The Big Screen (80 page)

It is a tribute to America's premier cable channels that they have made money, and terrific entertainment, from views of a country in growing trouble. (HBO's most characteristic Everyman figure may be Larry David!) No wonder so many ambitious and creative filmmakers have given up on the condescending attitude toward television that prevailed in mainstream American filmmaking from the first days of the small screen until the 1990s.

One of the most intriguing directorial debuts for a premier cable channel was the pilot episode of
Boardwalk Empire
, shown in September 2010 and directed by Martin Scorsese, who is also an executive producer on the series. That year, Scorsese was sixty-eight, yet he also opened a feature film,
Shutter Island
, and two documentaries,
A Letter to Elia
(on what Kazan had meant to Scorsese growing up) and
Public Speaking
(about Fran Lebowitz). Was this a busy year, or one in which the maestro might have assigned some projects to associates?
A Letter to Elia
was codirected with Kent Jones, but Scorsese's appetite for film is not much drawn to delegation. Thus, in 2011, he completed and opened a documentary,
George Harrison
:
Living in the Material World
, and a 3-D feature film,
Hugo
, adapted from
The Invention of Hugo Cabret
, a novel in pictures by Brian Selznick (a first cousin, twice removed, of David O. Selznick). By the time the latter opened, in November 2011, Scorsese was in preproduction for
Silence
, a project he had been nursing for years, about Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan. As he spoke about it,
Silence
seemed like a project along the austere lines of
Kundun
(1997) or
The Last Temptation of Christ
(1988), and a mark of the director's early desire to be a priest. “It's about the very essence of Christianity. It's about who Jesus really is, in a sense. It's based on a true story. Some priests went there in his name and tried to bring ‘salvation' to the Japanese. At a certain point the Japanese turn on them, try to kill them, and the priests felt they had to leave.” But in case that spiritual material might seem to compromise his marketability, or prove too hard to make (even with Daniel Day-Lewis), Scorsese had other projects being developed,
Sinatra
, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role, and
The Wolf of Wall Street
.

Silence
or
Sinatra
? It's the imprint of a versatility or split personality that prevails in the American movie world two decades after Steven Spielberg did
Jurassic Park
and
Schindler's List
at nearly the same time. It's also a proof of Scorsese's restless energy, his headlong way of speaking, the nervousness of his authority, money problems, and his attempt to fulfill an old Hollywood goal, that of making high art and a crowd-pleaser at the same time. Along with his rapturous knowledge of film history, his meticulous facility with the medium, and his pitch-perfect imitation of a movie-mad kid, this is what has made Scorsese the cherished godfather and role model in modern American film. And
Hugo
is an unashamed celebration of being film-mad as well as a plea to save all the old movies, using the despondent figure of Georges Méliès at the close of his life as a central character. There was widespread relief among directors when Scorsese at last got an Oscar for directing and the Best Picture award for
The Departed
. He deserved so much more, even if
The Departed
was not his best work.

The tumult or torment in Scorsese may be too interesting to settle for words like “genius” or “creator.” It is the striving and the endless tension in “Marty” that are most impressive, and that drive the violence in his work. This is not just the various ways of killing or abusing people, though no one can deny that compulsive habit in films from
Goodfellas
(1990) to
Casino
(1995) to
The Departed
(2006). I suggested, in talking about
Raging Bull
(1980), that Scorsese could not separate himself from fraternal rivalry and its hidden attractions. He is haunted by the life and death of gangsters, and endlessly drawn to filming killings. But this is not just shooting spectacular deaths, or needing them in his stories. It is as if filming and story are a pretext for fearful rhapsodies of violence—consider the repetition of De Niro catching fire at the close of
Casino
, and then the sumptuous brutality in the disposal of the Joe Pesci character and his brother in a hole in the desert.

Pesci and De Niro are one of the most frightening warped love stories in modern film. Put that beside Scorsese's lack of interest or achievement with women on-screen (though Sharon Stone is a loving gift to misogyny in
Casino
), and it's possible to feel a smothered pulse of homoeroticism in Scorsese's work that is the more suggestive because it is not acknowledged. (The most telling American films about gay feelings have been made not directly but obliquely, in films that are ostensibly confident about manhood, dames, and violence.) Scorsese has persisted with the confrontation between boys dressed up as men.
The Age of Innocence
tried to deal with women and society, but it is not as true to Edith Wharton as Terence Davies's English film
The House of Mirth
, which has an exceptional, fatalistic performance from Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart.

