THE AVIATOR COMMETH: IN DEFENSE OF SCORSESE

The promotion has been going on for a couple weeks already. Harvey is doing his best to get Marty that director’s Oscar. Leo took over half a Friday’s Dateline NBC. CNN and Miramax have partnered for their own promotional push (which is interesting considering that this translates to Time Warner and Disney making nice-nice). And starting tonight, the great Martin Scorsese himself gets into the act with a special appearance on IFC’s Dinner for Five that was taped a few months ago at the Lake Placid Film Festival. Then on Tuesday, my favorite channel TCM premiere’s a new entry in Richard Schickel’s great series of documentaries focusing on directors talking about their own careers: Scorsese on Scorsese.

I’ll admit it: I worship at the altar of Scorsese. Regardless of George A Girl and a Gun’s attempts to argue to the contrary (check out the 11/28/04 entry), Scorsese is almost indisputably the greatest American director still working today, by far the best to come of age in the 1970s and, maybe most importantly, the most learned and intelligent scholar on all things films. With that said, while I disagree with most of George’s comments in that post (and just so we’re clear, while I also take issue with one of his film noir comments, that’s reserved for another post, I think he continues to produce some of the most well-considered and intelligent film writing not only on the web but anywhere), I would be practicing blind fanaticism if I didn’t acknowledge that he no longer seems to be the same filmmaker he was a decade ago.

George makes a good point when he says Scorsese “started making bloated, expensive pictures with lousy stories which were expected to make money rather than make our spines tingle.” While I wouldn’t personally go that far, there definitely has been a shift post-Goodfellas to a more Hollywood stylized, higher-budget, hopefully more commercial filmmaking style. It’s an undeniable argument when considering movies such as Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, Casino, Bringing Out the Dead and Gangs of New York (Kundun is a possible exception). However, Scorsese’s personality is still injected into each of these films, and to call any of them poor attempts at filmmaking is just silly. What we do find in this period of his work are a series of film that don’t rise to what we expect and hope from a Scorsese movie, Gangs of New York being the best example of this “disappointment.” Of course, Scorsese can’t seem to give anybody what they want. Gangs of New York gets criticized for simply being Goodfellas in the 19th century (which is actually an absurd comment), yet at the same time, everybody’s pissed that he hasn’t made another film as good as his 1990 mob epic.

First of all, it’s not unnatural for filmmakers to “lose it,” although most probably never actually do. Our best filmmakers make movies of such awe-inducing quality that our expectations keep rising to levels that become that much harder to achieve. Maybe Scorsese is following a similar career arc to that of my all-time favorite director, Billy Wilder. Most people, including George, consider Scorsese’s heyday to be his early films with the heavily nouvelle vague-influenced Who’s That Knocking at My Door, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and eventually, Raging Bull. After that, he made a string of movies that were very New York-centric but not as highly regarded (at least at the time … more on that later) before his thought-of masterpiece Goodfellas, and then hasn’t been the same since.

The situation with Wilder is similar. When Wilder began directing, relatively early on he made a string of brilliant films, many considered among the greatest films of all time and the best of their respective genres. Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd. , Stalag 17, Sabrina, Some Like It Hot and The Apartment were all made in a 16 year span, and the movies that I didn’t list aren’t too shabby either. After The Apartment, Wilder made only nine more films over the following 20 years (even though he never actually retired), and while each is entertaining in its own way and several are actually better than remembered, none of them come close to his previous work.

One big difference between the two is that Wilder always worked within the big Hollywood system (there really wasn’t another way in those days) while Scorsese was a product (or even one of the creators) of the burgeoning New York independent film scene, so his sudden utilization of bigger budgets and glossier filmmaking is a more noticeable shift. But the lack of a brilliant movie post-Goodfellas isn’t so different from the dry spell Wilder experienced post-The Apartment

Unlike Wilder, though, Scorsese has a second filmmaking career going on, and here’s where my theory comes into play. Theory, you ask? Or not. Moving on ….

George mentions that in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, author Peter Biskind speculates that Scorsese was just another 1970s burnout filmmaker, but I don’t think that’s it at all. Sure he had his reporter life-in-the-fast-lane issues including a drug addiction (which I believe it the main reason New York, New York is such a snooze). But I wonder if Scorsese — notwithstanding the increasing size and scope of his films, particularly after Goodfellas — merely doesn’t enjoy making narrative feature films like he used to. I wonder if his heart simply isn’t in it. Over the last several years, he has been so active in efforts with film preservation and in making documentaries regarding the histories of cinema and music, I wonder if he finds those projects more exciting than finding his next Taxi Driver or Raging Bull. All you have to do is watch him speak about some specific genre or period of film history and marvel at how many facts and how much knowledge spills out of his quick-talking mouth to understand the passion he has for movies. And it’s infectious. I dare anyone who considers himself/herself a cinephile to watch Il Mio Viaggio in Italia and not want to instantly watch every single film he references, which basically means watching the majority of Italian Neorealism from the cameras of masters like Rossellini, de Sica, Antonioni, Visconti and, of course, Fellini. Then there was the PBS miniseries “Martin Scorsese presents The Blues“, and his upcoming documentary about Bob Dylan. Both of these projects return him to his days working on music docs as editor of Woodstock and director of The Last Waltz.

