refusal to humor local redneck nepotism results in failure to get his license. He explodes at a Gaming Commission, rants to reporters, and gives himself a high-profile television host to justify hanging around the Tangiers.

Sam is the only person in the film who maintains relative dignity and sympathy, for his professionalism and especially his fatherly concern for Amy, who, at one point, is tied to her bed by her mother who wishes to go out for the evening. In the screenplay, Sam was to have had Lester killed by Nicky, but this was left out of the film, perhaps because Sam is the story’s only link to common humanity. Like so many Scorsese heroes, Sam is defined by his yearning, his desire to transcend his lot and live his version of the American dream through Vegas, the institutionalized loophole in American post-puritan morality. Yet his ferocious poise in gambling and management is matched by a lack of emotional smarts, and his willingness to employ thuggery in settling a romantic rival’s hash, his unleashed loathing for an establishment of country club blazers and cowboy hats who won’t let a Jewish bookie join their ranks, all doom him.

The recreated cocaine-stained polyester and sleazestache chic of 70s style is noxiously intense (largely responsible for the glut of 70s retro films of the late 90s), Scorsese’s culture riffing alternately playful—like the painfully exact recreation of Sam’s TV show or caricature of Siegfried and Roy—and carefully planned. Like the soundtrack’s use of three different versions of “Satisfaction”—from the Stones’ driving, declaratory original to Devo’s disintegrating, masturbatory edition—Nicky and Sam’s control dissolves in a welter of blow-induced shootings and soul-grinding jealousies. Scorsese honors his locale with typical idiosyncrasy, by casting Vegas headline comedians like Alan King, Don Rickles (as two of Sam’s casino lieutenants, Andy Stone and Billy Sherbert), and Tom Smothers.

Casino fulfills Scorsese’s interest in the mechanics of violence, power, and criminality, and opens up territory suggested in The Age of Innocence and Raging Bull in studying not just social outsiders, but its winners, to study how often in American society that old adage of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s about there being no second acts in American lives, proves true, and why. Sam, Ginger, and Nicky triumph by being the most exacting, enthusiastic, and ruthless in their fields. They are pure entrepreneurs, but their utter confusion of success with plunder destroys all three of them to varying degrees. Ginger and Nicky are seriously screwed-up people, and Sam’s offering all he has to a woman he knows is venal and untrustworthy reeks of masochism. Casino moves from Goodfellas’ true-crime black comedy to a new realm, one of classical tragedy. As in Euripides and Shakespeare, it uses the extreme lives of its colossal characters to reflect on ordinary human faults, allowed to reach an extreme through the scale of their lives. Most people only feel like the world collapses when their marriage busts up, but in Casino it literally does.

Ginger runs off with Lester, taking Amy with her, then crawls back when Lester blows all their money. Sam, fuming, accepts her but bitterly harps on Lester’s waste and finally spits death threats. Ginger only wants to get her hands on her safe deposit box, but Sam won’t hand it over, knowing it’s the only way he can keep her around. His and Ginger’s concussive brawls and mutual abuse result in Sam dragging Ginger by her hair down a hallway and throwing her out, only to have her return in the middle of the night, their rage temporarily spent. Ginger tries to push Sam by declaring Nicky is her new sponsor, but Nicky contemptuously has her thrown out of his restaurant in her hysterical state. Sam, justifiably paranoid that Nicky’s goons will arrive, has Sherbert come with a shotgun. All they get is Ginger instead, repeatedly ramming Sam’s car in their driveway. She uses the police intervention to snatch the key to the safe deposit box, and beats Sam to the bank to make off with her treasure chest, only to be stopped by detectives.

But they’re not after her—they’re drawing the net on the whole operation. They even try to get Sam to rat on Nicky by showing him photos of Nicky and Ginger together; he shuts the door on them. Still, Remo and the bosses, Nicky, Frank, dozens of made men,and parasites are arrested. In reply, the bosses order a bloodbath. Witnesses, weak links, traitors, and the problematic litter the landscape from Kansas to Costa Rica. Nicky and his brother, released on bail, are met in a cornfield by Frank and their crew. The boys, happy at the chance to remove the scary little creep from their lives, hold Nicky down and force him to watch them beat Dominic to a bloody pulp, and then do the same to him, before burying them both alive in a dusty grave. It’s perhaps the rawest scene of violence ever in a mainstream American film, and Scorsese finally confronts a limit here, both of what he can get away with and of the lifestyle of these people. This is what’s at the center of the onion he’s peeled, and fittingly for an angry repudiation of violence, it’s Nicky the psycho who’s the suddenly sympathetic victim. The only amusing aspect is that Frank Vincent finally has revenge for the beatings he received from Pesci in Raging Bull and Goodfellas.

What’s left of Casino’s narrative runs out on burning sand, scored with perhaps Scorsese’s most perfect sound-vision fusion by The Animal’s version of “House of the Rising Sun.” That most iconic of blues songs—like the film—mixes cautionary tale, deterministic social argument, and ironic sensual celebration. Alan Price’s organ burns away as Ginger, as a groaning husk, drops dead in an anonymous hotel hallway, murdered with a hot dose of heroin, her fortune squandered. Sam, we find, is saved from a bomb planted in his car only by incredible fortune. Our last image of an aging, thick-spectacled Ace Rothstein, is another Scorsese Odysseus washed up on the shore, emptied of torturous passions and laden with experience, happy to be simply alive. As old Vegas collapses flames, he muses with due sarcasm about the laundering of the town; gone is, at least, the sense that the town was run by human beings, guys like himself who had risen from nothing, replaced by corporations. America’s playground becomes another place for the bedazzled and hopeful to give their money away to the giants.

1990s, Auteurs, Drama

Goodfellas (1990)

By Roderick Heath

My clothes may still be torn and tattered/
But in my heart I’d be a king/
Your love is all that ever mattered/
It’s everything.
– “Rags to Riches” by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, performed by Tony Bennett

Knocked out in bed last night/
I´ve had my fill, my share of looting/
And now, the tears subside/
I find it all so amusing/
To think, I killed a cat/
And may I say, oh no, not their way/
But no, no, not me/
I did it my way.
– “My Way” by Claude François, Jacques Revau, Paul Anka, and Sid Vicious, performed by Sid Vicious

1990 was a vintage year for gangster films. Francis Coppola revisited old turf with the underrated, operatic The Godfather Part III; the Coen Brothers made a typically skewed visitation to the Hammett/Chandler subgenre with Miller’s Crossing; Stephen Frears tried Jim Thompson’s hardboiled milieu with The Grifters. But it was Martin Scorsese who laid down the template for a glut of gangland portraits with Goodfellas, creating surely the most stylistically influential film of the following decade. Goodfellas’ punchy aesthetic is reflected in films as diverse as Donnie Brasco (Mike Newell, 1997), Boogie Nights (Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997), Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994), through to TV’s The Sopranos. Countless pseudo-indie confections made its tone-setting, narrative-driving voiceovers irritatingly popular.

