killers of the flower moon (w&d martin scorsese, w. eric roth, david grann)

There’s a certain irony in Scorsese, an alpha male filmmaker, whose films so often revolve around the activities of other alpha males, making a film in his dotage which is predicated upon the strength of a woman. Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie brings a subtle charge to proceedings which all the grandstanding of De Niro and DiCaprio cannot compete with. She inveighs the film with a sense of that which goes beyond dialogue, the power of a look, the throwaway line. Where De Niro and DiCaprio are all surface - the latter surface emotion, surface stupidity, the former surface cunning, a typical late De Niro genial monster, Gladstone seems to be all depth, as though she has no need to speak in order to convey thought. It’s a compelling performance, which ties in with De Niro’s early observation to his nephew that the Osage say that the white person’s speech is like the chirp of a blackbird, and they will use silence to counter this, examining the weakness of their white interlocutor.

Around the midpoint of the film, Mollie gets sick. She drops out of the narrative to a certain extent, and the film shifts to more familiar Scorsese tropes of the family and its corrupting influence. It descends into a meta drama about the relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and his uncle, William Hale, played by De Niro. Their interaction feels predictable and follows a vein that runs through Scorsese’s work of the seductive but malevolent power of the family. There is a fearsome attempt to depict DiCaprio’s Ernest in a not altogether unsympathetic light, in spite of the fact that he is responsible for the killing of two of his wife’s sisters, amongst other crimes. This feels a lot like the exec producer actor interfering with narrative logic.

Having said which, the first half of Killers of the Flower Moon, until Mollie becomes bedridden, is almost vintage Scorsese.  At his best, he is a master of making big issues fit the screen, as though they have been waiting for him to boil them down into 120 minutes. The intercutting of archive footage, the grand set pieces, the swooping camera, the rhythmic edit, the sense of the narrative being driven through the use of music and edit, the ellipsing of time, all these are present in the opening hour. Then, like a marathon runner spotting the tape and slowing down, the second half of the film, robbed of Gladstone’s ludic energy, seems to run out of gas. (Or oil.)

taxi driver (d. scorsese, w. schrader)

De Niro’s lopsided grin. The inner madness of the outsider who will conquer the world. A direct romantic link between Les Fleurs Du Mal, (the taxi driver as the modern flaneur), and the lunatic apostles of Trump. 

De Niro as cowboy. Keitel calls him a cowboy. He polishes his cowboy boots. He’s the vengeful hero of a Western come to clean up the land. Shades of Midnight Cowboy, a decade later. 

The logical conclusion of the conquest of the natural world, is to turn in on itself, to wallow in an orgy of supposedly lost freedoms. (The right to roam wild, the right to kill, the right to commit crimes. The freedom to carry weapons, to curtail another’s freedom.) 

Keitel as Gatsby - the use of the word “sport”.

The imperfections of an iconic movie. The narrative drifting with the rhythm of the night. 

The secondary characters who create the world. The other cab drivers. The Latino bodega owner. Iris’ companion. The man who interviews Travis for the job. Scorsese himself. The secret service agent. A world is made of people. Film can accommodate a local galaxy like no other artistic medium. 

The slogan of Charles Palantine: “We are the people”

The dry witty interchange between Brooks and Shepherd, like something out of another movie, an NY romcom running alongside the dystopia Travis is living. 

cape fear (d. scorsese, w. wesley strick, james r webb)

