The only complaint this writer has with Mr. Scorsese, a “film portrait” by Rebecca Miller, is that it is only five hours long. The child of an immigrant neighborhood, a sickly asthmatic, a confused priest, a dirty hippy, a coke addict, the bad boy of New Hollywood, and a loving husband and father — Martin Scorsese has been all of these things and more, and been, perhaps, the greatest living American film director for over five decades. Meeting this fact is an opening electrifying montage collating fragments of Scorsese’s idiomatic film grammar. It’s a blistering prelude, the opening stanza of an epic, and it sets the pace for a nearly comprehensive dissertation on the cinema of Mr. Scorsese. Miller and team showcase a dazzling array of documentary motifs, including marquee sit-downs with big names like Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert de Niro, and Brian De Palma, as well as rarely seen behind-the-scenes footage, never before seen home movies, and creatively reinterpreted archival material. Across five largely self-contained episodes, with titles such as “Saint/Sinner” and “Method Director,” Mr. Scorsese develops an internal style that lives up to the profound psychology of its central subject.
Miller, whose previous documentary explored the life and work of her father, legendary playwright Arthur Miller, is as invested in Martin Scorsese the man as she is in Martin Scorsese the auteur, the legendary film director. And it’s a good thing, for though Martin Scorsese’s cinema spans the entire latter history of American cinema, from New Hollywood to the streaming revolution — his influences ranging from Nicholas Ray to John Cassavetes, his acolytes including entire new generations of American filmmakers from Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson, and the Coen Brothers to Ari Aster and the Safdie brothers — the most interesting thing about Martin Scorsese’s cinema is the man himself.
Scorsese, son of immigrants, child of the streets — Mulberry street, the Bowery, infamous places enshrined in the cruel, bizarre annals of New York history and brought to life in his Gangs of New York — he grew up with the old world ghost of organized crime hanging about in the air. He describes the Lower East Side of his youth as a “place of fear,” with violence “imminent, all the time.” Miller interviews Scorsese alongside childhood friends, men who speak easily of violence, who knew intimately notorious underworld criminals — men like Sally Gabba, who served as direct inspiration for “Johnny Boy,” Robert de Niro’s character in Mean Streets — and she illustrates scenes of street violence, threats overheard, with clips of brutal, sudden violence from his cinema. From Mean Streets to The Irishman, violence, to Scorsese, is a natural, quantifiable outburst that we must not turn away from. Spike Lee, another native New York auteur who followed in Scorsese’s shadow, is one of the many high-profile cinematic figures who sing Marty’s praises here. He registers Scorsese’s fascination with violence as occupying a critical role for the American psyche. In films like Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese captured, with inimitable, brazen accuracy, the innate violence at the core of American ideology — a violence that follows logically from a system of capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, and patriarchy.
More than anything, as an artist, Scorsese is unafraid, even when looking at himself. And more often than not, he’s looking at himself. “You have to be cruel enough,” he says, “to be an artist.” Scorsese thinks himself cruel, in sacrificing relationships with his loved ones, as he did throughout the younger decades of his career, but he also sensed that he must be cruel to himself, in recognizing his own cruelty, in order to sympathize with the darker shades of human nature. With Miller he speaks of the violence inside himself: the violence that has made him sensitive to characters like Travis Bickle of Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin of King of Comedy; a violence that almost drove him to threaten studio executives at gunpoint regarding the final cut of Taxi Driver, a film that ultimately won top prize at Cannes, galvanized his still young career, and was soon defined as one of the finest American films of the 1970s. That violence and cruelty, and a self-loathing that emerged out of self-destructive behaviors and isolation, gave Scorsese an impetus to make Raging Bull. “That’s me,” he remembers thinking about Jake LaMotta, banging his head over and over again against a jail cell wall, alone and disfigured. For Scorsese, “the dark side is frequently where the truth is.” He is a “raconteur of the dispossessed,” who sides with criminals, immigrants, martyrs, and prostitutes, who sees human fallibility in every story, and finds it somehow beautiful.
Scorsese, the asthmatic child for whom the cool of the Times Square movie house was the only respite from the dusty streets and cramped tenements of Little Italy, needed the movie theater in order to breathe. And soon, he was breathing the movies. Biblical epics and Westerns gave him a thrill for the expansive, the grand historical canvas of the big screen, while Italian Neo-realist pictures, broadcast on a small set at home, showed him the power of reflecting reality. Miller does something brilliant with her film and places Rocco and His Brothers alongside home movies of the Scorsese household circa 1960, illustrating an angle of Martin Scorsese’s filmic DNA with impeccable immediacy. Mr. Scorsese includes many incredible scenes of complex cinematic digression, cleverly entangling the director’s personal narrative with the literal form of his craft through carefully edited and posed side-by-side montage. It’s a remarkable way to see autobiography in his cinema, not only via the characters and places of his childhood, but also through the physical circumstances of his life. We see a young Henry Hill of Goodfellas, for instance, peering at gangsters through the slatted window shades while Marty talks of himself being forced to stay indoors during the summer heat while other boys played on the street. There he was developing a voyeur’s eye for the high-angle shot, seeing the street as if from the upper perches of a techno-crane. Miller’s strategy works to illustrate just how personal Scorsese’s cinema is, as if the camera is always, no matter the genre, the subject, or the locale, acting as a stand-in for Marty’s own perspective.