After the cacophony that met The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas must have felt like safe ground, and Scorsese was handsomely repaid with his most generally admired work. For most of its running time, Goodfellas is an experiment in sheer cinematic motion – a deeply expressive virtuosity, structured like a cocaine binge, all electric pulse and giddy thrills to begin with, concluding in sweaty paranoia and collapsed perspectives. It’s impossible to forget the impact of first watching the film and being instantly hauled along by its compulsive force, the giddy, dirty life story Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) narrates. We meet Henry during a moment of staggering brutality: his friends Jimmy Conway (Robert de Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) shooting and stabbing a groaning, bloodied man in the trunk of their car.

Henry slams the trunk shut, and Scorsese freezes frame on his pale, sweat-flecked face, to the immortal voiceover announcement, “All my life all I ever wanted was to be a gangster.” In five minutes we know all there is to know about Henry and why he ended up confronting this, and why his expression looked like he was thinking, “Well, I knew there’d be days like this.” As it happens to Henry, so the film happens to us; the logic is there, but shit happens so quickly you hardly know it. Henry’s a half-Italian, half-Irish, blue-collar boy (played young by Christopher Serrone) whose working-class life of straitened circumstances and furious belt beatings looks like excellent training for the brutality, avarice, and lordly authority gangland life offers. Henry starts his underworld career as a gofer for local Mafia heavy Paulie (Paul Sorvino) and the vibrating network of hoods, stick-up artists, skimmers, and scammers he patronises.

In the arc of Scorsese’s career, Goodfellas was important not just for being a return to the criminal milieu underpinning Mean Streets and Raging Bull – although, unlike those films, Goodfellas is about the men on the far side of the invisible line that Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Jake La Motta danced on – but also as a return to his neo-realist inspirations. Goodfellas achieves its great impact by fusing the slickest of modern movie technical, editing, and storytelling techniques, with a carefully expostulated charting of a specific milieu utilising a flavorful verisimilitude straight from the neo-realist playbook by using real ex-mobsters in the cast and the casting Scorsese’s parents in key roles. Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi adapted Pileggi’s nonfiction account of Hill’s life, Wiseguys, which was dedicated to analysing and describing just how the mob works in all its sleazy, entrancing details.

The film warps our perspective, not just with Henry’s incessantly nasal, quick-fire patter reproducing a high-pressure salesman’s enthralling seduction of the senses whilst numbing critical faculties, with his constant phrasings (“it’s just good business,” “makes sense,” etc.) ad nauseum. Scorsese furthers the effect with tunnel-vision framing, edits, and dizzying camera movements – most famously, the single-take tracking shot in which Henry, trying to wow girlfriend Karen (Lorraine Bracco), treats her to the alternative entrance to the Copacabana, passing through kitchens and hallways, greeting chefs, waiters, necking couples, and celebrities with easy flair, to a table summoned from nowhere especially for this VIP. She (and we) is knocked flat by the effect. Much later, as Henry descends into coked-up, paranoid hysteria, Scorsese, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (this is the film credit he’ll probably want carved on his tombstone) go all out – whip-pans, flash edits, zoom shots, dollies, tracking shots, distorted sound, jaggedly intercut musical cues – in a sequence as impressive to film makers, who have hailed it as an experimental film construction in itself, as it is to ex-junkies for whom the sequence is queasily accurate.

Goodfellas shows how crime families are just that – families consisting of people who spend all their time together, living, dying, raising families in each other’s laps. Henry’s vicious upbringing makes him drawn to the earned respect and familial trust of the mob. He and Tommy are virtual favourite nephews to Jimmy’s corrupting uncle when he’s the local dapper gent, god to all the two-bit punks. When Henry is busted for the first time, he is greeted by a celebration (“You lost your cherry!”) as affirmation he has now passed the final rite of passage for a wiseguy. As Henry sells it, the Mafia life is the ultimate refusal to kowtow to moneyed authority and the deadening demands made on working-class men – befitting the Mafia’s roots in Sicilian quarrymen’s attempts at union-building (the Italian phrase “syndicate” that has come to refer to the Mafia, also means “union”) – who earn with sweat and (literal) blood a life of luxury and authority that ordinarily would be denied them.

That Tommy is an explosive psychopath is only of concern to Henry and Jimmy when he turns it on them – otherwise he’s the kind of scary force you’re glad to have in your corner. Tommy casually shoots a lippy waiter (Michael Imperioli) and is willing to risk assassination by their Mafia overlords to get revenge on obnoxious Bill Batts (Pesci’s old stand-up buddy Frank Vincent, getting his second beating off Pesci in a Scorsese film), a made man who teases Tommy about his childhood job shining shoes. Pesci’s signature moment – which, according to legend, Scorsese let him write and direct himself, and which did most of the work in capturing him his 1990 Best Supporting Actor Oscar – is when, in joking over drinks, he suddenly seems to take offence to Henry calling him “a funny guy.” Although he eventually realises it’s a put-on, Henry is momentarily a deer caught in Tommy’s headlights. It’s entirely possible, and he knows it, Tommy might shoot him for the perceived insult.

But most of the time, Tommy’s their trouble-prone, motor-mouthed kid brother whose mother (Catherine Scorsese in her most indelible performance for her son) pesters him to get married, and who cheerfully takes the boys to her place and has them sit down for dinner with her whilst Batts is locked in the trunk. atts’ death echoes right through the film, both as the first true reality check and a narrative refrain at various points: when the dons look for their missing paisano, when the trio have to dig up the rotting corpse from its forest grave, right through to when Tommy gets a bullet in the brain when he’s expecting to be made a member of the Mafia fellowship he has insulted by killing Batts. It’s a thoroughly deserved death, but Jimmy and Henry weep for their comrade.

The film’s second narrative voice is Karen’s. Bracco arguably gives the film’s best performance, sublimely communicating in body language her arc from fiery young suburbanite to a middle-aged woman addled by cocaine and cynicism. Karen is no innocent victim or clueless neighbourhood wife. She readily admits, when Henry sticks a gun in her hand, that it turns her on. Initially volatile, having been thrown together on a double date neither wanted, Henry eventually cements their relationship by beating a neighbour who molested her. It’s instantly apparent to Karen that Henry achieves the things – hard revenge, wads of cash, universal respect – most guys promise, and she swiftly lets herself be seduced by it.

Her own ironic perspective on events – she’s middle class, Jewish, independent-minded – sees her aghast at the classless, foul-mouthed, violent mob wives like Rosie (Illeana Douglas) she’s supposed to hang with, the industrial-grade brutality, tackiness, and socially incestuous people she’s now surrounded by. But she’s fine with that as long as Henry’s handing her inch-thick bundles of bills (and not that Karen and Henry’s tastes are especially superior – when they give a tour of their newly furnished house, it’s an empire of kitsch). She loses her cool steadily in dealing with Henry’s institutionalised infidelity with Janice (Gina Mastrogiacomo), a lengthy imprisonment (she puts up with years of raising kids and struggling on her own without help – the moment he gets out, taking in their crummy house, he declares “We’re moving.”), until one morning he awakens with her jamming a revolver in his face, interrogating him about his girlfriend. It’s catching, this violence thing. The pair reconciles on the orders of Paulie – the Mafia’s family values are more about the potential security breaches of busted marriages than actual emotional concern.

Henry, Tommy, and Jimmy make most of their money through robberies, especially hijackings and skims done from the freight terminals at Idlewild/JFK Airport which is on their turf; Henry also, whilst in prison, branches out into drug dealing, which Paulie has strictly forbidden him to do. The cosiness of their lives finally shatters when they pull off one of the biggest heists in history, ripping off Lufthansa of several million dollars. It renders them the most triumphant group of criminals in the country and the most paranoid. Soon Jimmy’s got Tommy and other thugs assassinating all the noncertifiably trustworthy partners in the heist, like Stacks Edwards (Samuel L. Jackson) and wig salesman Morrie Kessler (Chuck Low), whom Henry tries, ultimately unsuccessfully, to save from Tommy’s ice pick. Morrie’s the kind of guy who’s just born to be murdered, a clinging, cajoling, money-hungry schmuck; we, and Henry, cringe in defensive longing. The film’s almost unique in showing how truly dumb and loosely organised most of these people are – Henry’s drug posse includes his wheelchair-bound brother, his sexpot girlfriend (who leaves cocaine-glutted cookware around her flat), and his superstitious stoner babysitter. Only violence and codes of ethics keep this world in motion, and finally Henry realises even these don’t necessarily count for much.

Morrie’s TV spot is a superb recreation of cheap advertising style, cementing another of the film’s strong aspects. Scorsese, always sharp with cultural reference and satire, also provided a blueprint for the increased pop cultural awareness of ’90s filmmaking, with his vividly utilised retro soundtrack and constant refrains to ephemera, like Henny Youngman entertaining at the Copa and polka king Bobby Vinton (played by his son Robbie), continually providing cultural context for the events portrayed. Early in the film, Tony Bennett’s gorgeous “Rags to Riches” blares, a height of Italian-American jazz-pop both declaring a cultural ascendency and providing an ironic counterpoint of emotional riches with the gangsters’ greed.

After the ugly fallout from the heist, Tommy is brutally whacked; confronted with an empty room that should be filled with Cosa Nostra elders, he ejects “Oh no!” before having his brains sprayed over the tiled floor. Jimmy begins to make overtures to Henry that sound alarmingly like invitations to get whacked after he’s busted by DEA officers after his day-long crack-up. Karen calls him paranoid until she herself feels mysteriously threatened when Jimmy seems to be trying to set her up for a gang assault on the pretext of selecting some second-hand furniture. This convinces them both to flee for the cover of the witness protection program. Henry shops Paulie and Jimmy out for stiff stretches, whilst he lives out the rest of his life in squaresville suburbia, haunted by the image of a vengeful Tommy shooting at him, to the strains of Sid Vicious’ punk brutalisation of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” – a logical end for a steady decline from glam to sham.

Made hugely famous by the film, Hill, now long divorced from Karen, got himself kicked out of the WPP for eagerly announcing his identity to anyone who’d seen the movie, went back to prison for a stretch, and now stars in every other cable TV documentary on the mob. (It’s an interesting job to compare the film with the TV-made film The Million Dollar Getaway (1991), about the Lufthansa heist, featuring John Mahoney as Jimmy the Gent. In the latter film, Jimmy is portrayed as a folk hero contending with the determination of his Mafia partners to kill all the good blue-collar boys who actually committed the crime and keep the dough for themselves.)

The final shot of Tommy blasting at the camera is a direct quote of The Great Train Robbery (1902), the first American narrative film, and western, and crime flick. As well as summarizing Henry’s final mood, it makes a statement about the history of filmmaking and American society, the long drift from Wild West banditry to suburban conformity, which Henry lives out in a particularly surreal, compressed version. Scorsese also puts in a shot of Karen watching The Jazz Singer (1927), the first sound film, which is both appropriate to her character – a Jewish kid alienated from her parents like Jolson’s titular hero – and another turning point in cinematic history, continuing Scorsese’s self-conscious motif. In the course of the film, he uses just about every narrative and cinematic trick extant, and these references seem to complement his awareness that in the 146 minutes of Goodfellas, he had found the perfect material to realise his own ideal of cinema’s potential.

1980s, Auteurs, Drama, Religious

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

Whilst making Boxcar Bertha in 1972, Barbara Hershey gave Martin Scorsese a book, The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis, the Greek author whose novel Alexis Zorba became the famous film with Anthony Quinn. The novel of the Christ led to Kazantzakis’ excommunication, and the work was often banned. Last Temptation remained lodged in Scorsese’s imagination until he began developing the project in the early 1980s. Nervousness pervaded all stages of bringing the film to realization. Paramount, which had agreed to bankroll the film, pulled out before shooting began. The production went ahead in Morocco on a $7 million budget provided by Universal and Cineplex/Odeon.

The early hand-wringing proved justified by the film’s reception. Christian organizations lobbied for its banning. Some offered to buy the negative for the production cost and destroy it. Picket lines attended screenings. French zealots threw Molotov cocktails at a Parisian showing. Wildfire controversy accompanied the work wherever it went. If it was a grindhouse film, its video cover might still boast “Banned by Bulgaria and Blockbuster!” All this from a guy who came close to enrolling in the seminary? You’d think Marty had portrayed Jesus as joining in a cocaine-fuelled threesome with Mary and Judas and voicing support for Michael Dukakis. Rather, The Last Temptation of Christ is merely a vivid, strident, intellectually curious work. It is also possibly Scorsese’s greatest film—not that it’s ever likely to win that consensus from a popular culture that has made a fetish of Taxi Driver or Goodfellas—and one of the most vigorous and original religious films ever made.

Kazantzakis’ written prologue establishes the spiritual territory; the disturbing, incomprehensible struggle of a man who is also divine to reconcile the struggles between the flesh and godliness. The Jesus thus conjured is not a beatifically smiling savior assured of his own rectitude and sublime purpose, but (as embodied by Willem Dafoe, dedicated to the role with hypnotic effort), instead chased by restless dread and unseen torments, filled with self-loathing and hate for the God he knows wants something great and terrible from him. He struggles through deadly stigmatic fits and phases of doubt, fear, anger, despair, and human longing.

Spurning the lamentable history of Jesus flicks, Last Temptation dedicates itself to a portrait of the beginnings of Christianity as it sprang from the brute soil of Roman-occupied Judea—this raw, dirty, poverty-stricken landscape on the edge of both the Empire and the realms of the human psyche; beyond here is only the bone-cracking desert, playground of Yahweh and Satan. Judea’s native culture has been reduced to ineffective theatre. It’s a multicultural crossroads, infused with Bedouins, Arabs, Persians, and Africans, tough and vital. The land has turned its attention to wandering preachers and soothsayers like John the Baptist. Guerrilla resistance simmers; the Zealots, including Saul (Harry Dean Stanton), act as paramilitary enforcers, searching out traitors both religious and secular. Jesus has made himself a pariah by being the only carpenter willing to manufacture crosses for the Romans. He even participates in crucifying a seditious prophet, anticipating his own hideous fate. “God loves me…I want him to stop! … I make crosses so he’ll hate me. I want him to find somebody else!”