It’s so many years since I saw Cape Fear, perhaps when it came out. In my memory it’s dominated by the denouement, which takes place in the everglades on a boat, in a sequence which I remembered as being half the film, although it turns out it’s only the last twenty minutes or so. The reason the end looms so large is because it truly is a case of Scorsese pushing the boat out. Loads of CGI and De Niro’s portrayal of Jack Cady, always pushing the envelope, goes overboard. I get why the film chose to go where it does, but it felt as though in a bid for an operatic finale, it flirted with anti-climax. There’s nothing subtle about Cape Fear, but it is tremendously well directed. The acting of Lange and Nolte and Lewis is impeccable, the score and the production design and the editing maintain rhythm and tension despite the predictability of the narrative. Meanwhile, De Niro gives the kind of grandstand performance that only he can, relishing the malevolence of his character without ever sacrificing his charisma. (One can’t help thinking that Sorsese’s subsequent use of DeCaprio as a leading man is why so many of his later films feel hollow: DeCaprio wants to be loved too much, he’s never prepared to take the film into the ambivalent Faustian waters that De Niro excelled in as an actor.) Scorsese is having fun, paying homage to the B movie and Hitchcock at the same time, the camera ever ready to zoom in, to capture every nuance of the acting. The Nolte-Lange marriage is completely plausible: two fearsome egos whose shared happiness is a delicate balancing act. The film was so much better in the viewing than it had been in the memory. However the finale, with its pretensions of showing the family stripped back to a kind of Simian primitivity, overshadows all that comes before. 

the irishman (d scorsese, w steven zaillian)

What a strange experience it watching The Irishman. A bloated film, in keeping with late Scorsese, that has its high points and its low points. Which is woefully self-indulgent, but has moments of quiet genius. It was said that The Joker, which I have yet to see, was a homage/ pastiche of early Scorsese, but the same might be said of The Irishman. Much of the film is like watching someone doing Scorsese well enough to feel as thought they truly studied at the feet of the master, knowing that they could never quite attain to the standards he set. The same could be said for the acting; De Niro is too old to really carry the menace he once did, (although Pesci pulls it off), and Pacino has long since moved beyond being capable of being directed, treating acting like a party piece, which perhaps it is. We go not to watch great performances, but to watch the ghost of great performances. It’s not all that different from going to see the Stones or Dylan in concert. Perhaps the strongest acting comes from De Niro right at the end, when he’s confronting his weakness, and imminent death.

Indeed, this is an old man’s film. It makes one sorry in a way that the director didn’t follow the example of one of his idols, Kurosawa, and do a version of Lear. In the final half hour, when all the deeds have been done, De Niro is alone with his frailty and all of a sudden a tenderness, totally out of keeping with the rest of the film, creeps in. Something more honest, more homespun. Beyond the gratuitous budget-busting explosions and the ham-fisted violence. The scene with the nurse, whom he asks if she knows who Hoffa is, has a surprising pathos. De Niro finally laughs at himself, the wannabe who history has outrun. All his enemies and allies (who are all potential enemies) are dead, and he’s left isolated, philosophical. There’s a jarring scene with a daughter who has barely appeared in the script, the counterweight to the under-developed storyline of his relationship with another daughter, Peggy, who banishes him for his wicked ways. There’s a great scene with a coffin-salesman. Everything feels as though it doesn’t quite hang together, as though Scorsese wants to tell a hundred stories and he’s only got space for three or four, which is one or two too many. 

However, this sequence is the film’s coda, which comes 200 minutes in. After a potted history of the mob with De Niro & co trying to act down their ages. Kennedy’s come and go. The same old story is played on the old joanna. If anything it makes one wonder why no-one has ever tried to film the political novels of James Elroy, who did all of this so much more convincingly. Maybe the novels defy the scripting process. The mobsters progress is ramshackle, predictable, melodramatic. Again, this seems more like decoration, a giant arena wherein the old timers can strut their stuff. We come for the Pacino grandstanding, the De Niro bum-rush or his little-man-caught-in-a-big-man’s-game-face. We come for Pesci’s squeaky well-dressed psychopath. We come for Keitel’s suave arrogant charm, but that is merely hinted at, as it feels as though his part must have been written out in the edit. People haven’t swooned over The Irishman because it’s a great film. They’ve swooned over the Irishman because it allows them to remember what a great film felt like, back in the day. 

silence (w&d. scorsese, w. jay cocks)

In the final ten minutes of Silence we get a glimpse of what the film might have been like had it been made when its director was at his peak. From nowhere a narrator appears, a Dutch merchant. The story begins to be told through the interplay of narration and image. The acting complements the storytelling, rather than trying to drive it. The film isn’t dependent on reaching those minor climaxes which are now known as ‘beats’ in the language of screenwriting. Rather, the film finds its own pace, skipping over years of real time in minutes of film time, picking out details which elucidate the world the characters inhabit (16th century Japan). There’s no need to try to win the audience with a comic character; there’s a confidence and fluidity which the rest of the film, all two hours and a quarter, signally lacks. 