Of course, I’ll withhold judgment on The Aviator until I see it next week. A friend in LA saw it and absolutely loved it. He called it one of the best biopics he’d ever seen and easily Scorsese’s greatest triumph since Goodfellas. I suppose we’ll see. And unlike some people, while I was initially worried, I’m actually somewhat intrigued by Scorsese’s plans to remake Infernal Affairs by setting it in the world of Boston Irish gangs.

But back to George A Girl and a Gun for a moment, because it was in catching-up on his blog that I was suddenly sparked into writing this post. I think George has done a fundamental disservice to Scorsese by trying to pigeonhole him into one style of film, and being unfairly dismissive of movies that are, in fact, excellent and neglected rather than simple trifles. He says Goodfellas (1990) was the first “truly good film” Scorsese had made since Raging Bull. Excuse me, but that’s absolute horseshit. 1988’s Last Temptation of Christ is a remarkable movie that was unjustly lost amidst the religious controversy that enveloped its release. While not quite as criminal as his 1991 directing Oscar lost to the utterly undeserving Kevin Costner for the overdirected Dances With Wolves, but his 1989 loss to Barry Levinson for the overrated and overpraised Rain Man is almost as tragic.

Meanwhile, After Hours and (especially) The King of Comedy are absolutely dazzling black comedies and perfect reflections of the times during which they were made. The King of Comedy’s look at fame and depression in this society may appear absurd on the surface, but watch it again – it’s riveting. Rupert Pupkin belongs in the pantheon of brilliant performances by Robert De Niro. After Hours, Scorsese’s paean to the weirdness of mid-80s SoHo, is a vastly entertaining twist on a fish-out-of-water story, depicting the uniqueness of New York and the excesses of the after-hour scene.

George doesn’t even mention The King of Comedy preferring to emphasize Scorsese’s first true attempt to go Hollywood with The Color of Money, in my opinion one of the director’s weakest films which simply means, again, it’s not exceptional in the way we expect it to be. All three of these movies, though, certainly get better than a “generosity nod” and deserve far better comment than “neither is awful.” Do any of them equal his “major work”? No, but that’s why they’re not part of what might be called his “major work.” On the other hand, The King of Comedy and After Hours especially are woefully neglected and vastly underrated, as is his early single-mother drama Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. For that matter, while seemingly departures from what might seem like Scorsese pictures, both The Age of Innocence and Kundun are fascinating beautiful movies that seemed to lack approval because they didn’t involve Italian guys trying to beat up each other. And while I know most people dislike both Casino and Bringing Out the Dead because they seem to think Scorsese was just remaking Goodfellas in Vegas and Taxi Driver in an ambulance, I think they get a bad rap. Had any other filmmaker made either of these movies, they would have been lauded with raves. (I’m especially in the minority on Bringing Out the Dead which I loved.)

The idea that Scorsese is one of America’s greatest directors is not a “sales pitch,” and the only element of his oeuvre that doesn’t stand up to John Ford or Howard Hawks is that he’s not nearly as prolific. But who is today? The studio system churned out films by its biggest star directors with them averaging more than a film a year for stretches of time. Nowadays, with the length of time films sit in development and the very different nature of the film industry, even a major filmmaker getting one film per year made is the exception not the rule. Ford made many brilliant pictures, especially of the Western and war variety, but many of them are also very similar with only small variations to the story. Does Raging Bull stand-up to The Searchers? Is it really even possible to compare two such different films? If so, I say yes. And yes, you can also compare Scorsese’s resume adequately to Welles and Huston, especially if you’re going to say that Huston only had a “tiny handful” of best films and are limiting Welles to “his peak.” It might be more appropriate, however, to compare Scorsese’s work to the other filmmakers who came of age during the same time, and he certainly deserves to be in the company, if not leading the pack, of Spielberg and Coppola and ahead of De Palma and Bogdanovich. I would stack Scorsese’s five best films (Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Last Temptation of Christ and Goodfellas) against any other American filmmakers five best and be unsurprised to discover that he at least stands up to all of them. And his lesser films hold up too, even more so now than they did upon original release.

I don’t mean to attack George (who again depicts a breadth of cinematic knowledge of which I am often envious), nor does Scorsese need little ol’ me to defend him. His work adequately does that itself. And regardless of how good The Aviator may or may not be, even if it disappoints our expectations of a Martin Scorsese picture, chances are, it still will be one of the better films this year and a vast improvement on a hack job biopic like Ray. (By the way: if Leonardo DiCaprio had not been in Titanic and thereafter received the backlash from too-much-popularity resulting in so many of our schadenfreude hopes, he probably would be on his way to a similarly respected career as the one which Johnny Depp has developed over the past few years.)

Scorsese has been an invaluable asset to the world of cinema, and not just American film. Will he ever be the filmmaker he once was in the 70s or even the 80s? Maybe not, but maybe he doesn’t want to be. The one thing I do expect is that whatever comes from the mind of Martin Scorsese will always be worth watching, debating and studying because it will have come from one of the most important and influential filmmakers of the late 20th century, and an honest examination of his work is the only sales pitch needed to prove that.