Jesus determines to pursue his fate, and leaves his home and mother (Verna Bloom). Walking the shores of Galilee, he senses himself being followed by an invisible thing that strikes him with pain before directing him to the house of Mary Magdalene (Hershey – Scorsese made her audition so she wouldn’t think he was just returning the favor of the loan of the book in casting her). He watches the degrading sensual spectacle of Mary with her clients for the day. At the crucifixion he helped perform, Mary, amongst the jeerers, had spat in his face. Jesus begs her forgiveness; they were childhood sweethearts, but Mary lost Jesus to his crisis, which caused him to reject the possibility of marrying her. Broken-hearted and out of suitors, taking up a whore’s life was her only option, and she taunts him sexually and emotionally with forlorn rage. And yet a powerful friendship still holds them together.

Jesus reaches a remote, rugged, desert monastery. He is greeted by the spirit of the recently deceased Abbot, who states that he knows who Jesus is. Jesus confesses his purposes and weaknesses to young monk Jerobeam (Barry Miller), who tries to advise him on the tasks that confront him. When two black cobras emerge from a hole in his cell and speak with Mary’s voice, Jerobeam recognizes it as a sign Jesus’ impurities have been cast out, and he can return to the world.

The film’s greatest twist on the traditional story is Judas, embodied with great force and emotional complexity by Harvey Keitel. Taking a cue from the Gnostic texts, Judas is Jesus’ angry doppelganger, another childhood friend who has become an agent of the Zealots. Jesus takes Judas’ knock for whatever it is that dogs him, and indeed, he is the incarnation of Jesus’ merciless responsibility. Judas kicks at Jesus’ tools and wood for the cross he’s building, and when Jesus plaintively explains, “I’m struggling,” Judas ripostes, “I struggle. You collaborate!” When Jesus returns from the desert, Judas holds a knife to his throat—the Zealots have ordered his assassination. Jesus accepts the knife if it’s what God wants for him, but, stirred by Judas’ hesitance, suggests, “Perhaps He didn’t send you here to kill me. Maybe He sent you to follow me.”

Judas walks with Jesus back to civilization, stating “If you stray this much from the path, I’ll kill you.” A righteous opportunity quickly presents itself; the pair comes upon Mary being stoned by a mob, scapegoat for festering frustration. Jesus intervenes, facing down the righteous hypocrites, accosting wealthy Zebadee (Irvin Kershner—yes, the one who directed The Empire Strikes Back) with a telling count of his sins: “He’s seen you cheat your workers! And what about that widow you visit, what’s her name?” Jesus leads them instead to deliver the Sermon on the Mount, except that both the crowd and the impact of his words aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Jesus is too crippled by the conflict of his ideas and impulses to trust himself as a preacher: “God is so many miracles. What if I say the wrong thing? What if I say right thing?”

Jesus gives a parable of a farmer sewing wheat, some of which withers, some of which finds no soil, and some of which grows and feeds a nation, and then explains, when he’s met with stony looks, he’s the farmer. His parable proves immediately true; some declare him an idiot, some take him for a provocateur and bay for blood, and some, the most intellectually and spiritually curious, are intrigued. Jesus’ band of adherents swells. Taking a leaf from Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of St Francis, Scorsese uses the Apostles for gently, highly human, comic relief as they fight for sleeping space by the fire. Judas finds them silly and useless, whilst Jesus ponders the purpose-sapping contradictions of his efforts. His return to Nazareth is met by mockery and stones.

Judas suggests they go to see John the Baptist (Andre Gregory), who condenses the spirit of the Old Testament in his scrawny, wild-haired body. He rants prophesies of judgment, brimstone, godly wrath. “Now he sounds like the Messiah!” Judas croaks. They have come upon The Baptist at a ceremony, surrounding by religious ecstatics; women dance naked, drums bang, chants sound. As Jesus comes toward John from behind, John turns abruptly, just as Jesus had with his own unseen pursuer, and demands, “Who are you?” The noise of the ceremony dies, leaving only the sound of rippling river water, and does not return until John anoints Jesus’ head.

This is a scene that captures Scorsese’s jarring approach at its finest. Scorsese achieves a vivid sense of the past by spurning pure historical detail; he emphasizes the raw remoteness of time and place by mixing Judaic scenery with multicultural tropes. Roman soldiers are dressed in stylized garb that might have come from a punk staging of Jesus Christ Superstar. Isaiah visits Jesus in a bleached Darth Vader costume. With dashes of ’80s New Wave and punk aesthetic, right down to Peter Gabriel’s gorgeously weird score and casting alterna-music figures like David Bowie and John Lurie, Scorsese reinvents history with a melding of modernist dance, art, and film styles. Partly enforced by the low budget, there is a complete rejection of epic plush; this is a desert world.

“The God of Israel is a God of the desert,” John the Baptist tells Jesus, and that is where he must now go for his first confrontation with Satan, a pillar of flame with an elegantly mocking English accent (voiced by Leo Marks, writer of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom). The miracles, visions, and apparitions are starkly simple, in contrast with Mel Gibson’s setting in the The Passion of the Christ, where the only angels one could sense Gibson’s God trying to hold back were ten-thousand CGI artists (one could write another essay comparing these two films).

Facing down Satan’s taunts finally gives Jesus the warlike purpose he lacked; he returns with an axe he finds in the sand, ready for revolution, and pulls his heart from his body to display his newly granted capacity for miracles and to awe his followers. He passes through the landscape determined to heal and cast out demons; madmen and cripples slither out of crevices like he’s dragging the disease out of the flesh of the earth. Lobbied to raise Lazarus (Tomas Arana), brother of Mary (Randy Danson) and Martha (Peggy Gormley), who sheltered Jesus when he returned from fasting, Jesus bids the stone on his tomb rolled away, at which point everyone covers their face from the stench. Yet Lazarus still claws his way out of his tomb, numbed and covered in green rot.

Jesus enters Jerusalem and throws out the moneylenders from the Temple in fiery indignation in a scene met with the shock and anger of a rabbi (veteran character actor Nehemiah Persoff), who perceives himself as stalwart defender of Judaic tradition in a time of assault by foreign mores and Gods. Saul and the Zealots, seeing Jesus’ influence and that Judas has joined him, visit Lazarus and murder him, eliminating the proof of Jesus’ greatest miracle. When Jesus leads a mob to assault the Temple again, he is stricken by stigmata; God telling him he will not die a quick, heroic death, but with the ignominious cruelty of crucifixion, and there’s no way out of it. Jesus collapses and is helped away by Judas as Roman soldiers slaughter the mob.

Jesus already expects his end, told to him by a visitation of Isaiah. He tells a grief-stricken, conflicted Judas that he needs him to give him up. When Judas asks if he could give up a man he loves to such an end, Jesus replies, “No. That’s why God gave me the easier job.” In short time, Jesus writhes in doubt at Gethsemane before being dragged off to see Pontius Pilate (David Bowie), a calmly intellectual appraiser (“You’re just another Jewish politician.”) who swiftly diagnoses Jesus as being more dangerous to the Zealots. “It’s one thing to change the way people live, but you want to change the way they think, the way they feel,” Pilate explicates, as embodiment of Pax Romana logic. “It simply doesn’t matter how you want to change things. We don’t want them changed.” Jesus is beaten, crowned with thorns, and led to his bloody consummation on Golgotha. Jesus screams forlornly as a grimly apocalyptic dust-wind rises.

As it had with The Baptist, the clamor of the scene dies, and a golden-haired girl (Juliet Caton) approaches through the crowd. Tugging the nails from his feet and hands, she tells Jesus she is his Guardian Angel, and that God has granted a reprieve—he’s not the Messiah, and he can lead the rest of his life in simple ease. Led into a newly verdant Israel, Jesus is married to Mary and living in sublime peace with her before God appears to her and kills her. Jesus is enraged, but the Angel assures him, with her honey-toned, oddly psychopathic rhetoric, it was simply her time, that all women are the same. She encourages him to take a new wife, Lazarus’ sister Mary, and eventually also to bed her sister Martha. He fathers children and lives to a ripe old age, where he’s ashamed to think of his self-abnegating, egotistical, religious mission. He encounters Saul, now calling himself Paul, preaching in a public forum, of his conversion to Christ’s teachings and of the legend of his sacrifice. Jesus angrily declaims his death and mocks his own legend. Paul ripostes, “I’m glad I met you…my Jesus is far more powerful.” Paul is popularizing Jesus’ legend, arguing that humanity needs Jesus’ message of universal love and redemption.

Jesus is dying as Jerusalem is laid waste in the wake of rebellion, and his Apostles emerge from hiding to gather at his side. “Be careful, he’s still angry!” they warn of Judas, who enters, blood staining his hands from fighting the Romans. Judas erupts, accusing Jesus for not following his path, then lifting the veil on the Angel as Satan; this has been his most powerful, bewitching assault on God’s plan. Jesus, horrified and appropriately penitent, crawls out into the fire-stained, scream-riddled night and cries to return to the cross, which he promptly is, muttering “It is accomplished!” before dying. The movie literally dissolves, sprocket holes, scratches, and strips of film showing like the reel has broken.

The Last Temptation of Christ affirms Christ’s sacrifice; although Jesus wants earthly fulfillments—and those earthly fulfillments are twisted as Satan slyly draws away from the singular purity of his ardor for Mary Magdalene into a more ego-fulfilling threesome—he recognizes its insignificance before his great task, which is to reinvent the religion of his forefathers and humankind along with it. The film, scripted by Paul Schrader with contributions from Jay Cocks, is built around symbols, with sensitivity—as perhaps only a filmmaker can be sensitive to them—to the meaning that can charge images.

The film charts one of the Jesus myth’s strongest contributions to modern religious thought—the substitution of the physical for the symbolic. In the Last Supper sequence, Scorsese cuts betweens the rivers of blood spilt in Temple sacrifices—wasteful and grotesque in a starving country—and Jesus reinventing the idea in drinking “his blood.” “God is not an Israelite!” Jesus shouts on the Temple steps to an outraged crowd, losing their sympathy. His specific condemnation of nationalist self-love continues the film’s study of Jesus recreating the hard concepts of old Judaism into the symbolist thrust of Christianity—from real blood to transubstantiation, from Promised Land as a physical state to Promised Land as a spiritual promise. Stanton embodies Paul, the greatest convert to Jesus’ worldview, with whacko, shifty fervor; the symbolism is crucial. He doesn’t care whether Jesus really died on the cross or not for he recognizes the force of the idea and its appeal. The symbol is more powerful than the deed.

This leads to one of the film’s most forceful subtexts: the strong suggestion, dimly perceived by, and thus perhaps explaining, the rage of the film’s attackers, of a pointed rejection of the ’80s ethos of monumental greed (Scorsese stages the ejection of the moneylenders forcibly and repeatedly, making the film seem like an historical prequel to Wall Street) and the fatuous posturing of Moral Majority-era figures like Jerry Falwell, Jimmy Swaggart, and Ronald Reagan. “God is not an American!” Jesus might as well be shouting. Simultaneously, by portraying the Zealots as religious terrorists as theoretically rebellious, but really tools for power, the film engages with the troubles that engulf present-day Israel and drive many of the contradictions of current terrorist movements. The film’s Jesus, pained, morally questioning, tempted, and dedicated to multitudinous truth, stands at a vast distance from absolutist hypocrites of all stripes. Scorsese and Schrader, essentially unbelieving men but obsessed with the religious grounding of their perspectives, attempt with the film to recreate Jesus for themselves.

Scorsese’s most stylistically rigorous film, Last Temptation evokes the spiritual terrors that chase Jesus with a hungrily mobile camera (Michael Ballhaus behind it again). Having a blonde little girl as the harbinger of Satan was a touch directly inspired by Mario Bava’s Operazione Paura, and cunningly, during the alternate reality of the last temptation, it’s the only time Scorsese recreates the sun-kissed, twee atmosphere of standard Jesus portrayals. Finally, Scorsese had confronted the root source of many of his fixations head-on. For his next feature, Scorsese headed home again.

1980s, Auteurs, Biopic, Drama

Raging Bull (1980)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

Martin Scorsese was at his lowest ebb. The failure of New York, New York was the first big blow of his career. He indulged his cocaine habit whilst making the rock-doc The Last Waltz, and was finally hospitalized following an overdose. To stimulate his friend’s creativity and, Scorsese felt, saving his life, Robert De Niro pressed him to make a film of the autobiography of Jake LaMotta, one-time middleweight champion of the world and another Bronx-Italian prodigy. Marty, who hated sports movies, virulently declined at first, but De Niro’s continuing passion for the subject eventually convinced the burnt-out auteur to film the subject. Scorsese got Mardik Martin to pen a screenplay; Martin did months of research and turned out a regular biopic script before himself dropping out from exhaustion. Scorsese then got Paul Schrader to redraft it; Schrader broke up the structure, injected dashes of his dirty sensibility, and combined two major characters, LaMotta’s brother Joey and friend Peter Savage into one. Scorsese and De Niro then sat themselves down and spent six weeks making the script exactly what they wanted. What they wanted was described by UA executives as a portrait of “a cockroach.”

Whatever the qualities of NY, NY, it was clearly not the future of Scorsese’s career. So he stripped his approach back to basics; Raging Bull reinvents his early style – black-and-white photograph; flatly-lit, long-take, improvised scenes; experimental film editing. It was the first time since Who’s That Knocking On My Door? that Scorsese was allowed to work with his film school chum Thelma Schoonmaker, who had been a victim of absurd union regulations. Schoonmaker’s touch is instantly, virulently, eye-catching. Raging Bull is set thoroughly in the milieu of Scorsese’s childhood (the story begins proper in 1941, the year before his birth), and details a scene, wispily remembered, of small Bronx flats with the constantly intrusive neighborly noise, marital rows, baby whines, tinny radios.