Why the rest of film cannot retrospectively follow in the footsteps of its ending is a mystery. The script feels like it has been assembled by robots, the acting feels as though it’s being performed by robots, the art design is uneven and prompts more questions than it answers, consistently leaving us wondering whether what we’re seeing has even a grain of authenticity or if this is all some Hollywood dream. Even the editing and camerawork, so often fallback staples of Scorsese’s work, feel lacklustre. There must be a metaphor lurking behind the decline of Scorsese as a filmmaker. Maybe it’s just old age. Maybe the industry has wrong-footed him. It certainly feels surprising that the script for Silence, supposedly a passion project of the director’s for decades, is quite so wooden. It smacks of unnamed figures being drafted in to “help”.  

I had missed Silence when it came out in London. But looking for a suitable English language film in Brasilia, it seemed like it might be a safe enough bet. The cinema was a third full. People munched popcorn with enormous vigour. No-one walked out. Whenever the comic character appeared, people laughed. Perhaps there was something that my take on the film had failed to grasp; after all it's no small feat to convince people around the world to munch their popcorn whilst watching an epic about Jesuit priests in medieval Japan. All the same, until we got to the last fifteen minutes, Silence never felt like a Scorsese film to me.

goodfellas (w&d scorsese, w. nicholas pileggi)

In the middle of the NFT (or BFI for the new-fangled) screening of Scorsese’s classic, the fire alarm went off. A blur of red encroached on the screen as Liotta’s lover’s boss was being given the once over. For a second, I thought it was another of the director’s tricks, before the film came to a sudden halt and it was apparent the red blur was the house lights. In this instance it wasn’t a Scorsese device. But what’s so refreshing about watching Goodfellas is to note how playful and adventurous it is. With the lighting, or in the edit or the soundtrack. In the program notes, Scorsese acknowledges his debt to the French New Wave. The freeze frame, the way of narrating using a feverish Godardian edit style, the irreverence of the music. It’s hard to think of any mainstream filmmakers in the US or the UK who are willing or allowed to do indulge themselves and play with the medium like this. In a comedy or a musical perhaps, before anyone mentions La La Land, but not in what would now be described as a ‘drama.’ 

Scorsese’s bold narrative style is beautifully wedded to the epic narrative. He handles the passing of time dextrously, loving the challenge. Costume, music and art design are tools he relishes. When we returned from the fire alarm, after a chilly pause of ten minutes, the scene which had been playing before we left was repeated. It was the introduction to Henry Hill’s lover’s apartment. Watching the scene twice in the space of ten minutes allowed the viewer to truly process the depth of information and detail which each frame possesses. The throwaway remarks which get lost in the rapid-fire dialogue. This apartment perhaps features in just three scenes in the film, but the work that has gone in to making the apartment perfect is all there. This detail accumulates. There are no short cuts. We are immersed in a world we completely believe in and this helps to raise Scorsese’s films to another level. We’re not watching a gangster flick; for two hours plus we’re sharing Henry and his wife’s lives with them.

