MARTIN SCORSESE

SCORSESE MAKES GREAT ART BEFORE PRODUCING FILM MASTERPIECES

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

American-Italian stylized filmmaking distinctly from the New York neighborhoods gained critical success for the storytelling and the indelible portraits of America.

Director Martin Scorsese creates long interesting narratives with more than one plot reversal for the cast full of talented actors portraying unique characters from the streets of American cities.

Scorsese stays away from depicting sex scenes to draw in audiences, and instead, uses violence and often graphic violence to compel audiences through scene sequences depicting life and death struggles.

Violence draws attention to the moral development of the characters and how a young person might be shaped and formed by the kinetic energy of violence as much as the perpetrator of violence.

In GoodFellas (1990) chaotic violence is intertwined with sardonic humor and the tranquility of comradery and family life.

The sins of the flesh drive many characters, but the storylines are simplified by presenting love interests as another complication in the emotional caldron of relationships. The goal of the crime family is really to make money while violence is only an instrument to make more money or to keep the money machines already in their power and control.

Joe Pesci plays Tommy, whose use of violence becomes so common as to consume him and distract him from the real goal.

Casino (1995) is the unofficial sequel to GoodFellas with the mobsters moving from New York City to set up in the crime rich Las Vegas casino circuit. Robert De Niro is reunited with costar Joe Pesci, with Sharon Stone playing the love interest, while James Woods plays the unwelcomed third party.

The love for money tests the loyalty of even the closest of tightly knit gangsters. But the inevitable human frailties around the sins of the flesh are their undoing with a lot of sex and infidelity going on in the untold backstory to unwind the tightest of friendships.

Scorsese takes his time developing the characters and the relationships between these characters.

When the plot reverses, the audience has already invested emotionally into the script and therefore feel emotionally for the characters as their fate twists and turns through various morality trials often involving crime and graphic violence.

Scorsese likes to put a knife as much as a gun into the hands of his characters. The linear storylines allow for a more complicated narrative continually moving forward, then pushed along a bit by a music score and further acts of violence until people eventually get bumped off at every corner.

The stories merge and then depart from the main narrative, but the audience remains clear on the truth because the plot always moves forward without the sometimes confusing flashbacks and ellipses in which runtime reality may appear a bit confused.

This stylized voice gets the gritty details from having lived in that reality as a young man on Elizabeth Street in New York City’s Little Italy. Scorsese infuses himself into the earlier films as a kind of ghostly omniscient narrator.

In Mean Streets (1973) the young Italian Americans struggle to find themselves while surviving on the streets as the ideas of individual liberation begin to pull them away from the morality code instilled into younger versions of themselves by their parent’s Catholicism.

Scorsese draws the picture of the 1960s using the neorealism that dramatizes life as little as possible by using the real streets instead of movie sets, and the real people of the city instead of Hollywood celebrity actors.

This early New York casting call brings into the first few Scorsese films a young Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and then eventually, kind of begrudgingly, former child actors Joe Pesci and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Taxi Driver (1976) was the ultimate counterrevolution film driven mainly by honest character development in a tough modern city exploring existential themes of isolation and loneliness. The film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

De Niro plays an isolated Vietnam veteran driving a cab in the crime ridden New York City of the 1970s.

Travis befriends 14 year old girl prostitute Iris, played by child actor Jodi Foster. Harvey Keitel plays Iris’ pimp, Sport. The gritty filmmaker incrementally winds the audience up with the expectation that the fate of these three players on the street will eventually collide.

Taxi Driver is a neorealist film about the hopeless outcome for veterans who have made their way back home from the live war theater only to struggle with rejoining society. This theme of an outsider compelled toward the margins by his own passions is a subtext for several of the director’s films.

Scorsese then creates a stylized boxing film in the black and white medium to create the tone and atmosphere from the New York boxing world of the 1940s.

Raging Bull (1980) is Scorsese’s first real masterpiece partly because he uses the camera to paint the story as much as to incrementally follow the character development. The designer of true stories finally put down the pencil and sketchbook and picked up the paint brush and canvass.

De Niro won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the middleweight champion of the world, Jake La Motta. Joe Pesci costars as La Motta’s brother, sports agent and trainer.

Scorsese depicts the boxer in several different stages of his life, from the young up and coming sports narcissist to the aging tragic hero. De Niro transforms his character physically and emotionally along the way, well deserving of  the Academy’s accolades.

The linear boxing narrative flows naturally forward on the momentum of a rollercoaster life that might otherwise be less compelling with time shifts. The temporal sequences become entertaining enough through the telling of facts and the acting art that produces visceral reactions to individual performances.

De Niro had previously won an Oscar in a Supporting Role for his performance as the young Italian immigrant, Vito Corleone, in the Godfather II (1973). De Niro has seven nominations and two wins from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Born in Queens on November 17, 1942, Scorsese would not win an Oscar until directing the South Boston crime drama, The Departed (2006). The star studded ensemble cast with the New York director won four Oscars, including Best Motion Picture and Best Directing.

The crime drama narrative twists and turns through the relationships developed between characters, each of which shares a bit of culpability in the crime and corruption of South Boston. The complicated copper plot gradually fills with double blinds, but the narrative holds together through the relationships created along the way.

One of the best directors in the world then won the 2010 Cecil B. DeMille Award for Achievement in Entertainment from the Golden Globe Foreign Press.

Scorsese and De Niro create some of their best film work together. De Niro also worked in supporting roles with other directors, such as with Kevin Costner in a critically acclaimed performance as Chicago prohibition era gangster Al Capone in the Brian De Palma film, The Untouchables (1987).

De Niro goes through a physical transformation for the role by adding substantial weight to what had previously been a masculine physique for the boxing flick, Raging Bull.

In that same year, De Niro also plays a supporting role to Mickey Rourke in the Alan Parker film, Angel Heart (1987).

Scorsese then finds success with a whole new set of actors from a younger generation of Hollywood stars, telling the old story of Americana in different facets than those presented in stories about the Italian mob.

Scorsese shifts from casting De Niro and Pesci in the marque roles to casting Leonardo Di Caprio, beginning with the historical drama, Gangs of New York (2002). The Scorsese historical crime drama depicts the immigrant gangs fighting for America and the Five Corners neighborhood of Lower Manhattan during the Civil War years.

Scorsese casts Daniel Day-Lewis again after giving the talented actor the lead in the film, The Age of Innocence (1993).

Gangs of New York is another film compelled forward with an ensemble cast of characters and a compelling storyline that twists and turns with a lot of violence and vitriol shared amongst the criminal underworld.

The filmmaker also gets a bit more involved in the historical aspects of the storyline, utilizing the aesthetics of period costumes and historically accurate props in front of the camera. Scorsese becomes so infatuated by the accuracy of the little details of the era that the Five Corners neighborhood becomes a character in the film with the actors and the background extras becoming relegated at times to the role of props.

Dante Ferretti designed and manufactured the set of Old New York in the  legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome, Italy.

This film portraying the epoch of 1846 onwards is just the introduction to a more detailed, more artful filmmaking that becomes the impetus for a series of period portraits.

A Howard Hughes biopic becomes another Scorsese portrait of America. The Aviator (2004) earned 11 Academy Award nominations, winning five Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Cate Blanchett’s performance as the actor Katharine Hepburn.

Scorsese shows an artist’s intensity working with period pieces by panning the camera around to highlight the authentic set designs and props from the era. The camera also zooms in for closeups of the actors and then pans around the set again until catching another subject in the lens.

The Aviator is full of artifacts, including the cars and airplanes used during the era, right down to the broom handle used by a janitor in the airplane development hanger, and the camera flash bulbs on the ground at the entrance to a Hollywood Premier.

Scorsese combines the sound of crushing flash bulbs with the music score and background sound to create a self-reflective moment for the filmmaker and the film industry.

This examination of the early days of Hollywood includes contemporary best actors performing biopic roles as the best actors of the classic cinema.

Scorsese shows his skill in directing by again casting several talented actors in the same film, including Jude Law as Erol Flynn and Kate Beckinsale as Eva Gardner.

At the same time, the director highlights the world class innovation in industry and design that made America.

Hughes begins his filmmaking career in 1927. But this biopic character is not so different a subject with Scorsese again exploring the characters’ inner demons as the narrative brings them closer to that brief moment of redemption.

Italian cinema influenced one of the most influential filmmakers in the world. Scorsese has Catholicism in his backstory with the morality learned at church often underwriting themes of sin, guilt and redemption in the storyline.

These themes of personal truth become attached to the gritty reality of surviving through the filmmakers highly stylized conversation with America, as unique characters are sent on new journeys toward those poignant moments of transcendence.

Martin Scorsese, by Vincent La Brutto, London, Praeger, 2008. Martin Scorsese: A Journey, by Mary Pat Kelly, New York, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991.