Martin Scorsese, Ranked

I had originally planned to do a long-form essay of some kind about Martin Scorsese for Film.com, but as the year-end deluge of deadlines (to say nothing of personal time-consumers such as an impending departure from my day job and a move back to Atlanta) sapped so much energy that I restructured the overview as a ranked list. As such, I hope I managed to use each blurb to discuss each film on its own merits, rather than in competition with the others. While I clearly prefer some of the master's movies to a few lesser efforts, I'm routinely struck by Scorsese's range, and I tried to use this piece to call attention to just how diverse a filmmaker he is, and how he has delivered surprises every single decade of his professional life.

You can read my full article at Film.com.

Something Old, Something New: The Last Temptation of Christ / Lincoln

I knew I'd forgotten to link to something this week. Last Monday, my second Something Old, Something New piece went up, this time on the similarities that link Lincoln with another subversive, empathetic portrait of an abstracted icon, The Last Temptation of Christ. I'm quite happy with this piece, so I hope you read it. It can be found at Movie Mezzanine here.

The Top 10 Martin Scorsese Films

With Martin Scorsese celebrating his 70th birthday today, what better time than to count down 10 of the greatest achievements of one of America's greatest directors? Unlike his contemporaries, Scorsese has enjoyed a typically stable level of quality over the course of his entire career, not flaming out like a Cimino or Coppola nor exploding beyond his initial, intimate scale the way Spielberg and Lucas did. A consummate craftsman, Scorsese continues to employ technical mastery on a level that up-and-comers can only imitate, and often through contradictorily old-fashioned means. Think the tangible recreations of Gangs of New York, or the lush Technicolor throwbacks of The Aviator or Shutter Island. And when presented with new technology, as with digital and 3D, the director looks not merely to replicate the feel of film but to explore how these technical aspects can influence new directions in storytelling.

Not content merely to provide the world with his own string of great and memorable films, Scorsese has devoted much of his life to the preservation of the movies that inspired him, keeping them alive to motivate the next generation of movie brats. It can be difficult to whittle down his impressive filmography, filled not only with features but documentaries, concert films, shorts, even music videos and advertisements. These 10, however, distill the best of my all-time favorite director.

Hugo (Martin Scorsese, 2011)

For the six people out there who still love 3D, Hugo will be the film of the year. To be sure, no other film from any year is so well-suited for the format. Concerning the earliest days of cinema, where the medium still oscillated between kitschy gimmick and potential artform, Hugo was directed by Martin Scorsese, a director fascinated by the artifice of cinema and how its inherent falsity can nevertheless draw in a viewer like no other art. This makes 3D doubly appropriate, and as much as I loathe the tackiness of even the supposedly advanced iteration of the technology that is already flaming out brilliantly, Hugo makes such inventive and striking use of 3D that I hate what Scorsese's done as much as I love it. Hugo is too ambitious to make any money, but even so; could the director pump some life back into 3D just as it seemed we were free of this headache that comes once every three decades?

Set in the vast Parisien train station Gare Montparnasse in the early '30s, Hugo follows its titular hero (Asa Butterfield), the orphaned child of a clockmaker, as he moves within the walls of station winding its various timekeepers and swiping meals from oblivious vendors. He also collects gears to repair a rusted automaton his father (Jude Law) brought home before he died in a museum fire, hoping that continuing his father's work will somehow bring the man back in some form. But when an old toy vendor (Ben Kingsley) catches him trying to steal parts from one of his wind-up mice, Hugo finds himself thrust into a deeper story of embitterment and rejuvenation, one that holds the key to his own issues even as it plunges him into a whole new world.

Taxi Driver

To commemorate the release of Taxi Driver on a downright essential Blu-Ray, I've reviewed the film at Cinelogue. Almost assuredly my favorite movie of the 1970s, Taxi Driver hasn't aged a day regardless of the vastly different condition of modern New York City. This is a film for the lonely, the hurt and the angry, which makes it as good a fit for millennials as it did the post-hippie burnouts.

I only briefly touched upon the extras included in the Blu-Ray, but everything you need to know about the movie can be found in its commentary track or the bevy of retrospective material. The A/V restoration makes the film come alive more than it already does, yet this gorgeous transfer does not take away from the dingy feel of the movie. It is already my to-beat disc for 2011.

You can read my review now at Cinelogue.

After Hours

In the late-'70s, Martin Scorsese buried the stress of his work and a series of critical disappointments in a mountain of cocaine. When he experienced setbacks in the early '80s, he made After Hours. I'm still trying to figure out which response is more wild. After Hours exists to prove that Taxi Driver actually displayed some restraint. Its vision of New York crosses that Rubicon into madness and never looks back.

After delving into the psyches of his characters for a decade, Scorsese created a screwball version of his work, expelling his anger over Paramount's shutdown of The Last Temptation of Christ mere weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin. Sometimes, it's all you can do to laugh. That is not to say, however, that the film is without meaning. At times, it dips into unexpected poignancy, and even when it's being madcap and disjointed, the subjects it broaches are too severe to be considered mere farce.

GoodFellas

If the Godfather films used organized crime as a personification of the corruption of the American society and dream, Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas never rises out of the surface level, not because it is shallow but because it gets itself in too deep. Who can stop to think of the poetry of illegality and how it represents the truth ethos of American law and organization when you're too busy looking over your shoulder for the guy who's gonna whack you? Michael Corleone would sympathize, but only in his twilight: "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me right back in," he once said. The gangsters of GoodFellas do not even have the luxury of dreaming of escape.

Of course, to call the crime that occurs in GoodFellas "organized" would be generous. It charts the street level thugs, not the consiglieres and dons who buy casinos and bribe senators; the few visible higher-ups who manage to stand out above the rest never involve themselves in anything more substantive than the local rackets. What's interesting of Scorsese's eye-level document of gangster life is how the lower-level soldiers and minor bosses, when separated from those no higher than a caporegime, think of themselves as kings, even when they report to practically everyone. Hell, most of them aren't even made men.

A young Henry Hill (Ray Liotta as an adult) only noticed the swagger, though. "All my life I wanted to be a gangster," he tells us over a scene of horrific brutality that precedes a flashback, and the irony of the placement of that declaration dissipates in the face of Henry's childhood memories. A half-Irish, half-Sicilian brat with no future, Henry looks out across the street to members of the Lucchese Family and sees only idols. All they do is run stolen goods, but they have tons of cash and total respect, something that the kid values more than anything an education might get him. So, he starts to work for the wiseguys, which his parents enjoy until the father realizes what he really does.

Young Henry goes from an unremarkable, pre-gray-flannel-suit American teen to one of those low-ranking kings. He is made to park the wiseguys' Cadillacs and hock crates of beer and stolen cartons of cigarettes, yet the neighborhood kids carry his mother's groceries, and thugs intimidate the postman who delivers Henry's mail in order to stop him handing letters from school officials and truant officers to Henry's father. Of course, Henry's dad seems to react so angrily to his son skipping school not because he wants the boy to get a proper education but because he does not like the idea of his son gaining more clout than him.

GoodFellas opens with the old "Based on a true story" chestnut that usually announces a series of half-truths and whole lies. That's true of this film, too, but among the many delights of GoodFellas is the balance between some of Scorsese's most straight-faced and "realistic" direction and his usual fanciful interpretation. The script itself mainly served as a transcription of improvisations the actors performed in rehearsal, so much of the dialogue of this true story comes from the actors. That first scene, taken from the sequence that would bridge the first and second halves later in the film, casts the three main wiseguys -- Henry, Jimmy (Robert De Niro) and Tommy (Joe Pesci) -- in the Expressionistic red of the brake lights interspersed with blinding white bursts as Tommy shoots the half-dead man in Henry's trunk, reveals how Scorsese's aesthetic certainly doesn't stick to documentary-like verité either.

But the use of both subjective direction and improvised acting makes GoodFellas feel so real. The camera draws us into this world, while the increasingly panicked and paranoid mannerisms of the actors, even if they're speaking their own lines and not those of the real-life mafiosos and wives they play, give the audience a fly-on-the-wall perspective that more coldly scripted lines would have precluded. As a young adult, Henry walks through a night club, and the camera takes his POV as it glides through the place as wiseguys, these old and powerful men, turn and address Henry (and the camera, and therefore us) and greet him as an equal. The effect nearly drowns out Henry's narration, speaking volumes of the allure of what Scorsese always paints in a negative light even as he allows us to empathize. Violence permeates GoodFellas, even more so than Scorsese's preceding films, and the great triumph of the director's work here is the manner with which he can play it so broadly that it's often comedic even as the sadistic, lawless brutality constantly undercuts Henry's nostalgic view of his gangster life.