Another thing the director says in the notes is that he wanted the film to be like a documentary. It isn’t, by any stretch of the imagination. There’s too much flair, too much authorial incidence. But you know where he’s coming from. When young Henry looks out at the gangsters who populate the shop across his New York street, you know that this could be the young Scorsese. I think it was Barthes who declared that all writing is autobiography. With Scorsese, all filmmaking is autobiography. The more he honours this adage, the better his films. Goodfellas has a panache and a lust for life which still dazzles and feels modern, nearly thirty years after it was made.

the wolf of wall street (d. scorsese, w. terrence winter)

Lets call a spade a spade and a turkey a turkey. Despite generally positive reviews, rest assured that the Wolf of Wall Street is in reality a wolf with no clothes. Befuddled critics have been flummoxed by the Scorsese brand, which is there to full effect. Goodfellas voiceover, Casino narrative switchbacks, Mean Streets soundtrack etc etc. It’s like watching a Scorsese tribute band. The only trouble is that the tribute band has the original on bass, lead guitar and vocals. And goes on for so long you’ve almost forgotten what day it is when you come out. It’s one thing sitting through three hours of this if you’re getting paid for it and another if you’re the one forking out.

As such, before we even touch the subject matter, it’s an increasingly depressing experience. Increasingly, because the film opens with a certain amount of whiplash chutzpah. McConaughey’s cameo is the best bit of (over-) acting in the film. (The whole film is garishly over-acted, which is in keeping with a film which is garish and over-everything.) However, after about 45 minutes it becomes clear that the narrative and the edit have run away with the leash and they’re not going to be coming back in a hurry. Thereafter, as DiCaprio nerds his way around town, seeing the old master stumble through his paces becomes more and more dispiriting. Like watching an old boxer step back into the ring once too often.

Like many films which purport to be decadent and laden with vice, WOWS is a deeply nerdish enterprise. All the characters are borderline sociopaths, people who have the emotional intelligence of a peanut. DiCaprio, Marty et al might argue that that’s the point, that this is a savage indictment of US greed, but when the filmmakers themselves, from top down, are gorging themselves with such obvious delight, it’s hard to take this line in any way seriously. Boiler Room, a low-budget film, addressed the same material with much more punch. The slightly theatrical Margin Call got much closer to the nub of the matter. There’s nothing creative or revelatory about DiCaprio’s fall from grace as a low-rent Bernie Madoff. Indeed, far from critiquing its protagonist and his world, it’s evident that the film relishes and celebrates it.

You have to put this in some kind of context. In what other country or industry would a 71 year old man be put in charge of a budget of $100,000,000 (estimated, IMDB) and allowed to make a film laden with busty young women and drug-taking. If this is Scorsese’s Nero moment, it just goes to show how tedious the fantasies of a geriatric are. That he lives in a society which allows him to indulge these fantasies isn’t his fault. That he allows himself to tarnish his body of work is. Then again, when the dust has settled, no-one’s going to be going back to the Wolf to find out what was special about Marty. 

hugo (d. martin scorsese, w. john logan, brian selznick)

The watching of Hugo was not so much about the film, more about the event. And I suspect that was true for just about everyone in the cinema. The event being the night of the Royal Film Premiere, something that has happened every year since 1946.

As Leicester Square is being currently turned into dust, the red carpet was a somewhat obscure affair, which took one round the houses, past several pubs, full of people with pints in their hands wandering what the fuss was about. As well they might. In spite of some well-tooled paparazzi, there was a shortage of luminaries. Damian Lewis, whose wife is in the film, seemed to be getting more attention than perhaps he’s used to, largely because the next most famous personages not in the cast were the latest graduates of X Factor. The security was desultory. As I took my place I speculated about how easy it would have been to have followed in the footsteps of Andrei Bely or Conrad’s anti-heroes. Which is perhaps reassuring. Once in the auditorium the entertainment consisted of watching a screen which showed live footage of nothing happening outside. The comedy was supplied when the hired compere’s rehearsal of her lines (something about David Niven) was mistakenly picked up by her live mike, to the audience’s delight. It wasn’t quite up there with Gordon Brown’s “bigoted woman” or Reagan’s plan to nuke the USSR, but it helped to pass the time. A few buglers took the stage, looking lost. They did some bugling which seemed to make them feel better. The highpoint was when the cinema’s Wurlitzer was used for the national anthem, giving it a kind of Blackpool-pier variety flavour.