Raging Bull has an ironic style. The distancing veneer of gleaming black-and-white offering one of the most vivid historical recreations on film, with almost every shot seeming fit for Life magazine. The elegant music with which Pietro Mascagni dreamily fills the film suggests a deep sorrow at the transience of glory, the brutal beauty of life, the dulling of youthful quality, and stands in raw opposition of the tawdry humanity Scorsese filmed. In contrast to the starkly shot personal scenes, the intricately choreographed, expressionistic, anti-naturalistic fights are almost like horror movie moments. Scorsese uses sound effects and slow motion to turn Jake, and later Sugar Ray Robinson, into prowling beasts of prey; steam and smoke weave gothic fogs.

Jake LaMotta. Who is this brawling hunk of masochistic meat, this man who became famous for the amount of punishment he could dish out and take in a ring? In many ways he’s masculinity run amok. He fuels his abilities in the ring with resentment and sexual frustration that eventually curdles into sexual paranoia. His most admirable quality – his long-standing refusal to kowtow to the Mafia – springs from venality. “You gonna let them take my money?” he demands of his brother-manager Joey (Joe Pesci), before clobbering him in a sparring session, when Joey’s connected friend Salvy Batts (Frank Vincent) comes sniffing around at the behest of local godfather Tommy Como (Nicholas Colasanto).

The singular quality of Scorsese’s oeuvre, especially for an American director – his willingness to make films of less-than-admirable, even despicable people – is at its apotheosis here. Even Peckinpah tended to love his bastards; Scorsese has an endlessly unblinking eye for the hypocrisies, thuggery, betrayals, cruelties, and pathos of LaMotta’s life and of the culture that surrounds him. In the first scene of the proper narrative, we meet LaMotta, 1941 model, losing and winning at the same time – the film’s keynote of his character – when he knocks down a black boxer but loses to him on points. This provokes a riot from the fight fans; chairs and popcorn fly to the roof, punches are thrown, a woman is knocked to the ground and trampled by the blood-lusting crowd. So often throughout the film, the corners of the tapestry Scorsese weaves are crowded with evidence of some violence or sleaze; even in the legendary Copacabana (something of an icon for Scorsese, who returns to it in GoodFellas), there’s the evidence of fights just finished or just about to start.

After the travesty of the ’41 fight, Jake, in one of the lengthy domestic sequences that anchor the film, starts an argument with his frazzled first wife Irma (Lori Anne Flax) that boils over into a painful, hilariously accurate moment of marital cacophony. She’s a hard-as-nails, standard-issue, Italian-American woman who lets duty take her only so far before she erupts. Jake, barely concerned or even interested, frets over his tiny hands, the fact he’ll never fight Joe Louis (whom he thinks is the best there is and whom he thinks he is better than), and finally eggs Joey to punch him in the face. Jake lives in a dialogue with the flesh. He understands people and himself, feels and expresses through the way he comes into contact with their meat. He subjects a young boxer, Tony Janiro (Kevin Mahon), to a disfiguring beating because his second wife Vicky (Cathy Moriarty, in her film debut) called him good-looking (“He ain’t pretty no more,” Como notes), but also lets himself take a brutal beating for many rounds in another bout, to pay for a row with Vicky, before turning around and clobbering his opponent.

The spirituality and eroticism of punishment of the flesh echoes long through Scorsese. Vicky’s kissing his bruise-riddled body has its parallel in Cameron Diaz kissing Leonardo DiCaprio’s scars in Gangs of New York. Jake is an ancient kind of human, inarticulate and foolish, macho bordering on insane – but when it comes to that language of meat, he’s Aristotle. After he retires from boxing, Jake enters showbiz, which then had a strange, symbiotic relationship with boxing. Joey, Jake’s usually stabilizing influence, says to one of his children at the dinner table, “If I see you put your hands on that plate one more time, I’m gonna stab you with this knife, d’ye hear me?” Yes, this is the familiar world of working-class fatherhood. The film’s brute honesty about what constitutes family life in this period for these men is best seen as Jake and Joey’s respective wives (Theresa Saldana is the other) sit like decorous dolls on the floor tending the children and Jake walks in and pinions his wife on the floor with kisses.

Jake falls for Vicky when she’s a 15-year-old nymphet (Joey’s already taken her out and tried to make her), the gimlet-eyed, platinum-haired minx who promises intricate sexual possibilities and delivers them. She’s initially one of Salvy’s entourage, and for Jake, it’s partly a pleasurable, infuriating challenge to steal her away from that representative of the unseen influence that’s caging his talents. Vicky’s barely more articulate than Jake; in fact, she’s an icy, careless youth who is overwhelmed by Jake’s sheer physicality (his seduction of her is almost paternal). She enjoys provoking and indulging his sexuality, even as she grows up and finds the oppressive quality of his adoration intolerable. Jake’s desire for Vicky is identified as an illness central to this and any hypermacho culture, which delights in asserting sexual ownership of adolescent women to simultaneously leash and exploit them. Jake lives an American dream riddled with familiar American termites. Is there any more pathetic yet typical, personally apt a comeuppance, than losing his long-worked-for nightclub by mistakenly aiding sleazy businessmen get laid with two underage schoolgirl hookers?

Jake is jailed and strains at a bleak cell, punching the wall in howling agony. He has by this time destroyed any personal support. Once upon a time, Joey put his neck on the line when he found Vicky back in Salvy’s company at the Copa; reacting to Salvy’s sheer cheek, Joey went berserk, hitting Salvy in the face with a glass and slamming his head repeatedly into a door, the height of the film’s violent absurdity. Yet later, Jake, aging, getting fat and lazy after finally gaining his title, starts off trying to fix his television, prodding Vicky over her trips out and Joey over the near-forgotten Copa incident; slowly and malevolently, Jake works himself into a jealous fury (“D’you fuck my wife?”), slapping and threatening Vicky until she spits back confirmations, “I sucked all their cocks, whaddaya want me to tell you?!”, going to Joey’s house and, in front of his family, putting Joey’s head through a door and cold-cocking Vicky. She can forgive him, but Joey can’t. If Jake can’t find a real opponent, he’ll make a shadow one. Even many years later, when Jake’s a washed-up comic, he tries to reconcile with Joey without actually apologizing; in a sticky, cringe-worthy moment, he draws his not exactly thrilled brother into an embrace. Vicky’s already kicked his butt out before the nightclub arrest over infidelities; to her chagrin, he barges into her house to gouge jewels from his championship belt to pay his bail.

Jake breaks just about every heart to come in contact with him, but then, his is broken a few times in the film. He feels the long period when, in resisting the mob, he can’t get his title shot, as a slow, maddening torture. To get his shot, he gives into Como’s clear declarations and throws a fight to Billy Fox (Eddie Mustafa Muhammad); he can’t fake it, and afterwards is reduced to a blubbering mess. Here, and in the jailhouse, Jake’s ability to inflict suffering on others seems tame compared to the suffering he generates for himself when his clear, simple, natural capacity for violence is manipulated and betrayed. As a boxer, he’s finished off by Robinson, who, in their last bout, destroys LaMotta, aging, out of shape, having lost Joey’s counsel. Robinson crushes his nose, destroys his face, and tears him down to a bare trunk of masculinity; his flying blood decorates the judges. Still, his sliver of unbowed triumph: “You never got me down, Ray!” De Niro gained his second (and, to date, last) Oscar for his performance, probably more for his commitment to gaining and losing weight. His LaMotta is a prowling, growling, dead-eyed creature when not in the ring (he reminds you of Quint’s description of sharks in Jaws), then, in the ring, quite literally the raging bull. Only Pesci keeps pace with him; it’s amusing to watch Pesci beating the crap out of Frank Vincent (which he’ll repeat, worse, in Goodfellas) knowing that Pesci and Vincent were, before the film, working as a comedy duo; the underemployed, demoralized Pesci had to be talked into appearing in the film.