We see glimpses of his childhood storyboards in motion, animated and brought to life. We see storyboards for the dizzying boxing scenes of Raging Bull set alongside their reference, the shower scene from Psycho. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s longtime friend and film editor, sits at her editing bay and breaks down Marty’s process for us, describing his religious, nearly psychotic efforts to elevate the moment. Schoonmaker describes the exacting, intensely charted music cues of Goodfellas, and shows us the precision with which Rolling Stones tracks were spliced together during the infamous cocaine paranoia movement. Spielberg, Aster, and both Safdies share astonished words regarding the puzzling “pure montage” of Goodfellas and Casino, both of which move the dial of cinema up somewhere north of eleven.
Miller also introduces us to Scorsese the Catholic, who could retreat into serenity, ritual; who sought sublimity as a youth, who seeks it still; who prepared, once, to enter the priesthood, before the allure of rock ‘n roll, women, and the West Village grew too palpable. Yet still it was Father Principe, a guiding light for altar boys of the Lower East Side, who exerted an outsized influence on his personal and artistic growth. And it has been the question of faith that, time and time again, the director has returned to in his films, whether it be directly — as in The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun, or Silence — or slantwise — in Killers of the Flower Moon, Bringing out the Dead, or Mean Streets. Daniel Day-Lewis describes Scorsese as a “sensualist” who works like a “coal miner,” who embodies “vocation” like a “man of the cloth.” The Last Temptation of Christ, perhaps the filmmaker’s magnum opus, the film that, alongside Gangs of New York, took the longest to realize, to bring to fruition, was eventually made independently on a shoestring budget. We see rare behind-the-scenes footage depicting a scrambling crew and a makeshift set in the sands of Morocco: pure grit and passion.
That other passion project, the “origin story” of Marty’s home turf, the Lower East Side, is Gangs of New York, in which “society” is “being worked out in the streets.” The film was a massive undertaking that involved recreating the lost world of old New York, circa 1860, on the same Italian studio lots that once housed the supreme visions of Federico Fellini. George Lucas visited the set of Gangs and quipped that it was the last film to ever be made like that, with such sweeping, breathtaking scope mired in personal reflection. Gangs shows Marty at the height of his personal cinema, fusing the old Hollywood liberality of DeMille’s epics with the intense detail of Roberto Rosellini’s history films, along with a heavy dose of New Hollywood excess. Gangs of New York is long overdue its reappropriation into the canon of latter American cinema, and Mr. Scorsese goes some way toward facilitating this, documenting the harrowing journey the film took to realization — planned as early as the late-1970s, pushed back due to the financial woes of New York, New York, and finally realized thanks to the convergence of the star-crossed Leonardo DiCaprio, recently off the blockbuster Titanic.
It’s in this intimacy that Miller’s project shines. Mr. Scorsese explores the personal influences of the director’s cinema more than almost any other material available. Not unlike the seminal “directors on directors” series, Scorsese on Scorsese, and yet in a wholly new, cinematic form, Mr. Scorsese gives us the director, his influences, his collaborations, his highs and lows, in the voice of the man himself. And this documentary doubles by functioning as indelible a text for film students as it does for cinephiles, if not more so. It rivals even Sidney Lumet’s book Making Movies for pure and simple diction, for broadcasting the inner workings of cinematic mastery, the dos and the don’ts, the lessons Scorsese learned. From Roger Corman he learned to make a movie on schedule and on budget; from Elias Kazan and John Cassavettes he learned to listen to street language; from Jean-Luc Godard he learned to throw the rules out the window; from early collaborator and longtime editor Schoomaker, he learned the free association of images and the power of the cut; from Robbie Robertson, ringleader of The Band and another frequent collaborator after The Last Waltz, he gained even more of a musical, rhythmic sense; and with his student films at NYU, What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This and It’s Not Just You, Murray, he developed technique and sensibility.
And finally, we meet Martin Scorsese, the doting father and caring husband, who, after decades of inner turmoil, maniacal obsession, and pent-up anger, has centered his life around his wife, Helen Schermerhorn Morris, and his daughter, Francesca. We see sweet, tender moments captured by Franscesca and shared via her social media. We see a different side of Marty, a sweet, gentle, patient figure who waits on Helen, suffering from acute Parkinson’s, with mindful diligence. And it’s in this balance of portraiture that Mr. Scorsese becomes a brilliant, blinding, and ultimately deeply moving study of a multifaceted man and his work. It’s a project that across its runtime just keeps giving, with final proof coming near the end, where we see moments from the making of Killers of the Flower Moon: it’s a process of creation that just won’t stop. Martin Scorsese, the greatest living American film director, won’t stop.
DIRECTOR: Rebecca Miller; CAST: Martin Scorsese; DISTRIBUTOR: Apple TV+; STREAMING: October 17; RUNTIME: 4 hr. 43 min.
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