As for the film, Scorsese’s latest… It has to be said that he uses 3-D more effectively than Herzog and, so I was told, Tim Burton. At its heart, Hugo is a paean to the art of cinema, with the narrative revolving around a young boy’s re-discovery of  the forgotten George Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley. At the end of the film there was the strangest use of 3-D I’ve encountered yet as the fictional, cinematic Kingsley made a speech in almost exactly the same spot the actual flesh-and-blood Kingsley had made a speech introducing the film earlier. Life imitating art imitating…

There’s some lovely use of Méliès’ films, the discreet nod of a veteran director to cinema’s capacity for delight and improvisation. All of which makes this a meritable project for Scorsese’s first use of 3-D. The pity is that the magic is all in the technology: apart from Sacha Baron Cohen’s droll turn as a vindictive station master, there was a shortage of the sort of charm that Jeunet might have brought to it, in his heyday (or even Billy Wilder). Everything works, but in a strictly functional manner that’s ultimately un-involving: the most memorable moments are provided by Méliès and Harold Lloyd.

Still, the night was not really about the film, it was all about the occasion. One wondered if its low-key tone was reflective of the British indifference to the art of cinema: pitch up, watch something made by a North American which stops you thinking for a couple of hours, and then escape by any means possible. In our case this involved being ushered out through a dangerously-packed fire escape, men in black tie shouting into their mobile phones, glamour at a premium. To be thrown out into the Soho night just in time to catch last orders.

shutter island (d. scorsese, w. kalogridis)

There must be a million of these type of scripts drifting around Hollywood, waiting to see if it comes up lucky. Scripts which look like they're clever, but turn out not to be as smart as they think they are. Scripts that have ladles of meaning and reference - in this case Dachau; Hitchcock; the Cold War and its debt to the Nazis; psychiatric methodology and more - but have no real coherence; scripts that, the more they protest the existence of their soul, the more you suspect they lack one at all. Welcome to Hollywood: sound and fury signifying nothing.

Sad, therefore, that a director who is still as skilful as Scorsese should find himself lumbered with such a script, based as it is on a book by a highly successful commercial writer. Is this the equivalent of Gershwin writing jingles for toothpaste ads? A great skill applied seemingly exclusively towards a notion of commercial gain?

Presumably the director set out with the notion that he could do something interesting with the material. The film opens with heightened B-Movie colours and music, and a beaten-up looking DeCaprio looking suitably askance. The set-up is not unpromising, and for a while it works. There's the lone star up against the world, there's the wartime reveal, the slow build-up of character. Scorsese goes in for some operatic effects, suggesting he's having fun, even if once again, the notion of Hollywood using the Holocaust to beef up its narratives veers on the distasteful. (Carefully composed piles of bodies; artful violence...) The nods towards Hitchcock seem to come thick and fast - Vertigo and North by Northwest and maybe more. Then, as the second act begins, the script begins to explain itself. Characters start to talk all the time. About what's going on 'on the island'. About the ethics of 'the island'. The more they talk the less we're interested. Finally they've talked themselves out of it, and the film indulges in its de rigeur twist, and we can all file out of the cinema going, 'it went on a bit, didn't it'.

Actually, I left wondering what it would have felt like to walk out of Mean Streets or Raging Bull or even King of Comedy on first release. Few filmmakers have ingrained themselves so comprehensively within our cinematic language and vision. Plenty have analysed Scorsese's gradual fall from grace, so I won't try too hard. In a way it seems as though, having played his part in shattering the idols, and then becoming an idol, Scorsese is now attempting to hark back and pay tribute to the cinema his films out-paced. Hence the fifties, the B-Movie plots, the operatic anti-naturalism. It doesn't seem to do him many favours; but he's lost his stories, and he doesn't know where to turn, so he looks over his shoulder hoping they're lying in the road (or the DVD collection) behind him. When what he really needs is a proper script. Which needs a proper reason for being written.