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Is the
sixth time a charm?
That’s
the question for the great director Martin Scorsese, who
has been five times nominated for a Best Directing Oscar
and has never won. Now, his film The Departed
will almost certainly be nominated January 23 in a
number of categories, directing among them, and the
question is: Will he at last get to make the speech with
the golden statuette in his hand, signifying whatever it
is that an Oscar signifies?
Why not?
Scorsese, 64, is recognized as one of America’s finest
directors—if not the finest—a consummately engaged
member of the film community, active in film restoration
and other initiatives. He’s kept his hand in the
documentary world, and often segued from big-budget
Hollywood pictures to small, hard looks at issues and artists.
So it’s
his due. It’s his time.
But . .
. questions: Does Scorsese care? Does he deserve it for
The Departed? Why hasn’t he won before? And, most
important of all, should we care? I don’t, not a bit.
But Scorsese surely does, not because The Departed
is his masterpiece. It’s not. It’s nowhere near his
masterpiece, an earnest bit of corporate filmmaking
designed to honorably milk genre expectations for
maximum profit. It’s somehow largely unconnected with
his previous great films and, happily, also unconnected
with his previous mediocre films.
But an
Oscar signifies something that’s clearly important to
the New York filmmaker, and that is acceptance in the
far glades of
Los Angeles
filmmaking. You would think it meaningless after all the
success he’s had, all the praise, and that if the work
isn’t its own reward, then the rewards were their own
rewards. But an Oscar, particularly for a sickly kid who
grew up thinking he’d be a priest? Especially someone so
sunk in film history and culture? John Ford won Oscars,
and Billy Wilder, and Steven Spielberg, and he’d want to
be a part of that set.
The
irony? If he wins, it’ll be for one of his least
Scorsesesque films. It even could be argued that The
Departed is an imitation Scorsese film. It seems to
be made by a graduate student who has studied the great
Marty, and now has some money to play around with and
has decided upon a tribute to the master.
The film
isn’t set in
New York,
where all of Scorsese’s great films were set, and it’s
not set among the Italian American Mafia subculture, and
its characters seem by far a cooler lot than Scorsese’s
typical crew of hotheads and sociopath outsiders who
yearn to belong and start killing when they don’t. Nor
does it have the hypnotic intensity that Scorsese brings
to his typical film, that sense of hyper-realism that
takes on a nightmarish clarity. It doesn’t have
Scorsese’s old friend and collaborator Robert De Niro
(who was off making his own film, The Good Shepherd),
thus vacating a fat old-guy role for Jack Nicholson, who
brought a different and distinctly non-Scorsese tone to
the piece.
Where De
Niro would have been manic, obsessed, riveting as the
gang lord Frank Costello, Nicholson plays the old guy in
an almost comic tone. He’s in the game still, after all
these years, because he loves the game. De Niro’s
Costello would have still been in the game all these
years because he loves to win. De Niro would have driven
the movie faster, his pathology would have made it hang
together more. (What is the difference between the two
actors? Nicholson knows he’s funny; De Niro is so funny
precisely because he doesn’t know he’s funny.)
This
latest film from Scorsese represents a kind of
professional directors’ conceit. All these
guys—Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, the generation that
broke through in the ‘70s—seem to be hitting a similar
stage in life. They understand they are not wunderkinder
anymore; they don’t want all the Sturm und Drang on the
set. Somehow, they became the establishment and decided
they’d rather do 10 more films that are pretty good than
one more that’s a difficult work of genius.
Scorsese
seems to have drawn a lesson from Gangs of New York.
That was his baby and getting it made, with budget
overruns and editing problems and fights with
management, must have nearly killed him. Even when he
did succeed, he was a full year behind schedule. When
the film earned mediocre reviews and did mediocre
business he must have wondered: Why did I put myself
through that? His two films since then—The Aviator,
his highly praised bio of Howard Hughes’s struggles to
make Hell’s Angels (which perhaps reminded him of his
own struggle on Gangs) and now The Departed—both
have been mainstream entertainment and star-driven, both
have been made quietly, competently, professionally, and
neither has really expressed the Scorsese personality in
the way that the earlier, better movies did.
The
filmmaker was a Little Italy kid through and through,
but a childhood of ill health reportedly kept him sealed
off from the normalcy of boyhood culture. After high
school, he went to seminary; the passion of commitment
to a higher order burned within him. But after a year,
he quit, and went to New York University’s film school.