The final scene has Jake, 1961, rehearsing the taxicab scene from On The Waterfront (the Tao of palookas) for his act, facing himself in a mirror (a scene egregiously copied by director Paul Thomas Anderson at the end of Boogie Nights. Jake has traveled the full arc of American celebrity, not most or least successfully, but most pungently typical, which is perhaps what finally made him interesting to De Niro and Scorsese. Reflected from the distorted eye of LaMotta’s tale is a grotty, tawdry culture that sups money and youth, pride and strength. As such it manages in a more sophisticated and compressed fashion than New York, New York to eviscerate the self-mythologizing fabrications of pop culture. Raging Bull, finally, is a statement of enormous cultural disgust. Scorsese would continue in this vein with his next film, The King of Comedy. With Raging Bull, deconstructing the ugly truths of American celebrity and life, Scorsese ironically reinvented himself. The film’s epilogue, suggesting a form of religious self-realization, also pays tribute to Haig Manoogian, his mentor. As for LaMotta, he had, in 1961, made a cameo appearance basically as himself in The Hustler, to which Scorsese would make a sequel, The Color of Money. He was helpful with the production, and later watched the film in the company of Vicky. Astounded and horrified, he asked her, “Was I really that bad?” “No,” she replied, “You were worse.”

1970s, Auteurs, Drama, Music Film

New York, New York (1977)

Martin Scorsese: A Retrospective in Words

By Roderick Heath

When the yellow moon begins to bloom / Every night I dream a little dream / And of course Prince Charming is the theme for me / Although I realize as well as you / It is seldom that a dream comes true / To me it’s clear that he’ll appear / Some day he’ll come along / The man I love / And he’ll be big and strong / The man I love / And when he comes my way / I’ll do my best to make him stay… – “The Man I Love,” George and Ira Gershwin

Taxi Driver’s surprise success gave Scorsese heft and fame. He was at this time tagged, along with the other young directors taking American cinema by storm—Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, John Carpenter, John Milius, Michael Cimino, John Landis, Peter Bogdanovich, and others—as a “Movie Brat,” an epithet that, like the label “Impressionist” about a century earlier, became a rallying cry. If there was a common feature of these directors, it was their argot of total cinema. Their first and almost last point of reference was earlier movies. They reinvigorated Hollywood as a commercial entity, largely due to their willingness, even love, of making genre cinema, in recreating the dream films of their youths. All of them worshipped Fellini and Godard, but Scorsese was just about the only one damn fool enough to want to be them.

Coppola had given the generation its big breakthrough with his canny melding of the cool, studious effects of European art cinema with epic American narrative in the Godfather films. For all these filmmakers, there were differing layers of irony in their attempts to meld auteurism, art cinema, and classic Hollywood. Many of them wanted to take a shot at the total stylisation of the musical. Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love, Scorsese’s New York, New York, Coppola’s One From The Heart, Landis’ The Blues Brothers, even Spielberg’s 1941 (which he made for the opportunity to stage a 1940s musical number), were all troubled productions, most of which flopped and dented the Brats’ domination. Scorsese went to Hollywood to make New York, New York, but remained a New Yorker. For his fellow Movie Brat directors, melding old and new, hip and square, lush and spare was a necessary and entertaining act of cultural synthesis. Scorsese, however, dedicated his new film to examining precisely the gap between life and art, old and new style, façade and critique, spectacle and honesty.

New York, New York sets out to be, as Marty called it, a film noir musical inspired in form by such showbiz tales as The Man I Love and A Star Is Born, with a screenplay by Earl Mac Rauch and Mardik Martin. It tells, in livid, often bruising detail, of a marriage between two professional narcissists, Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) and Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli). Scorsese set out to create the texture of a personal, realistic film in the Cassavetes mould—virtually all dialogue improvised, which made editing the film hellish. The film’s exchanges make up in vivacity what they lack in the arch, contoured crackle of screwball style. The first half-hour of New York, New York is a virtuoso, near-continual scene. It’s VJ Day in New York, and the streets have erupted in confetti and abandon. Jimmy strips off his uniform, casts it out the window, and hits the town in a gaudy Hawaiian shirt looking for just one thing: to get laid. The jam-packed Rainbow Room, where Benny Goodman and Orchestra are playing, represented the peak of the sweet glamour of the Big Band era as well as the emotional apogee of four years of war. Jimmy tries his pick-up lines on every bird in sight. He is especially drawn to Francine, seated by herself waiting for friends, splendid in her USO uniform. When his every attempt has failed on the hostile, evasive woman, he announces a new plan: “I want to stay here and annoy you!” He does just this for the rest of the film.

Eventually, when Francine’s fellow USO performer Ellen ( Kathie McGinnis) arrives, her date is Jimmy’s friend Eddie di Muzzio (Frank Sivero, soon a Scorsese regular), who has arranged for the four of them to hook up. Jimmy makes sure to cook Francine good before dropping her home. The next day, Francine is trying to find Jimmy to contact Ellen, who’s on the run from killers and shacked up with Eddie. She watches in amusement as Jimmy bluffs the hotel’s concierge, posing as a wounded war veteran (“Anzio!” he hollers, “I was at Anzio!”) and skipping out as always without paying his bill after being manhandled. Jimmy’s in the not-so-fine tradition of Scorsese’s keenly observed Noo Yawk flakes; indeed, New York, New York’s riskiest, most original idea is to make such a flake the hero. For Jimmy is, we learn, talented. He contrives to drag Francine to his audition with a Brooklyn club manager (Dick Miller), and shows he’s a mean tenor sax player, but too edgy and modern for the cleaned-up tastes of the time. Francine reveals she’s just as talented; when the manager expresses a desire for something like Maurice Chevalier, Francine launches into a sweet, swinging rendition of “You Brought a New Kind Of Love,” which Jimmy accompanies with contrapuntal elegance. They are fused instantly into a double act.