Occasionally, GoodFellas practically intoxicates the viewer with its hints of power. When Henry takes his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco, the film's sole weak link) on their first true date, Scorsese employs a tracking shot that manages even to shame the previous one. After all, the first tracking shot showed us why Henry loved Family life, but he'd also already become used to it; the second tacitly assumes Karen's perspective as she watches this punky, self-absorbed 21-year-old transform into a deity. He practically changes the properties of the microcosm of the club: he parts the entry line to get in through the side door, walks calmly and amicably through the kitchen where patrons cannot enter, a chair "materializes" in the packed restaurant for Henry and his date, and much older people buy Henry free wine out of respect. Scorsese has to end the shot with a pan to a shitty, hackneyed comic just to remind us that this isn't someone's wonderful dream.

Karen's embrace of Henry, aroused as she is by his violent reprisal for a groping neighbor and his flashy wealth and power, shows how even the routinely abused women in this underworld cannot consider another life once they've had a taste. Sure, you have to pay your respects and, most importantly, "keep your mouth shut," but a wiseguy only has to obey the wiseguys' rules, not society's. As such, the insanity of gangster life often plays as comedy so grandiose it might have fit in the silent age were it not so rooted in dialogue. Tommy, attempting to woo a Jewish woman, displays the typical solipsism of the gangsters when he unironically chuckles, "I can't believe this. A Jew broad prejudiced against Italians!" Scorsese then juxtaposes, despite their lengthy time apart, scenes of Karen's Jewish mother and Tommy's Sicilian mom to demonstrate how the two are practically carbon copies for all the ethnic hand-wringing of both the Jews and Italians who constantly insult each other. Tommy in general walks the line between lunacy and dark comedy, his emotional rollercoaster so wild it sweeps up all those in his company: in perhaps the film's most quoted scene, Tommy has a dinner party in stitches before suddenly turning into a cold and intimidating killer when Henry remarks how funny the hothead is. "Funny like I'm a clown? I amuse you?" he hisses, until he finally reveals that he's kidding and people laugh even harder. That's Tommy for you: he can cow everyone in fear or win their love, often with only the briefest separation between the two.

The most absurd comedy, though, reveals just how powerful even these low-level guys are. "Nobody goes to jail unless they want to," Henry tells Karen, and when he is later pinched, he has his driver take him to jail as if going for a meeting. He might as well be, as he and the other incarcerated gangsters live as though nothing changed; they even get access to a kitchen to cook hearty Italian meals. There's no place that the wiseguys cannot make more comfortable. As the film continues, however, the humor and irony of this infiltration reveals its double edge: it also means that there's no place to hide.

Henry is, after all, placed in the center of two men who will lead him to the same destruction, albeit in diametrically opposed paths. Tommy, the white-hot nova packed into Pesci's small frame, is the embodiment of the childish freedom allotted to these gangsters: free to berate, beat, even kill practically anyone who sparks his short temper, Tommy is the unglamorous portrait of what happens when a person is not held accountable (and, when he eventually is, of the stark horror of mob "justice"). Jimmy, on the other hand, is more measured and calculating. Along with caporegime Paulie (Paul Sorveno), Jimmy is one of the few truly organized members of the demonstrated organized crimes. Though violent and ruthless, he carries himself with a more professional and typically calm attitude. He orchestrates the Lufthansa heist, at the time the largest cash robbery ever committed on American soil. In the aftermath, however, Jimmy slowly devolves. As the other criminals immediately advertise their guilt by spending their cuts on expensive, noticeable purchases like cars and mink coats, Jimmy takes drastic measures to protect himself, gradually eliminating almost everyone connected to the heist. In the film's best sequence, perfectly set to the ending strains of Derek & the Dominoes' "Layla," Scorsese's camera glides over images of bodies stowed in cars, dumpsters and even a meat wagon to show where all roads lead in the goodfellas' world.

Jimmy's own descent into paranoia prefigures the intensified final act, in which Henry, made rich but also addicted by selling coke, falls apart in an amphetamine haze. Living in a house that makes Dirk Diggler's pad look tasteful by comparison, Henry practically gives himself to the cops, who track him by helicopter in a funny sequence where Henry constantly makes his companions look for the helicopter to prove he's not crazy. Both he and Karen lose their minds as police raid the house and arrest Henry, as he fears Paulie's wrath while Karen comes to dread Jimmy, who himself frets that Henry will rat on him. Their entire world is based on keeping quiet, but they all live such ostentatious lives that they don't need to speak to give themselves away.

At last, the house of cards finally comes tumbling down. "Being together all the time made everything seem so normal," Karen tells us much earlier in the film; the close-knit nature of family and Family life only further enhances their feelings of superiority and separation from the rest of society. But society eventually breaks up this loose community, and we see how shaky the ties that bind really are, jiggled loose as they are in the frenzy of cocaine-induced hysteria. By this point we're entirely inside Henry's mind, which is probably why Scorsese then chooses to harshly expel us from it. Perhaps because memory of Taxi Driver's controversy (or the more recent hullabaloo over The Last Temptation of Christ) hung over his head, the director does not finish the film in harmonic subjectivity. Instead, Henry stops in the middle of testifying before entering the Witness Relocation Program to rail directly at the audience, who largely complained about this ending. It's understandable, as it shows a man, even in defeat, so arrogant that he turns on the people he invited to listen to his tale. By breaking the engagement of his own story, Henry uses his last bit of screentime to impart one last reminder that he, and those like him, is nothing more than a cocky jerk, and no amount of short-lived power can disguise what a pathetic and aggravating man he is.

Bringing Out the Dead

In preparation for the upcoming Martin Scorsese Blog-a-Thong for the Large Association of Movie Blogs, the following is a re-write of the first Scorsese movie I ever reviewed on this blog. I've scrapped the first entirely in favor of this review for two reasons: 1) My opinion of the film, which was already positive, has changed considerably, to the point that I consider it the director's second-most underrated film after his satirical masterpiece The King of Comedy, and 2) because the first article was unsatisfactory on every level, a shoddy reiteration of plot with little interpretation.

David Bordwell recently posted an article -- to call attention to its quality would suggest that Bordwell (or his wife, Kristen Thompson, for that matter) is ever not at his best -- that outlined Martin Scorsese's use of both French Impressionism and German Expressionism in his work. Anyone who truly pays attention to the director's films will know that the "realism" label bandied about without a care holds no weight: Scorsese's impeccable eye for detail and character certainly add a bedrock of verisimilitude to his corpus, but even the exacting production design of Gangs of New York is interpretative.

This is relevant because, of all the director's films, none throws any pretense at realism to the wind quite like Bringing Out the Dead. Its first moments, a shot of an ambulance speeding through Hell's Kitchen that cuts to the eyes of its driver, Frank Pierce (Nicolas Cage), being processed through numerous color filters as he careens through the city at warp-speed (a direct reference to the first shots of Taxi Driver, albeit played in fast-forward). These shots, and their existence as a frenzied update of Scorsese's greatest film, set the tone of the film: Taxi Driver cooled enough to use its protagonist's mental state to explore larger issues, but Bringing Out the Dead never leaves its tortured insomniac, never allows for anything but the slightest break for air.

It's fitting that, to date, the film should mark the last collaboration between Scorsese and Paul Schrader, as the film shares stylistic -- even narrative ties -- to not just Taxi Driver but Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ as well. The imagery of blurred lights, ubiquitous steam and cascading colors updates Taxi Driver with better technology and more money, yet Scorsese heightens them not simply because he enjoys a bigger budget but because of the lack of control Pierce has over his life; unlike Travis Bickle, Pierce is not the steady pilot of the vessel that ferries him through hell. Objects appear normally, after all, in the windshield; they only blur as you pass them. Pierce agrees: "The biggest problem with not driving is that whenever there's a patient in the back, you're also in the back. The door's closed. You're trapped."

Pierce himself contains elements of Jake LaMotta (his blindness to anything but his own pain and desires) and Bickle (take your pick), but the character he most resembles, after a fashion, is Scorsese's Jesus. Pierce cannot sleep because he's been unable to save any of his patients recently. This failure to literally save people recalls Jesus' doubt over his own message, which the people in Last Temptation begin to distort even before his death, centuries before His word would be completely corrupted by the Crusades and various inquisitions. Pierce, however, cannot seem to manage any sort of salvation: in his first shown assignment, he tends to a man in cardiac arrest who by all accounts is a goner. But he instructs the family, crowded around in fear and the mounting grief of lost hope to play some music that the man liked, as it "helps." Pierce than manages to get a pulse, but this "miracle" clearly had little to do with the Sinatra croon wafting through the apartment, its purpose merely to distract the family from their pain. The man, as we'll see throughout the film, didn't die because of the music, or even because of Frank and his defibrillator, but because Hell's Kitchen has torn him down too many times without killing him that he's not about to start now.

That patient hangs over the rest of the film, in a constant flux between life and death -- he flatlines a dozen times a day and is brought back each time. References are made to his "fighting spirit," but the darker implication is that he fights to die, not to live. He instructed his family not to call 911 and even locked himself in the bathroom to prevent easy access. Thus, this patient comes to embody Pierce's growing self-doubt and his troubling new ideas: "In the last year," he says, "I'd come to believe in such things as spirits leaving the body and not wanting to be put back. Spirits angry at the awkward places death had left them." Frank, with his twisted messiah complex, slowly kills himself for the sake of his patients, and his constant losses wreak havoc with his head. Suddenly, his ideas of saving others begin to lose their pull: "I came to realize that my work was less about saving lives than about bearing witness," he says. "I was a grief mop." Ergo, Pierce serves not only as a Christ figure but his own apostle, attempting to save lives and consoling others (and himself) when he fails.

The other reason that the ever vacillating man plays into the story is in the introduction of his daughter, Mary (Patricia Arquette), one of the more compelling female characters to grace a Scorsese film. Mary, like Frank, cannot decide whether she wants her father to live or die, having suffered abuse as a child yet still unable to let the man go. Arquette excels at these characters, broken women fragile enough to need help in this world yet strong and determined enough to boost others. As such, she becomes Pierce's focus, neither as a love interest nor (à la Bickle) a symbol of anything but simply as the person who may hold the key to his stability, just as he, a kind man in a horrible city, may give Mary the support she's never had.

It's scarcely conceivable that anyone could get by in Scorsese's image of Hell's Kitchen on their own, though so many are made to. Taxi Driver spread its hellish effect over all of New York City, but Bringing Out the Dead reveals that the expanse of New York's hell was actually a dissipation of evil. Hell's Kitchen concentrates that evil into a subsection filled with despair, and its nightmarish imagery is all the more arresting because it's so much easier to identify with Frank and his perception of this nightmarish world. The hospital where he brings his patient, Our Lady of Mercy, is dubbed Misery by its patients and staff; whenever Scorsese returns to it, scanning over its aisles choked with patients who outnumber the rooms, the cops who spend so much time dealing with the wounded criminals and overdosing junkies that they, in their harsh black uniforms, become as much a part of the hospital staff as the white-clad nurses and doctors, who are hardly more sympathetic than the merciless cops. The streets are covered with brain-fried, punch-drunk loonies who cannot be called gutter trash because the gutters are too full to accommodate them. It's such a terrifying microcosm that a dying man (Michael K. Williams) swears that if he lives he'll join the army "where it's safe."

As is fitting for the work of a paramedic, Bringing Out the Dead is very episodic; spread across three nights, each night pairs Frank with another EMT who also suffers from the constant stress of so much death and pain, and each night he travels through segments of the larger segment that is Hell's Kitchen. On the first night, Frank travels with Larry, who attempts to outpace his own breakdown by focusing on the next meal. He cannot eat the same meal two nights in a row, because remembering what he ate the previous night might also conjure memories of the trauma to which he attended. Larry would typically like to avoid as many jobs as he can, so Frank must take the initiative to respond to any call. By the second night, though, Frank is the one who wants a break, which he never receives as Marcus (Ving Rhames) zealously pilots their ambulance to every incident in search of "miracles." Marcus spends the night railing about the Gospels and preaching like an evangelist at the scene of an accident, but his constant flirting with the female dispatcher with whom he shares a dalliance undermines his piety. Marcus and Frank are even present for what someone insists is a virgin birth, of twins no less, but Frank cannot accept this as the miracle that Marcus does as one of the twins -- the one he handles -- dies from complications. Of course, no one really believes that the woman gave birth as a virgin, save the man who saved himself for her.

Marcus' outlandish personality -- as well as his hair, which manages to be both curly and slicked back -- somewhat recalls Screamin' Jay Hawkins, which is appropriate for what is by far Scorsese's most pop music-oriented film; Martha and the Vandellas, Van Morrision, Sinatra, The Who, The Rolling Stones and so many more make appearances, generally increasing in rocking edge as the film wears on and Frank's resolve wears.

So, by the time that Frank teams up with Wolls (Tom Sizemore), whose own frustration with his job has manifested itself in anti-Hippocratic rage against his patients (or victims), the soundtrack is dominated by such punk rockers as The Clash and Johnny Thunders. Frank teeters on the brink by this point, and what is most affecting about Wolls' outbursts is not how insane and violent they are but how closely they mirror the final stages of Frank's self-annihilation. Despite his constant warnings against Wolls' behavior, Frank's first major breakthrough comes when he screams at a suicidal man and offers to help the man kill himself, who flees in terror; "We cured him!" Wolls laughs, but the absurdity of the moment is undercut by the realization that it really is the first person we've seen who might be better off for Frank's intervention. Later, a junkie, Noel, who appears every night in some fit of chemical (internal and external) imbalance and incurs Wolls' wrath, manages to redirect Frank's own budding madness; Frank and Wolls catch him smashing cars with a baseball bat, but when Frank agrees to help Wolls catch and beat Noel, he ends up venting his anger by hitting a car of his own.

The dark comedy of this moment pervades the film. Frank, disillusioned with his role as a savior incapable of rescuing others, wants to stop his torture but cannot bring himself to stop self-harming on his own (a Scorsesian theme that stretches back to his 1967 short The Big Shave). So, he reports to each of his shifts late, or leaves early to try to get some sleep that never comes; his captain finally confronts him on this, but he's got a wild hair up his ass that transforms his anger at Frank for sloppy work into self-righteous defiance of the system. Frank does everything but come right out and beg to be released from this torment, but the captain interprets the rage as a sign of dedication and not only retains Frank but offers the "unlucky" son of a bitch an extra week of sick time. So many people return to Misery for drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning and brawl wounds that the head nurse (Mary Beth Hurt) knows many patients by name and chastises them and threatens to withhold treatment like a mother exercising tough love.

This lunacy adds to the warped perception of Hell's Kitchen, which results in some of Scorsese's boldest visual invention. The lights around the ambulance seem to blur as they're seen through the tears caught in Frank's eyes: he never quite cries after all, no matter how close he comes. The ambulance moves through Hell's Kitchen in such a frenzy that Scorsese films it from above, or with the camera entirely on it side, and images are often processed through the windows and mirrors of the vehicle, distorting if not completely destroying them. Just as Scorsese had characters glide in Mean Streets and GoodFellas to show how they perceived the places they felt most welcome, so too does he fluidly rush up the stairs to get Frank and Larry to Mary's father. Frank hallucinates a stoned dream of the ghosts of those he failed to save reaching up to him from a street pavement as he literally raises the dead, and a recurring image of a young girl named Rose, whose death set his collapse in motion, tortures Frank (this would of course be reworked and used again in Shutter Island). And few scenes in all of Scorsese's canon are as shamelessly Expressionistic (or bizarre) as his rescue of the drug dealer, somewhat kind and somewhat evil, impaled upon a metal girder below his apartment window. As Frank makes his first unmistakable, physical save of the film, the blowtorch cutting the girder sends up sparks. Almost romantically, with Frank cradling the weakened dealer's head, no less, Cyrus remarks that he can feel the heat of the warming metal, which pierced his chest. With such unabashed artistic touches, is it any wonder that the usual hospital dispatcher who sends Frank on these assignments is voiced by Scorsese himself?

Cage pours all of himself into the role, as the part could not work with any less an effort. His hangdog expression is perfect for such a downtrodden character; when he tiredly counters Mary's fleeting attempts to justify her father's past behavior as a method to make her strong to survive the city with, "The city doesn't discriminate. It gets everybody," his fatalism seems more human and strangely empathetic than cynical. That perverse humanism defines his final act, in which he puts Mary's father out of his misery rather than force the man to live with a micro-defibrillator in his heart for the rest of his life simply to sate Frank's need to keep someone alive. Searing, white light often highlights action in Bringing Out the Dead, usually when focusing on the dead and dying. It's an ironic use of holy light to show the terrible act of death, but then there's always been a certain contradiction between the horror of mortality and the hope of everlasting life it brings. By allowing Mary's father to die, however, and by returning to Mary, Frank not only releases the messiah complex that keeps him up, he also attains some of the holiness he so desperately chased, at last falling asleep in Mary's arms as Scorsese bathes in light. Travis Bickle's "redemption" was caked in blood, but Frank attains his by the absence of the red stuff that coats him everywhere else. As perfect as they were for each other, Schrader and Scorsese would do well to not undermine the chapter-closing image of this last shot, content to let it summarize their remarkable work together and to bide its time until people at last realize what they've overlooked.

Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is the epic, self-destructive companion piece to Who Shot Liberty Valance. It posits that one need not have traveled out west to find romantic lawlessness, and that one could not find the answers to a more productive society back east. It is also proof that Martin Scorsese can make masterful work no matter the circumstances. Gangs of New York is his most artistically compromised picture, trimmed down even at its 167-minute length from a reported five-hour cut and commercialized in a futile attempt to make the film into some sort of hit. Yet it remains his most personal, above perhaps his erstwhile passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, the ultimate paean to Marty's beloved hometown and an exorcism of his hangups.

The impositions placed upon the film by Miramax hindered this vision, yet perhaps they fueled the more bombastic visual choices that serve Scorsese's deconstruction of his career. Besides, the marketing of the film provides for a misdirection Scorsese attempts with the film itself, goading the audience into identifying Amsterdam, the underdog character who enjoys a romance and narrates the picture, played by an actor still known for being a teenage heartthrob (Leonardo DiCaprio), as the protagonist. He is not.

The real crux of the story, and the personification of the choices made by the film's director, is William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). He symbolizes the dying New York, at once Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon. He's a bigot and a ruthless killer, but he has a sense of honor. So do many villains, of course, but Gangs of New York is about the transition in New York's history, not from anomie into civilization but the loss of the "nobility" of violence. Bill is not the symbol standing in the way of progress; he is the last of a dying breed.

Day-Lewis' performance here has been eclipsed by his work in There Will Be Blood, and Daniel Plainview is indeed a testament to the actor's ability to captivate an audience even with a character diametrically opposed to identification or empathy. Yet William Cutting has an emotional complexity that runs deeper even than Day-Lewis' earlier Christy Brown. When he kills the father of DiCaprio's character, Priest Vallon (Liam Neeson), in a street battle at the start, Cutting refuses to allow any of his gang, the Natives, to spoil the body. "He'll cross over whole," Bill declares, despite his vicious hatred of the Irish Catholicism Vallon represents. For Bill, why he's fighting someone is less important than how those enemies conduct themselves. In a quietly piercing scene, Bill confides in the adult Amsterdam, whom Bill accepts without learning his true identity. Draped in an American flag, Bill condenses his power, the power of anyone who holds it, into fear and the ability to manipulate it. He tells the boy about Vallon, what a great man he was; in one skirmish, Amsterdam's father got the best of ol' Bill and nearly killed him, sparing his foe's life only to force him to live with the shame. Bill notes that he cut out one of his own eyes because he could not look at Vallon.

Like the film, Bill is visually outlandish, absurd even. He routinely sports a red coat as if in a Nicholas Ray period piece, complete with pants that manage to be even longer than Day-Lewis' lanky frame can allow. It's the sort of get-up that sticks out even in a period picture: here is a man who doesn't need to care what others think. It's funny, then, that Bill should reflect Scorsese's aesthetic, given the issues he suffered, even as a universally acknowledge master, at Miramax's hand.

Scorsese's direction is without question the loosest in his oeuvre, or at the very least since Mean Streets threw the director far ahead of the minor accomplishments of his first two features. The opening gang fight, set to anachronistic music and even edited as if a submission to MTV, sets the tone for the film's structure as it draws a line in the sand separating those willing to play along in Marty's meticulously recreated sandbox from those expecting a more conventional movie. Yet Scorsese's direction tests the patience even of the loyal: scenes jut about as if someone unleashed a wild chimp into Thelma Schoonmaker's editing suite and the director simply trusted that his longtime collaborator knew what she was doing when he got the results back. Sudden transitions, awkward breaks, unnecessary cutaways in the middle of an action for a reaction shot or something else to break the scene: all of these issues exist in the film, the result of both the trimming and whatever held Scorsese and Schoonmaker's fancy.

Yet this seeming clumsiness allows the director to break entirely from the tropes that bind the genre. Scorsese worked within them for his superb The Age of Innocence but gave the characters an emotional resonance so many of these pictures chase but never obtain. Gangs, however, belongs firmly with his gangster pictures. Indeed, he casts all of the characters, be they actual gang members, policemen, whores or politicians, as gangsters. The women seduce and take from the men, who take from others to cover their losses, before giving their cut to corrupt coppers and bosses like Bill, who use the money to pocket politicians. It's far too tangled a web to be called a "vicious cycle."

Scorsese films these characters with the same passion he afforded to his earlier films, the ones that mixed character with aesthetic to make everything more visceral, more felt. He lost himself in the jumble of The Departed, but here Marty manages to convey the states of mind of both lead characters. He charts both Amsterdam's rash bravery and the loathing he feels for himself and his self-doubt as well as Bill's sadness at the "rising of the tide" that will wash away everything Bill values. The two characters (and moods) play off each other, Bill's nobility and paternal treatment of Amsterdam compounds the boy's feelings of guilt for not avenging his father, and when Amsterdam finally does make his move, in a craven attempt to get the jump on the Butcher, Bill's feelings toward the changing world are confirmed: Amsterdam is not an evil man, and certainly not a villain in the same way that Bill isn't, but he represents the shift of gangsterism from something done out in the open with a set of rules to a world governed by backstabbing, literal and figurative.

Because Scorsese somehow taps into two mindsets at once through his disjointed style, everything is magnified. The sets, painstakingly crafted in Rome, are massive and establishing -- it's a telling contrast of convictions that George Lucas, upon visiting his old friend during production, remarked, "Sets like that can be done with computers now." Like the sets, the jargon is so accurate that even the characters seem to have no idea what the idioms mean and need many translated. The story is Shakespearean, and Monk McGinn (Brendan Gleeson), a big Irish mercenary who once fought for Vallon, even says so when he sees Amsterdam save Bill from assassination. Later, Amsterdam kills the crooked cop Jack (John C. Reilly, the best of the supporting cast) in a scene that recalls Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras. Too, the curtain that Jack yanks down in his death throes reveals a comically outsized cross, at once a reminder of the guilt that drives Amsterdam to avenge his father and Scorsese's pointed jab at himself for redirecting the Catholicism in his films squarely on the guilt that he's still exploring in this film.

The film's amplified visuals reach their apex with the climax, a thunderous vision of the Draft Riots that grows so huge that even an elephant roams the street at one point. Gangs of New York, which halted post-production for a time in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is about not fighting wars that are not yours to fight. Amsterdam spins his wheels for most of the film because his subconscious recognizes that Bill's conflict with the Vallons ended with his father's death, yet he presses on because he feels the need for vengeance. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrive in America are the first to be conscripted in the new draft, and Scorsese overlaps a scene of a batch of soldiers being shipped off on one of the same boats that brings home a hold full of coffins with every docking with an Irish ballad that mourns the state of the immigrants, forced to flee starvation only to find themselves forced into someone else's war. Ironically, the one war worth fighting, the war to preserve the union, is met with indifference, then aggression from the New Yorkers who see themselves as their own entity. Thus, the greatest city in the Union is reduced to what might look no different than a bombed Confederate city, to be rebuilt as a part of the Union through the same backhanded procedures that returned the South to the fold. Scorsese isn't asking us to keep quiet and accept violence against us, but he also asks that we stop and think before fighting, and as such Gangs of New York becomes not only a companion to John Ford but Bruce Springsteen, specifically his own post-9/11 triumph, The Rising.

In the slaughter and smoky haze of the riots, Amsterdam and Bill settle their score. This is the last chance Bill will have to die "a true American," and he takes it, killed honorably by Amsterdam rather than face the world he sees on the horizon, even through the massive cloud kicked up by the shelling. Note that, at the end of the film, Bill, not Amsterdam, rests in the grave next to Vallon's, and as Scorsese suddenly jumps through history to the present (well, just before it, as he leaves the World Trade Center intact), we see time forgetting the men who helped shape the city, and the fact that the movie is about those who created and not destroyed is why the Towers remain. "The appearance of the law must be upheld," Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) told Bill early in the film, "especially when it's being broken." That dishonesty stuck in Bill's craw, and he later tells Tweed, "You can build your filthy world without me." Thus, he wouldn't feel so bad about being covered up by the vines, forgotten by the world he laid the foundation for -- as the tagline reminds us, "America was born in the streets -- and we shouldn't pity him either, not simply because of his violent acts but because obscurity is far nobler than cheap veneration.

Shutter Island

I noticed when I signed into my Blogger account to write this a whopping five posts in a row discussing Martin Scorsese's much-belated B-movie Shutter Island. Given the broad disinterest shown in the bloggers I follow (not to mention myself) concerning the 2010 features released up to this point, I got a kick out of seeing everyone snap to attention. Adding to my amusement was the fact that the miniature excerpts from all five were variations on "Warning: contains spoilers." I plan to cross-review this for my school paper and I'm too lazy to write two entirely separate articles, so I shall avoid spoilers in this review.

Besides, the various twists and turns of Shutter Island just do not matter, and Martin Scorsese knows it. I have heard grumblings through the grapevine that Shutter Island marks Scorsese's attempt to ape twist-master M. Night Shyamalan. This is categorically untrue; if Scorsese wanted the unlocking of the narrative to be the film's ultimate payoff, he would not have telegraphed it from the first minute. Anyone remotely paying attention to the film can and will deduce its ultimate truth by the 10-minute mark, what with the pointed looks and deliberately overacted emphases on certain key phrases such as "defense mechanisms."

What the director does instead is use the messy pulp of Dennis Lehane's novel -- which I have not read but feel confident on the basis of the film saying is far, far, far removed from his usual output, about as far as Shutter Island is from native Boston -- is craft his best film since Gangs of New York, and his most brazenly cinematic since Bringing Out the Dead. Like Scorsese's underrated mid-'80s style-over-substance feature (After Hours), made in direct response to the aborted first attempt to make The Last Temptation of Christ, Shutter Island is Kafkaesque, though not in a particularly deep way. Where After Hours played its psychological mire for laughs, Shutter Island works as a thriller, but the two share a kinship in their display of Scorsese's boundless visual form and the jollies he gets from throwing caution to the wind.

You can see that the director is having a ball from the first frames of the film, as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonard DiCaprio) converses with his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as they ride a ferry to the titular island. The camera jumps between them as if Godard had sneaked into the editing room, further interrupting these jump cuts with visual asides to Teddy's past, of his wife (Michelle Williams), whom Teddy says died in an apartment fire. The two men are headed to Shutter Island and its mental health facility, Ashecliffe, to investigate a missing patient, whom the doctors say managed to slip through the facility's considerable security measures "as if she evaporated straight through the walls."

For the sake of spoilers, I shall go no further, nor would I feel much inclination to continue following the narrative even if I felt no obligation to protect the mystery for readers. Shutter Island is a giant red herring, and more than that a red herring that flops about and speaks like those awful singing basses that so woefully became the rage around the turn of the millennium when we are all so happy to have survived Y2K that we made some very poor decisions indeed. Unspooling a complicated but hardly complex yarn would suck all the enjoyment out of the movie, as well as the pleasure of discussing it.

What is important, or at least relevant, is how much Shutter Island runs into the open arms of the glory days of the cinema. The overacting, while easily justifiable in retrospect, clearly harks back to the days before Brando tore apart the rulebook, when actors emoted with a capital "E." As an epic psychological thriller, Shutter Island most clearly derives from two sources: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus (the nature of the asylum and the overacting found within obviously brings to mind Samuel Suller's Shock Corridor). The sheer cliffs of the island match the rock faces that trapped the nuns in Powell's tripped-out vision of India, while the structure of the film, particularly the camera's alignment with the point-of-view of a detective who wrestles with his own perception, comes straight out of Vertigo.

It also marks a return to Scorsese's best kind of filmmaking, the sort that places his camera into the fractured POV of a warped character. Scorsese hasn't filmed in this style since his final collaboration with Paul Schrader, the criminally underappreciated Bringing Out the Dead, and he hasn't lost his knack for spellbinding shots that you can't always trust, even if he's telling a far simpler tale with Teddy than he did with Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta or Frank Pierce. Helping matters tremendously is the gorgeous photography by Robert Richardson, who won an Oscar for his work on the director's The Aviator.

Combined with Scorsese's energetic, freewheeling direction, the Powell-influenced cinematography makes for some startling moments. Who could sit there and argue that the film isn't "real" or "deep" enough as Scorsese gives us a horrifying glimpse into Teddy's past as a WWII veteran, a scene framed in the same "movie movie" style as the rest of the picture yet filled with a weight far heavier than the heartstring-tugging content of what's on the screen? And what of the foray into the dreaded Ward C, where the most dangerous psychopaths are kept, its dizzying, rusted metal staircases and walkways resembling a post-industrial version of M.C. Escher's Relativity?

So, yes, Shutter Island is, at its heart, a 140-minute paean to Scorsese's abilities as a visual stylist. But for all of us who guessed the ending before moving out of the first act, how many could have expected the inevitable reveal to be so moving, so like Vertigo in its striking moment of pure empathy between audience and character, even if that moment is forced upon us by the director? Shutter Island could mark an important turning point for the director, who suffered under the yoke of the Weinsteins on Gangs of New York and lost The Departed to Jack Nicholson. Now, with Oscar in hand, Scorsese is confident enough to be himself again, something we haven't seen in years. His long-discussed adaptation of Shusaku Endo's Silence appears at last to be on track, and Scorsese himself asked for the final delay in this film's release to tweak a few more odds and ends in post-production, effectively removing the film from receiving any Oscar attention this year or the next for the sake of making the movie he wanted. Let us hope, then, that Scorsese makes of this decade what Spielberg made of the last one: a period of astonishing late-career creativity by a director who no longer has anything left to prove.

Raging Bull

Raging Bull is one of the great character studies of the cinema. I have seen it derided as an inaccurate depiction of boxing technique by those who emphatically miss the point, but otherwise Scorsese's biopic has been rightly accepted as a modern classic, and perhaps the last creative gasp of New Hollywood as Heaven's Gate et al. dragged it down into the abyss. Every choice, from the decision to shoot in black and white to Robert De Niro's refusal to fake the vast body changes middleweight boxer Jake LaMotta underwent during his life, is the right one, one that finds verisimilitude in pure cinematic construction as only Scorsese can manage.

Scorsese happened upon the idea to shoot in black and white when he reviewed some initial test footage of De Niro in the ring with his friend and mentor, the legendary Michael Powell, and found that it didn't look right. Powell noted that, not only were the bright red boxing gloves De Niro wore distracting, they were not period-accurate. So, Scorsese decided to shoot in monochrome, allowing him to not only bypass the issue of the gloves but to avoid the then-disastrous quality of color film stock. The director, who used the film to overcome his crippling drug addiction -- made worse after the reception of New York, New York -- believed this film would be his last, and he wanted to make sure it would last if he didn't pull himself out of his tailspin to keep an eye on it.

The color shift wasn't the only influence Powell had on the production, however. The scenes inside the ring openly reference Powell's masterpiece The Red Shoes. Rather than film the fights from the perspective of the audience, Scorsese stays almost exclusively in the ring. His idea of Madison Square Garden is a vast, roaring blackness surrounding the stage with only those audience members close enough to bask in the radiance of the ring visible. LaMotta, like Vicky, lives for the stage, and what we see on-screen is Jake's perception of his fights; for him, only the opponent matters.

It's remarkable how much Scorsese makes his warped version of Madison Square Garden like his demented view of '70s New York in Taxi Driver: its infinite blackness is disturbing, made further obscure by the rising smoke of cigarettes (which recalls the sewer mists swirling about Travis Bickle's cab) and the blinding pops of flashbulbs. Scorsese further paid homage to The Red Shoes by choreographing the fights as ballet movements, though it's hard to tell just by looking at it (the opening credits, featuring De Niro shadowboxing to loosen up, have a dance-like quality though). “The only logical fight I ever saw was a Buster Keaton film," Scorsese later said. "He’s in the ring with this big guy. The guy comes out swinging. Keaton goes to the corner and gets a chair and hits the guy with it." That's more or less the finesse he gives to LaMotta, who earned his reputation as a fighter who never let an opponent out of arm's reach. De Niro, who trained with the real-life LaMotta, is terrifying in the ring: he bursts out of his chair at the sound of the bell and pummels his opponents -- "victims" seems a more apt term -- until they collapse or somehow retain consciousness long enough to vacantly listen to the result announcements.

Outside the ring, LaMotta is scarcely better. He's vindictive and insecure about his weight, at first because he's too small to fight in the heavyweight division to prove that he's the best and later when he begins to put on flab. By the time we meet him in 1941, his first wife has cracked from the pressure of living with him, throwing tantrums by the minute because she refuses to be beaten or insulted one more time. Jake, of course, accepts no blame, and he quickly moves on to his next conquest, 15-year-old Vickie (Cathy Moriarty in a sadly overshadowed performance), a young but mature lady who catches Jake's eye -- along with everyone else's -- at the local pool. We then see the cycle repeat, despite having only seen the final moments of the last one, as his mixture of boxer swagger and shy dope charms Vickie into marrying him, at which point their relationship turns cold as he saves all his energy for the fights, which in turn makes a repressed monster out of him.

He beats Vickie for even glancing at a man the wrong way. When she makes a passing comment on the attractiveness of a boxer Jake's set to fight, he can't stop thinking about it and pulverizes the kid when they eventually fight. "He ain't pretty no more," one of Jake's Mafia connections drawls at the end of the fight. He makes his brother, Joey (Joe Pesci, who's surprisingly heartbreaking here) punch him in the face earlier in the film to prove his toughness, but soon we see that it's his way of both addressing his own hangups and to accept punishment for what he knows is wrong but does anyway. Eventually, Jake's jealousy so overwhelms him that he believes Joey is sleeping with Vickie and viciously beats his own brother, shattering the only stable relationship in his life.