Scorsese may have worked too much—there are films that seem rushed, overcalculated, or gloating, and that blur cinematic dazzle with human uglinesss—
Cape Fear
(1991),
Gangs of New York
(2002),
The Departed
(2006),
Shutter Island
(2010)—but time and again he explores the medium like a surgeon at a massacre.
Taxi Driver
and
Raging Bull
are landmarks. In its complex use of music as a base,
Casino
is as engrossing as it is brutal, and a knowing and compromised portrait of the mind-set of Las Vegas. Scorsese gazes at the place like a would-be priest, in horror. But the movie-mad kid can't look away. When I first saw
Casino
, I thought it was just Marty doing gangsters again. It is that, but there's more. The De Niro character (Sam Rothstein) is a terrible man, but he's also a martyr figure, patient and stupid, trying to trust his wife, Ginger, hoping to see his “brother,” Nicky, shape up, striving to keep order (hanging his pressed pants in the closet of his office rather than risk creasing them by wearing them). Amid the garishness of Vegas, the foul chant of its language, the head in the vise, the blow jobs, and the bravura smaller parts (James Woods, L. Q. Jones, Frank Vincent, Don Rickles), there is a spirituality, the cockeyed naïveté of a questing soul who knows he will burn, if not at the stake then in the front seat of his car. The ultimate riddle in Vegas is that while many people go there for a few days because it promises an adventure with hell, the characters in
Casino
have a helpless sense of heaven there. Las Vegas is a biblical city, and no other film has delivered that so fully.

Scorsese looks at clothes, décor, and male gesture like a cobra scrutinizing a charmer. You feel he is realizing his own desires, or bringing them to life: he hungers for his own imagery as a fantasy made vivid. No one is more alive in the moment, or such a defender of history. He has fought to preserve films, to celebrate their past, and to revive neglected triumphs. He was a saint of generosity and admiration to Michael Powell, and he surely learned from the repressed extremism in many Powell films. That at the age of seventy he wants to do Frank Sinatra says so much about him: it ought to be a young man's subject, and the American movie has so often relied on kids like Orson Welles, Irving Thalberg, and all the dudes going out on Friday nights. But in movies these days, a seventy-year-old has to pass for a kid to stay alive.

By 1963, aged twenty-one, Scorsese was about to complete his BA in film studies at New York University and was making a short film,
What's a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
On graduating, he went for an MFA, too, and later he would dedicate
Raging Bull
to his teacher at NYU, Haig Manoogian, who had just died.

Also in 1963, Quentin Tarantino (of Irish, Italian, and Cherokee descent) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, places he has been loyal to in the talk in his work. Aged two, in a family that split up before he was born, he moved to Torrance, California, and never went beyond high school. He saw movies instead, and built up his knowledge and his unrestrained rapid-fire talk about motion pictures by working as a clerk in a video store in Manhattan Beach. (Video began to take off as Tarantino reached his late teens.) So maybe you didn't need to go to film school, in the way the generation of Coppola, Lucas, and Scorsese had assumed.

He had tried to work as an actor, but a chance meeting with Lawrence Bender prompted him to start writing screenplays—anyone could hear that Tarantino exulted in his ability to deliver impromptu riffs on hardboiled talk. It was like a teenager who had been programmed by the history of film noir and then had a shot of adrenaline in his heart. (Tarantino seems fascinated by drugs, and sees film as a companion to them.) So he wrote what became
True Romance
(1993) and
Natural Born Killers
(1994), the latter for Oliver Stone, rather as Stone once got his break dreaming up tough Cuban talk for Al Pacino in
Scarface
. In a world where the pitch is a vital step in getting any film made, a director has to be able to talk a meeting into silence, awe, and green-lighting.

Then, in 1992, he made his directing debut with
Reservoir Dogs
, a seething pastiche of noir in which the black-suited figures were named after colors (like the balls in pool or snooker). The film was full of references, quotes, and lifts—probably more than Tarantino remembered. He admitted trying to do a new version of Kubrick's
The Killing
(1956), and other video-store dogs cited the marked debt to
City on Fire
, a Hong Kong film of 1987 by Ringo Lam.

As for “reservoir dogs,” it was prison slang for rats or snitches, but it was also possible that Tarantino came up with the title when he garbled the name of
Au Revoir les Enfants
(“that reservoir film”), another 1987 film, by Louis Malle. We've most of us met video store clerks who play games with titles, talk in dialogue, and seem to have been up all night watching three screens.

Tarantino's first plan was to film
Reservoir Dogs
on 16 mm for as little as he could manage. In the end, it cost about $1.2 million (with Harvey Keitel, Mr. White, putting up some of the money).
Raging Bull
is in love with movies, to be sure, but it does convey a sense of boxing and New York, as well as male chauvinism, brotherhood, the festering boredom of nightclub life, and the bond between violence and sex. By contrast,
Reservoir Dogs
gives the impression of knowing and caring about nothing from life. Whatever it has came from movies or comic books, and the color-coded status of the gang members is a foreshadowing of video games. (There would be a video game from the film in 2006.) It is hypnotic, and the talk and many set piece shots are as mannered as if six Marx Brothers had done a course on James Ellroy for their rhetoric major in prison. Though frequently blood-soaked, the film reaches a cruel nadir when Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen—his character's real name is Vic Vega) razors off the ear on a bound and gagged cop, to a musical accompaniment (“Stuck in the Middle with You”), and does a prowling, shuffling dance while luxuriating in the prospect of torture. Blonde tells the cop, “I don't give a fuck what you know, but I'm going to torture you, regardless.”

Tarantino would have said it was only a movie (he forgave those who walked out on the film); and he might have added that movies had no other purpose than to extend and advance cinematic forms.
Reservoir Dogs
lays out a trinity of young male aspirations that is still with us: the kick of lyrical badmouth, the idealization of gangsterism, and an assumed familiarity with both that comes from movies. This is Mr. White before doing the jewelry store heist: