What Last Waltz?
Marty still has it, despite The Aviator
In late January, Martin Scorsese's film about the young Howard Hughes, The Aviator (reviewed here earlier by Virginia Postrel) received 11 Oscar nominations, though a scene in the film naggingly underlines what a peculiar time it is for one of the most tediously venerated of directors.
The audience sees a shot of New York's Chrysler Building taken from somewhere above; the camera slowly tracks in on a window at the very top floor, which, a cut later, we see is the office of Pan-American Airlines president Juan Trippe, Hughes' great rival; the background ceiling is a blue-hued, imitation Giotto–painted sky. It's instantly clear that we are in the lair of a villain, a Lex Luthor sitting atop Metropolis, conniving. Where Scorsese is usually a master of character complexity, what we have in Trippe is unadulterated comic book, minus the cape, high hat, curled mustache, and snickering mutt.
What does this tell us about Scorsese, who may well take the Oscar home as best director (something he's, quite absurdly, never been able to do)? Perhaps that long-overlooked directors or actors rarely tend to be rewarded for their best work. But also that Scorsese has been as adept as anyone in concurrently playing the two sides of his profession—the commercial and the artistic—so that what some of his films lack for in inventiveness and structural credibility, they more than make up for in star power and stylistic panache. In that sense it's easy to understand what Scorsese meant when he once declared: "I am an American director, which means I am a Hollywood director."
Old-line Scorsese aficionados might consider The Aviator a sign of the director's decline (though, to be fair, he came into the project late, after Michael Mann pulled out). Devoid of true intimacy, introducing characters that go nowhere, over-ambitious, the film often consciously sidesteps Hughes' repulsiveness, because, in the guise of Leonardo Di Caprio, that would have meant bad box office. One conjures up images of disgruntled film students, weaned on Barthes, Godard, and auteur theory, dismissing Scorsese's commercial extravaganza as really just a third-tier version of Citizen Kane.
The accusation would be unfair if it assumed that Scorsese is over the hill. For one thing, it's not the first time he has been handed a shovel and headstone. In an introduction to their 1989 book Scorsese on Scorsese, David Thompson and Ian Christie wrote that "in the aftermath of the early eighties" people were already pronouncing the director a "spent force." There is also the fact that the public, which is the only pressure group that really matters when it comes to movies, today disagrees. The highbrows may not like it but The Aviator will probably be remembered more fondly than the infinitely superior Raging Bull, for which Scorsese merited several soaring cinematic trinkets.
There is also the fact that in the last decade or so, Scorsese has stuck to his guns when it comes to his strong points, such as his presentation of the moral ambiguity of his characters and a taste for innovation that has produced occasional bombs (for example, the abysmal 1991 remake of Cape Fear), but has also made it invariably difficult to predict what he will do next.
One of the offshoots of the immigrant experience, particularly the Italian-American experience, is that generations of people have navigated in a world where the ethical subtletie—in fact contradictions—embodied in old-country ways collide with a wall of neat Yankee certainty. That's why Scorsese is a natural in describing worlds where good and evil, honesty and dishonesty, coexist, so that it is sometimes unclear where he stands on simple moral choices. Some see this as an example of the director's amorality, even immorality. In fact it reveals a Mediterranean side in the man, a sensitivity to the fact that traditional or personal ties and obligations can frequently interfere in modern life, imposing relationships not easily defined by straightforward principles. This is a central theme, for example, in Mean Streets, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas .
Nor have Scorsese's later films abandoned this. Ambiguity lies at the very heart of the unfairly maligned Gangs of New York in the love-hate relationship between Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo Di Caprio) and William "The Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day Lewis). It also nourishes the understated but climactic scene in the 1993 film Age of Innocence, where the character played by Day Lewis realizes that his demure young wife (Winona Ryder) has, in fact, ruthlessly played him for a sap by maneuvering him into breaking off an unconsummated love affair with the character played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
This tendency of Scorsese throws a bucket of water on the American dream, with its presumption that life in the United States must be either idyllic or wicked. He has repeatedly turned this black-or-white tendency on its head, writing, for example, of Travis Bickle, the artless, cracked character in Taxi Driver who guns down a pimp and several acolytes to save an underage hooker: "Travis really has the best of intentions; he believes he's doing right, just like St. Paul. He wants to clean up life, clean up the mind, clean up the soul. He is very spiritual, but in a sense Charles Manson was spiritual, which doesn't mean that it's good."
To his credit, Scorsese has also taken many risks. His 1999 film Bringing Out the Dead, with Nicholas Cage and Tom Sizemore, may be mostly forgettable, but it's in the same tradition as the excellent, if rarely recalled, After Hours (1985) or The King of Comedy (1983) in that viewers are hit from angles they never expected (like Graham Greene's "entertainments"). Who else on earth would have given Griffin Dunne a leading role in 1985 (in After Hours), or resurrected Jerry Lewis (in The King of Comedy), whose recorded presence outside the telethon circuit was limited to French art house reruns? Indeed, who other than Scorsese could sell such a morbid plot as the one involving Cage and Sizemore, describing two nights of a deeply troubled ambulance crew cruising New York's mean streets?
Where Scorsese has sometimes faltered, particularly of late, is in allowing aesthetics to take a hold of his films at the expense of more meticulous characterization. That's a legitimate beef against Gangs of New York and proved the undoing of Casino (1995), which merely replicated, in much plusher sets, many of the stylistic and plot novelties introduced in the remarkable Goodfellas (which offered viewers what is arguably the best tracking shot in film as the camera, without cuts, pursues a group of hoods entering a nightclub). It also happens to be the problem with The Aviator, where the set design, photography, costume design, and much else are flawless, but where the characters often come through as paper-thin.
If Scorsese wins the Oscar for best director this year, it will mostly be because Hollywood feels legitimately guilty for having ignored him in the past, but also can't miss an opportunity to reimburse someone who, thanks to his latest endeavor, appears to be making the industry more money than he usually does. The irony, some would say, is that Scorsese had to stop being Scorsese for a moment to gain this recognition.
Maybe, but he's also nimble enough to soon bounce back to his trusty gray zone, where folly and imagination, good and evil, are mashed into a giant ball of celluloid, ready to delight, disconcert, even disappoint.