His devotion to the art was almost as pure as the ideal
priest’s and he seethed with the need to save the movies
from themselves.
His
breakthrough film, Mean Streets in 1973, jangled
with this energy. It was the story of a young Mafioso
torn between his ambitions to be a good hood but also to
save his less stable friend, whose survival he sees as a
kind of religious salvation. That part—Charlie—was
played by Harvey Keitel, but the role that was to
provide the basis for most of Scorsese’s later work was
Johnny Boy, played by De Niro. What was Johnny’s
problem? Well, he was just angry, volatile, spilling
toward self-destruction at every turn, unwilling to pay
back his debts or show respect to his elders. He’s on a
one-way ride to hell and we know that he will bring
everybody along for the ride.
With
rare exceptions (Taxi Driver), that became the ur-tale
for Scorsese: A responsible male tries to keep an
irresponsible male from destroying himself. That’s true
in Raging Bull, where De Niro’s Jake LaMotta
makes war on the world while his brother, played by Joe
Pesci, tries to rein him in. It’s certainly true in
GoodFellas, where Pesci plays the bullgoose crazy
one, and it’s Ray Liotta who is the ameliorating factor.
In Casino, again Pesci gets the crazed, depraved
role, probably the most violent punk Scorsese has ever
put onscreen; it’s his pal, De Niro, who talks him down,
tries to rescue him.
That’s
another reason The Departed seems to have been
made by a Scorsese imitator, not Scorsese himself.
There’s almost no sense of comradeship in the movie.
It’s totally each man for himself and the most shocking
moment comes when expectations of loyalty are dashed.
The
film, based on a Hong Kong movie of surprising restraint
and complexity called Infernal Affairs, tracks
the progress of two moles—one in the police department
(Matt Damon) and the other in the mob (Leonardo DiCaprio),
who learn about the existence, but not the identity, of
the other. Each is assigned to locate the other.
The
situation itself is nothing like Scorsese. It lacks his
signature obsessions and it’s so intricate that it
requires a felicity for detailed storytelling that he’s
never shown before (which is why it occasionally loses
its way). His movies have never been overplotted;
they’re so obsessed with the moment and the
psychological state of the protagonist that they instead
discover and stick to very basic situations.
It’s
also guilt-free. The truth is, these are probably the
least interesting characters Scorsese has ever covered.
None of them seems haunted or torn, no one has issues.
Instead, they’re so consumed with the nuts-and-bolts of
complex professional obligations, that’s all there is to
them.
Then
there’s milieu.
Boston? Boston
Irish? Scorsese doesn’t have the feel for the Irish he
seems to have for those New York Italians, even if so
much of his cast (like Damon and Mark Wahlberg) can
claim a Boston heritage.
A deeper
issue is the relative mental health of everybody. Most
of Scorsese’s great films depict men in the grip of an
obsession that completely defines their personalities
and their actions. He’s not Howard Hawks or John Ford,
who preferred to study cool professionals in action;
he’s more like the great film noir directors—Rudolph
Maté in D.O.A. comes to mind, or Raoul Walsh in White
Heat—who showed men in extreme states. Thus all the
intricate plotting in The Departed and the lack
of deep psychological states make the film feel weirdly
apart from the classic Scorsese canon.
Which
brings us to this: Is the argument that he will win the
Oscar for The Departed but doesn’t deserve it?
Hardly. The truth is, as anyone who’s ever won a major
national award can attest, whimsy often has more to do
with the results than justice. The people who give
awards give them for their own reasons, not the
recipient’s: to look good, to make up for past failures,
to make a comment, to feel virtuous.
The
award that Scorsese may get in February will be savored
but doubted; it will feel more like a career salute
(Scorsese has already won an AFI Life Achievement Award)
than a particular embrace of a particular film. And so
what? That’s the way awards work, and who else are they
going to give it to—a second one for Clint Eastwood? Or
a first one for the two brilliantly talented Mexican
directors who are sure to be around for a long time to
come? Good Lord, they’ve already given one to Robert
Redford, Roman Polanski and Barry Levinson.
Yet one
can’t help but think that
Hollywood
waited until it was comfortable with Martin Scorsese
before conferring the gold statuette upon him, waited
until he morphed into something more bourgeois, more
system-oriented, mellower, more professional. His
earlier films—his great films—were savage examinations
of hearts of darkness, of deviant behaviors, of
misanthropic loners. They asked, defiantly: You talkin’
to me? |