Romance, or something like it, blossoms. After a gig, Jimmy won’t let Francine get out of the taxi they share to her hotel by kissing her. Francine skitters, slips, and flops about, half in the pouring rain, trying to escape his voracious mouth. Francine finds she’s been offered a gig with the touring big band of Frankie Harte (Georgie Auld), and Jimmy is also offered a slot. Unfortunately, he’s gone before she can tell him, so she packs up and goes to join the band whilst sending her agent (the great Lionel Stander) to inform Jimmy. Jimmy promptly skips town and catches up with the band. He almost gets himself assaulted by Hart when he sits in the audience, draws Francine off stage, and won’t let her return. Jimmy is simultaneously declaring his “not love. I like you very much” whilst ranting at being left behind: “You do not leave me! I leave you!” De Niro gives the greatest portrait of the artist as major-league irritant since Kirk Douglas’s Vincent Van Gogh. Jimmy’s alternately (and often concurrently) charming, funny, annoying, foolish, dishonest, angry, sullen, violent, and prone to larceny, but always propelled by a volcanic creativity and contempt for a world of schmucks, squares, and sycophants. He dances up steps in joy, throws tables in rage, play-acts, fakes out, schmoozes, assaults, and plays some mean jazz. (De Niro learnt sax technique, but the music he makes is by Auld.) He tries to sweep the world and Francine off their feet with the purity of his energy, and it sometimes works.

Thee tour continues, endless wheeling between towns in the band bus; Harte’s crusty and boozy, but he keeps the band disciplined. He won’t give Jimmy any opportunity to play his arrangements or his bop style, but he often relies on Jimmy to lead the band. Jimmy dabbles in composition, tracing out the bare notes that will become the title tune, whilst Francine writes poetry. After eading one of her poems about him, Jimmy says, “That was it! That was you proposal, get your coat on, put your shoes on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” and drags her to a justice of the peace. When Frankie decides he’s fed up, he concedes to Francine that Jimmy “blows a barrelful of tenor, oh, but he’s some kind of pain in the ass!” Jimmy takes over the orchestra, but appears set for a flop until Francine saves their bacon at an audition with a soulful rendition of “The Man I Love.” With Francine headlining, the orchestra enjoys major popularity, but Jimmy is quietly furious she’s getting the attention, and he jealously guards his command. One evening Francine dashes off stage and reveals she’s pregnant. She returns to New York to have the child, and the band, saddled with a far less talented singer, Bernice Bennett (Mary Kay Place), whom Jimmy beds in Francine’s absence, soon faces disaster. Jimmy signs over the band to another leader, and returns to New York to find Francine riding on a wave of good publicity, her agent having secured her recording dates; Jimmy, the arch, proud individualist, feels she’s degrading herself by kowtowing. Jimmy meets up with black musician friends and jams with them at a Harlem club (“Do they let white cats in?” “Just come in the back way.”). For the first time, Jimmy’s style is set free and wild in the be-bop milieu. Meanwhile, behind the pyrotechnics of Jimmy’s approach to life, Francine grows, quietly, from defensive doll, to urgently helpful wife, to coolly calculating go-getter who gets it. And Jimmy, without saying a word, knows he’s going to get screwed by life again. The subterranean arc of anxiety in Jimmy begins driving him crazy.

Like many Scorsese narratives, New York, New York is a study of a macho slow burn, except that this one remains entirely interpersonal. Jimmy gets himself thrown out of a nightclub by getting increasingly soused and truculent as Francine is courted by a Decca executive (Lenny Gaines). In one of the film’s most striking images, Jimmy is manhandled along the entry hall lined by bright neon tubes, embodying the electric distress by which he is caged. He and Francine fight in their car, whereupon Francine is stricken and almost loses the baby. When Jimmy visits her in the hospital, they mouth caring statements for each other, but it’s clear what held them together has dissolved. Francine is much more a question mark than Jimmy. Minnelli often looks dazed by De Niro, appropriate to the character, yet she barely registers when not singing; her trademark acting touches feel by rote in comparison. Francine is, finally, the opportunist of the pair. Insufferable as he is, Jimmy is curiously honest even when bullshitting. Very few films paint so vivid a tale of how colliding egos and intentions can destroy relationships. Jimmy and Francine are scrutinized by the camera like a microscope on a pair of mating insects. In the space of about a year, we have one failed marriage, the kind that Francine, later a big Hollywood star, will sigh over if mentioned by interviewers.

In the film’s epilogue, we are treated to a short film purporting to be Francine’s latest hit movie, Happy Endings, which Jimmy is watching in a theater. Happy Endings is a brilliantly made pastiche of 50s-style musicals, charting the rise of a doe-eyed usher to major star who yearns for her gentlemanly agent Donald (Larry Kerns), who disappeared just when she made it big. Happy Endings presents just such a spin on the New York, New York story that such a musical would have done. The number was originally edited out of Scorsese’s film, and this was credited with its flop; without the sequence, the film’s careful alternation of glam and grit is unbalanced. Out in the real world, Jimmy’s not doing too badly. He has a spiffy nightclub, his song “New York, New York” has, in its cool jazz incarnation, become Casey Kasem’s theme song, and Francine’s singing her mountain-leveling version in her live shows. Actually, of course, the song is the work of Kander and Ebb. (In the film, Francine’s poetry becomes the lyric, with Jimmy unimpressed: “These vagabond shoes…are longing to stray…and step around the heart of it?” he reads, nose curled up like it’s week-old fish.) Backstage after seeing her sing, Jimmy meets his son, and proposes he and Francine get together later; she agrees. But neither can finally be bothered.

And yet the film around them is a lovingly textured dream, a paean to the total style of classic Hollywood, indeed catching how artifice can sometimes suggest reality better than reality: in the snow-crusted villages the band tours in, where Jimmy and Francine bicker and are married, or the stunning vignette of Jimmy watching, after the first night with Francine, a sailor and girl jitterbugging in the street below a railway line, suggesting an otherworldly staging by Gene Kelly of Alfred Eistenstadt’s Times Square kiss photo. The musical sequences are bravura in style. Marty’s camera (with immeasurable aid from DP Laszlo Kovacs) zooms, dollies, and glides, picking out soloists and darting in on them, then drawing back and painting rich group shots. Scorsese tips his hat to the influence of Michael Powell at several junctions: Jimmy signs into a hotel as “M. Powell;” the scene where Jimmy cracks up in the nightclub is decorated entirely in neon that glows an infernal, maddening red, a favorite signifier for both directors; and the way Happy Endings reflects, in a distinct, distorted mirror, the larger film’s story, is reminiscent of the ballet at the centre of The Red Shoes.

The central couple’s personal separation symbolizes a vital split in American pop culture. Francine goes Hollywood—big, slick, entertaining, vital but without edge, embracing of artifice over truth. Jimmy remains New York—hip, hard, leaning to black culture, small in scale but intently creative, finally, calmly resigned to his busted dreams (“Yeah I saw Sappy Endings,” he tells Francine). The story, conceived as a variation on A Star Is Born doesn’t entirely reverse the formula; instead of having one figure supplant another in stardom, New York, New York suggests there is more than one kind of stardom, more than one kind of success. This Scorsese film obviously had a stylistic influence on such jazz-and-nostalgia-themed films that followed as ‘Round Midnight, Bird, and Henry & June. It failed on first release, but there is a happy ending; when the film was restored to its proper form, it did good business in a 1980 re-release.

film freedonia

Film essays and commentary by Roderick Heath

Tag Archives: Martin Scorsese

The Irishman (2019)

The Departed (2006)

The Aviator (2004)

Gangs of New York (2002)

Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

Casino (1995)

Goodfellas (1990)

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

Raging Bull (1980)

New York, New York (1977)