At some point it must become redundant to discuss the pristine excellence of Scorsese's direction, the way that every tracking shot is at once eminently noticeable but never distracting or a celebration of itself, yet if I accepted his direction as read I would also have to sweep aside the accomplishment of editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It's strange to think that Scorsese's vision and skill could find such a perfect foil, but Schoonmaker is every bit as integral to the power of this work -- and so many others -- as the director. She gives enough time to each shot in the ring to give us a sense of space, but her cutting is as quick and brutal as LaMotta's fighting style. She travels through LaMotta's life in a montage blending Super8 color "home movies" with black and white still frames of Jake's fights, those misleading images of the foggy warmth of polychromatic 8mm of LaMotta's growing family juxtaposed with clear, definitive looks of bruised and bloodied opponents falling to the unstoppable Bronx Bull.

The most shocking cut of all jumps from LaMotta's final fight with rival Sugar Ray Robinson, which ends in LaMotta's first unmistakable loss and a lingering final shot on his blood dripping from the ropes to a photo shoot and interview a few years later as Jake announces his retirement. Suddenly, Jake is revealed as a bloated whale, and the fact that the film opens with this iteration of Jake in no way lessens the shock of the sudden leap forward. Of the many remarkable aspects of De Niro's all-encompassing approach, his weight gain is perhaps the most overrated. His refusal to wear a fat suit and to gain the 60lbs himself is admirable -- and it probably guaranteed him the Oscar -- but it's the manner with which he captures the animal that is LaMotta, and how he somehow makes a man -- however awful -- out of him, that gives the performance lasting resonance. I do get a kick out of an assessment of LaMotta's ballooning, however, from British critic Peter Ackroyd: “The man without a soul has nowhere to go but outward.” Even as a tub of lard who runs a crap nightclub where he peddles the kind of stand-up we saw him chuckle at 15 years ago, Jake still thinks he's the champ, and there's something tragicomic about the way he discusses his retirement as if he's leaving the game on top.

Only twice in the film does Jake cry, and it's important to note the difference between the two. He does so the first time after he throws a fight for the Mafia, an almost humorous affair as LaMotta nearly knocks the guy out with one punch then has to dance around for four rounds as everyone in the stadium jeers. That comic moment disappears when Scorsese cuts to Jake in the locker room sobbing uncontrollably for what he's done, to the point that his trainer can barely fight back tears. The second comes years later, after he drove his brother away, lost his wife and kids and got busted for allowing underage girls into his club. As he sits in solitary confinement, he's given just enough time to mull over what he's done with his life and beats his hands and head against the wall, screaming in agony and regret. In the first instance he sobbed because he'd allowed someone to interfere with his boxing life for the first time; in the second, he realized how little it mattered.

I've heard Scorsese labeled as a "cold" director before by random forum users and even the odd critic, but if Scorsese is cold, who could possibly be "warm"? He does not hate LaMotta; indeed, he may be the only director who could have plausibly given the character redemption, as he does with that prison scene and the final moments of the film, set after an uneasy reunion between brothers. As he stands before a mirror, practicing the monologue he's about to foist onto a bored audience and psyching himself up -- I'd forgotten how much Paul Thomas Anderson took from this to end his own Boogie Nights -- we finally see a bit of humility in him, though LaMotta's still got some energy to him. The possibility for quiet redemption presents itself, underlined by a textual coda reading the Biblical quote, "Once I was blind, but now I see."

Taxi Driver

Though I've traveled abroad several times, I've only ever been to New York City once, and only for a three day high school band trip at that. Before I went, I made the mistake of re-watching Taxi Driver, one of my all-time favorite films. Why a mistake? For someone who had no idea what the Guiliani administration meant beyond September 11, my only knowledge of the city came from Scorsese's oeuvre, of mean streets and the good fellas who roamed them. Watching Travis Bickle's descent into madness amidst a dank, dripping den of fetid urban decay terrified me as deeply as it did the first time, though I still did not fully understand it at the time. Of course, now New York has been literally Disney-fied, the homeless swept out of sight and the streets so clean and vibrant that the whole damn place feels like an arty theme park.

It's such a stunning transformation that Taxi Driver now plays as a period piece, one not of nostalgia or revisionism but of paranoid horror. The streets, always wet to better reflect the lighting, look perversely filthier in the presence of water. That water does not cleanse but rests on top of the roads and sidewalks, as if the entire city were made of oil. As shocking and alienating as the film is, this style will make you believe that the city is indeed little more than a repository for scum, as Bickle says.

An honorably discharged Marine who served in Vietnam, Bickle applies his titular job because his insomnia keeps him up at nights riding buses and cabs to calm him, so why not get paid for it? Initially awkward but endearingly goofy, Travis' narrations betray a conflicted soul, one who sees the hopelessness of this city's downfall, one customer at a time. He gets along well enough with his fellow cabbies (look for the late, great Peter Boyle as the sage driver "Wizard"), his demeanor changes in the presence of black people. With unsettling slow-motion tracking shots, we see Travis shift from a grinning buddy to a visibly enraged racist, and his internal rants on the "scum" of the streets turns from a catch-all condemnation to a byword for blacks.

One person in the city catches his eye, however, a white-clad woman who strides through this town untainted by its influence. Without ever getting within a five-foot distance, Travis falls in love. Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) volunteers for the presidential campaign of Senator Charles Palantine (Lenoard Harris), and she notices Bickle spying on her. He finally musters up the courage to ask her out, and she finds his creepiness odd but intriguing, so she agrees, only for the socially inept Travis to take her to a porno film.

Understandably off-put, Betsy leaves, and a dejected Travis, who'd pinned all his optimism for the city's future on her, sinks into a full schizophrenic rage. He purchases a number of firearms and begins training himself for... something. Without a reason to acclimate into society, it's only a matter of time until Travis fully goes off the deep end. He finds his catalyst in Iris (Jodie Foster), a pre-teen prostitute bossed around by her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel).

Both Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader cop to Taxi Driver being an urban remake of the John Ford masterpiece The Searchers, and twisted parallels to Westerns are numerous. The hero of the Western is always an outsider, someone who enters into society only long enough to cleanse it of its corruption or to defend it from attackers. Travis, a Vietnam veteran moves to New York to readjust to society, yet he soon finds he cannot. His idea of cleaning the streets reflects the Western philosophy of the gun, which dictates that the only degrees of justice are the caliber of your bullets. Scorsese and Schrader see through the fabricated nobility of these men and paint Bickle as a sociopath, one who perhaps has the right idea when he sees New York as an amoral wasteland, a modern Sodom, but his decision to take a gun into the streets to right the wrongs are insane. Alan Moore took a cue from the film when he applied the same revisionism to the comic book genre with Watchmen, in which the heroes are all uniformly unbalanced.

Later, he sports that infamous mohawk, a sign of his descent by way of a Native American haircut. Sport wears an Indian headband, so he becomes the Injun chief, and Travis must become savage like the tribe (in movie terms, obviously, not reality) to break into to save Iris. Iris recalls Ethan's kidnapped niece in The Searchers, though, unlike Ethan, Travis never expresses a desire to kill her for being "tainted."

Travis' third and final fixation is the politician, Palantine. By random chance, the senator winds up in Travis' cab near the beginning, and Bickle talks to him about cleaning the streets. Palantine tosses off glib bits of assertion while looking thoroughly uncomfortable in the cab of someone who even claims to be a supporter. Bickle notes this, and when he snaps after Betsy's rejection, he comes to view Palantine as the enabler who allows the city, the country, to decay. His plot to assassinate the politician, however, is the one hurdle of the film; as the film occurs from Travis' demented POV, it's hard to tell what motivates him to equate killing Palantine with saving Iris, or why he would shave his head and make him more noticeable. Occam's razor would say to just accept that he's crazy and move on, and that may be best. What I decided on this viewing was that because Travis saw the senator as the force that allowed the scum to thrive, killing him might wake up the populace to the stench around them.

I also believe that he would have tried to go after Sport and save Iris himself even if he had managed to kill Palantine. Obviously he would have been stopped there and then, but going after the senator first gave him a chance to fix the overwhelming problems which could trickle down and free Iris, while the Plan B attack on the pimps at least ensures that he can free one person. The final shootout is a thing of savage beauty, shot to perfection by Scorsese and edited with just the right frantic rhythm by Tom Rolf and Melvin Shapiro. Scorsese desaturated the color timing to pass the film with an R rating, but that, funnily enough, makes it all more disturbing as it lacks the softness of '70s color stock. It culminates with a remarkable overhead shot that tracks the aftermath of Bickle's rampage through the seedy hotel, which some have interpreted as Bickle's soul leaving his body.

I do not believe the epilogue, though, is his dying fever vision. Bickle recovers from the attack and is propped up by the media as a hero. Even Palantine hoists him up as an example of the people taking charge and blah blah blah. I think this redemptive coda gives the film an ironic twist as well as a point; if this is merely Travis' last thought, then the movie is nothing more than the profile of a psycho. If it is real, then it reveals America's return to conservatism that built to a head with Reagan's election. For the media to set up a psychotic as a folk hero for slaying a -- to be honest -- relatively nonviolent pimp and a corrupt cop demonstrates a need for Americans to find concrete heroes and villains in the post-Vietnam world.

I also believe that the coda is real because of its last shot, which I finally understood with this viewing. When Travis gets back to his job, Betsy rides in his cab one night. Maybe caught up in the notion that Travis is noble, maybe just wanting to hook up with a celebrity, she attempts to re-open their relationship, but Bickle simply drops her off and doesn't make her pay. As he looks at her in the rear view mirror, suddenly he notices something and tilts the mirror, which only reflects him, not the object in question. The camera suddenly cuts with a jarring noise to capture Bickle and his reflection dominating the screen. What I see now (and don't know how I didn't see it before) is Bickle's total rejection of society. Where Betsy/the good of society rejected him before, now he can drive away from it. When he tilts the mirror to look for the unseen object, we see only him: Travis has descended into a fully insular world of paranoia now, and it's only a matter of time before he does something no one could mistake for heroic.

To call Taxi Driver a masterpiece is a waste of words. It was hailed as one upon its release, and even though it launched the career of the most impressive filmmaker working today, perhaps the most talented American director since Howard Hawks, it remains Scorsese's best film. I've not even mentioned De Niro's performance yet because I find it so unnecessary. To watch him in this film is to see pure madness, but not the moustache-twirling kind of more facile works. No, Bickle may be a genuinely decent fellow, but his mental instability turns him from an awkward, almost Office-like character into a terrifying construct. That endlessly parodied scene of him in front of the mirror asking, "You talking to me?" not only recalls yet more Western tropes (it's a straight lift from Shane) but reveals his schizophrenia and insanity.

Just recently I finally watched the last few Scorsese films I had yet to see. I came to the conclusion that, of his 20 narrative films, a good 10 were classics (about five or six are masterpieces), another five were highly watchable and the rest were merely good. It may be errant fanboyism, but I never disliked a single one of his films even when I failed to see the point of, say, the totally unnecessary The Color of Money (other than raising money for his most personal work, The Last Temptation of Christ, so it was kind of worth it). His ability to use his mastery of technique to get inside his protagonists' heads and flesh out his worlds, fusing style and substance seamlessly, makes his projects always worth seeing, and his restlessness and willingness to step far outside his comfort zone and fall on his face even today (I liked Kundun, so you can all shut it) is only outclassed in audacity by Jean-Luc Godard's irascibility. With Taxi Driver, he placed his camera in the mind of a madman and became trapped, and the result was one of the most thrilling pictures ever made.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese's The Departed is a curious case: in the director's repertoire of masterpieces, classics and just plain good movies, it ranks, narratively and structurally, as one of his weakest. Yet it is also one of his most vibrant and engaging, to the point that I find myself itching to revisit it more than any of his top-tier films, and I adore all of them. In condensing parts of all three of the Infernal Affairs trilogy in one film (though the main focus is only upon the first in the series), the movie becomes bloated and spends no time really analyzing its characters, but Scorsese manages to turn it into an epic tragedy that mostly overcomes its glaring flaws.

Normally, Scorsese's films follow a protagonist so closely that we end up viewing the entire narrative through the character's often demented point of view. This time, however, he charts the paths of two characters, which forces Scorsese to take a more objective approach. He watches the two moles, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), with rapt curiosity rather than total empathetic involvement, and it's a testament to his mastery of the craft that his camera work does not suffer at all for this drastic shift in style.

Moving outside New York and the Italian scene -- it would have been redundant after GoodFellas so completely charted the Italian mafia -- The Departed instead looks at Boston crime and the influence of the Irish mafia. "I never wanted to be a product of my environment," explains mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) as images of civil turbulence from the '60s flash before our eyes, "I wanted my environment to be a product of me." Costello has taken over the city's crime after driving out black gangs and Italian mafiosos, and the police can't touch him.

He takes young Colin under his wing, and when the lad gets old enough he enrolls in the Police Academy to set himself up as a mole in the department. Meanwhile, Billy joins the force in an attempt to distance himself from his crime-ridden family, only for Capt. Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Sgt. Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to recruit him to use those ties to infiltrate Costello's organization. They give Costigan enough jail time to make him look legit, then send him back to his family to let him get to work.

Naturally, a film concerning moles primarily concerns identity. The deeper Billy gets into Costello's racket, the more he slowly comes undone under the pressure. When he angrily demands the cops come and bust Costello for any one of the dozens of felonies he's witnessed, Dignam threatens to simply erase his police file and make him just another gangster, and you can see the desperation in DiCaprio's outraged face. Colin begins to dream of a free life when he enters into a relationship with psychiatrist Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga), but he's clearly as trapped in Costello's web as Billy. His inability to let people in on his true identity manifests itself when he refuses to let Madolyn display pictures from her childhood when she moves in with him; they only serve to remind him of what he can never have.

There's also a strange paternal bond between Frank and each of the moles. Billy's father and uncle met their demises either directly or indirectly through Costello's actions, and so he places his trust in Bill even when he knows he shouldn't. His relative warmth toward the boy make him more than just the Virgil leading Bill through hell. His bond with Colin is of course even closer, considering he's been nurturing the boy from his adolescence. When Colin contacts Frank, he even calls him Pop so the other cops don't get suspicious.

Scorsese said the film's madcap ending is meant to be a metaphor for the war on terror, which actually makes sense -- surprising, given the over-the-top insanity of the last 20 minutes. The line between cop and criminal disappears in this film when one's identity is muddled, and that could reflect the approval of torture and other atrocities in the name of battling our enemies. The zero-sum bloodbath that closes the film demonstrates that blurring the line to fight the bad guys will destroy us even if we do somehow triumph over the villain.

That final shot, of a rat scurrying across the window, is pathetically obvious, but it's not nearly as bad as some people claim. I've heard people say it ruins the film for them, which baffles me. Still, it shows the cliché in William Monahan's script, which Scorsese successfully underplayed until that moment. Moments like that, combined with the cast's dodgy grasp of the difficult Boston accent and some terrible scenery-chewing from Nicholson, keep The Departed out of the director's upper echelon of work, yet I find myself delighted and completely absorbed by this film.

Where Scorsese's crime dramas are always intimate, tracking one man's ever-unsuccessful attempts to escape the hell of his existence, this dares to be more epic. It brims with the director's signature energy, which was missing in The Aviator and Gangs of New York, though the latter is a better film than this. If nothing else, The Departed demonstrates that, even when working with an under-developed script that reads like a loving Scorsese parody, he can still make something better than most directors could ever hope to craft.

No Direction Home

Now this is more like it. I greatly enjoyed D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back, but I could see in that film an obviously edited version of Bob Dylan, an arrogant little weasel that could either be torn down or further deified. But Martin Scorsese's extensive foray into Dylan's life and career (up until 1966, at least) uses mountains of archival footage and indeed Pennebaker's own material to provide much needed context to the aloof, pretentious Dylan we got with Don't Look Back. However, it appropriately never presents a definitive image of the most mysterious man in music.

Opening with a barrage of old clips and interviews from various periods in Dylan's 60s evolution, No Direction Home plays like the carefully researched documentaries of Ken Burns as processed through Scorsese's visual excitement. We officially start, of course, with Dylan's childhood, though this section remains firmly enshrouded in the fog of Dylan's mythology. An aged Bob speaks in voice-overs from an interview taken shortly before Scorsese came aboard the project, and for him life started in high school. His parents, his childhood friends, and any nostalgia get left to the wayside; Dylan subtly impresses upon us that he was born in a town that served only to inspire kids to leave, and his parents must have been too "normal" to even factor into his consideration.

Instead, he goes straight to the moment when he first decided to play music. Scorsese and his team managed to dig up a recording of one of his performances at a talent show, and I was surprised to learn that he started out as a rocker, tearing up the stage to the point that the principal came and closed the curtain. Dylan remembers the principal, of course, the first man to stand in his way. He also remembers two women he dated, but only because of their strange names. Even as a teenager, if you weren't different or if you weren't in his way, you didn't rate a blip on Dylan's radar.

Dylan describes himself in this period as a "musical expeditionary," a term he uses to justify filching dozens of records from the home of a friend who had the best collection of folk in the state. The man in question recalls how Dylan was so interesting then that he could never really be mad at the kid even though he was lifting ultra-rare recordings. Whatever the reason, the world probably owes this man a huge debt, because without him Dylan might never have heard Woody Guthrie's recordings, and had he not he would have never decided to go to New York to meet him. "I heard [Guthrie] had some kind of ailment," Dylan recalls, "so I thought it'd be a nice gesture to go visit him." He hitched his way to Greenwich Village, performed folk covers on the streets until a young starlet named Joan Baez invited him to sing with her, and within a year he was a star.

The Dylan of these early days comes off like joyous little musical sponge: whatever he heard, he memorized, and he tried to hear everything. If listening to his debut and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan back-to-back was a shock, wait 'til you see it happen: suddenly thrust into the spotlight, Dylan finds himself a party to some of the most incredible developments of the 20th century. He's on hand at the Million Man March and stands mere feet away from Dr. King as he delivers his "I Have a Dream" Speech, and even gets to play his protest songs to the crowd. Young Robert Zimmerman has to grow up fast as the folk community essentially places all of their hopes on him: when he stumbled into Greenwich Village out of the Midwest (and already with a healthy load of made-up life stories), the community found the next Guthrie. Here was the Dust Bowl come to Greenwich Village: you didn't even need to leave home to see it.

The problem with all this sudden fame is that Dylan had absolutely no idea what to do with it. He was just a guy who wanted to play music, and all of a sudden people expected the grand speeches befitting social activists. But judging from interview footage, both old and current, the last thing Bob excelled at was speechifying.

All of this led to the most recognizable image of Dylan: the black-clad self-serious poet, never seen without a cigarette in hand, as if to add a physical haze around him to complement the fogginess of his personal history. This is the Dylan who, hyperbolic as it may seem, changed the world, the beatnik who hid behind dark sunglasses in order to mask his own insecurities. If the fans thought they were bewildered by this new development, they had nothing on the man himself. Over the course of the first 2 hours or so of the film, we've seen Dylan climb to the very top of the world, to scale Olympus and become a god. When Dylan cast himself out of heaven in a sort of protest of the protest movement, he expected his fans to follow their god, and he could never really understand why going electric had the effect it did.

Maybe it's because Dylan never really interacted with his audience. "I never wanted to be 'one of them'," he says, referring to that notion of the artist "becoming one" with the crowd. Identifying with an audience meant locking your music down to appeal to them for as long as possible, and Dylan could never figure out what he wanted to be long enough to care about appealing to a demographic.

The entire last stretch of the films deals with the controversy over this radical shift in tone. Fans boo his backing band; "I don't understand how they can buy up the tickets so fast," Bob wonders. Why do his shows sell out so quickly if the people hate this new direction? Not all fans were so close-minded, of course. At a clip of his '66 performances near the start of the film, a reporter asks for the opinions of the teens streaming out of a gig in England. One kid says he liked it, and another loses it: "I came to see Bob Dylan, not a pop group!" The first kid replies chirpily, "Not a lot of pop groups like that!" Thank God somebody got it.

Then there's the press. Don't Look Back portrayed Dylan's dealings with the press as, well, childish and spiteful, but Scorsese surrounds these scenes with context, showing just how thoroughly uninformed the reporters who pestered the artist were. One even cops to never having heard a single Bob Dylan song. Can you imagine a critic discussing a movie he hadn't seen, or a reporter wrote an article about a news event he knew nothing about? He'd get fired in a New York minute, but because this is rock 'n roll, and because it allowed them to print a sort of controversy regarding a falling star. The Beatles covered up their disgust with wit, but Dylan flat out fought them; you could argue (and I'm torn) that it was all an Andy Kaufman-like manipulation of people to craft a sort of anti-comedy only funny to him and those who got it, but really Dylan was just pissed.

Scorsese's documentary ends after 3-1/2 hours with some title cards mentioning Dylan's motorcycle accident and how he eventually recovered and continued to record (in case you weren't sure), but as much as I wanted to see the rest of Dylan's life explored by the filmmaker, I agree with the stopping point. Scorsese wanted to peer into the life of an enigma without ruining the mystery, and he succeeded wildly. He does not waste time by interviewing "experts" from music magazines who would speak in redundant platitudes about the importance of Dylan's albums; no, Scorsese digs up interviews with the people who really knew him, and because they knew him they never try to explain him. They report all the stuff Dylan told them and delightfully say that it's all a load of nonsense, but they still offer insights into the man and his work.

No Direction Home is not the best documentary ever made about music -- nor is it even Scorsese's own best, not with The Last Waltz knocking about -- but as a document on the life of a musician, I've never seen a superior film; as a portrait of an artist, it ranks second only to Terry Zwigoff's Crumb. Scorsese infuses the still photos and archival footage with such passion and understanding of what make Dylan interesting that he never retreads nor ruins the mystery for people; he does almost as much to cement Dylan's status as a genius and a revolutionary in the pop world as the actual music. I can safely say it's the only time in my life I've watched a 3-1/2 hour documentary and wanted to restart the thing and watch it again the second it ended.

Who's That Knocking at My Door

Martin Scorsese's debut contains so many of the director's trademark themes that it's fascinating even in its flawed state. What started as a short student film in 1964 evolved into a Catholic-tinged romance by the time it debuted at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1967 under the title I Call First, where it was enthusiastically received by then-novice critic Roger Ebert, who almost single-handedly established the director as a talent to watch years before he followed through on that promise with Mean Streets. Even if it pales next to later works, the film is a thoroughly interesting introduction to a legend.

Scorsese follows J.R., your average Italian-American kid, as he passes the time on the streets of New York. He's played by Harvey Keitel, more fresh-faced than I ever thought possible; yeah, I know he was younger, but even in Mean Streets he had a bit of a grizzled appearance about him. He hangs out with his aimless pals as they hit up bars and have their way with loose women. Near the start of the film J.R. meets a young woman (Zina Bethune) in a train station, and the two discuss John Ford's masterpiece The Searchers, a film that will come to have many parallels with the story. The two hit it off, and soon they're a serious couple.

J.R. is so in love that he even plans to marry the girl, until she reveals to him a terrible secret: when she was younger, her boyfriend raped her. Unwilling to marry someone who isn't a virgin, J.R. rejects her and must figure out what he wants to do. The men of Scorsese's films often fear the sexual power of the female, and J.R. is no exception. Scorsese contrasts J.R.'s rejection of her impurity with an earlier montage of J.R. imagining himself bedding numerous floozies and whores. The men in society can screw whomever and whatever they want, but if a woman has sex--even against her will--it's her shame.

Likewise, Scorsese also deals with the subject of Catholic guilt that would define many of his characters. At one point we see J.R.'s mother fixing dinner for well-behaved children, only to cut to the seedy hangout in which J.R. and his buddies meet, complete with photos of nude women plastering the walls. When J.R. decides to marry the girl "anyway," she justifiably gets upset with him for being bothered not by the fact that someone violated her but that she's not a virgin. J.R. struggles with the way he was brought up and even calls her a whore. The film subsequently ends with a montage of shots of J.R. going to church for absolution, because of what he said but also because that's just what he does. As with the theme of male and female double standards, it's just too pronounced.

The influence and indirect homage of The Searchers plays out with the girl's confession. J.R. plays the role of John Wayne's character. Where Ethan held viciously racist views on Native Americans and accepted only the "purity" of the white race, J.R. places women into two categories: the nice girls and the broads. The girl fits into Natalie Wood's part: just as Natalie Wood was barely different after being assimilated into the Commanches, J.R.'s girlfriend is a "nice girl" who's just not a virgin.

I Call First became Who's That Knocking at My Door when exploitation producer Joseph Brenner agreed to distribute the film for wide release, under the provision that Scorsese added a sex scene, resulting in that fantasy sequence that looks so out of place. It's only another addition to a film established largely in a piecemeal format; not only were new scenes added in but different types of stock. Scorsese used both 16mm and 35mm film to make the movie, so some scenes sparkle while other look like the indie film that it is. It's somewhat of a visual approximation of the film's own disconnect between the obviousness of the themes and the brilliance inherent even in the director's first work.

For all its flaws, Who's That Knocking at My Door gets a great deal right, and it shows Scorsese deftly in control of his camera as it mingles with characters, jump cuts all over the place and just generally makes itself a force in its own right. Scorsese also shows his mastery with melding pop music with the visuals, making it that much more exciting. For all its heavy-handedness, I'd love to watch this again, something I didn't think I'd be able to say about the film from the outset. It trapped Scorsese in the exploitation market for a few years (he'd go on to make his weakest film, Boxcar Bertha, after this) before friend and indie pioneer John Cassavetes shook some sense into him and told him to get serious. The result was Mean Streets, and that's the place everyone should start with Scorsese, but die-hards can find a lot to love in this potential-laden offering.