Real American arthouse: The brilliance and beauty of Malick’s ‘A Hidden Life’

In a season when Scorsese’s extra-long, extra-dramatic, CGI-tainted Irishman is the foremost topic of conversation among U.S. cinephiles, it has been both reassuring and instructive to see an epic-length American film that is both “smaller than life” and possessed of a singular poetry. Terrence Malick — he who endlessly frustrates the folk who want simple, linear, multiplex-safe narratives — proves he is “as tough as Bresson” (Scorsese’s own stated goal, which he hasn’t come near since the Eighties) with his latest, visually sumptuous film that concerns a moral dilemma and has a foregone conclusion.

Both Malick and Scorsese are products of the sublime “maverick” era in early Seventies American cinema. Scorsese has since reinvented himself as a new-model “Arthouse Lite” version of the old Hollywood studio system director. As he has grown older, Malick has becomes even more of a maverick, making lengthy features that have generally eschewed linear plotlines for an assemblage of striking images and slices of life that convey a mood and a rhythm rather than a storyline in the standard Spielberg/Tom Hanks/Marvel mode.

Malick (right) is as different in his approach and goals from Scorsese as he is from David Lynch (with whom he has shared a common production designer, Jack Fisk). Even though his films are lengthy, they are indeed smaller than life, in that he favors character, behavior, and setting over plot. His work draws on the avant-garde American tradition, foreign cinema (Tarkovsky, among others), and a knowledge of both fine art and philosophy (he worked as a philosophy prof before becoming a filmmaker) to offer a collage of elements that conveys characters’ inner lives, while showing them moving toward often melancholy conclusions.

His latest feature, A Hidden Life, is his first film since The New World (2005) to have a linear plotline — perhaps the experimental structures of Knight of Cups (2015) and Song by Song (2017) revealed even to the filmmaker himself the negative aspects of fragmenting characters’ lives too much.

A Hidden Life is the real-life story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler during WWII. The film is narrated by three characters: Franz, his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), and his mother (Karin Neuhäuser). It is “a message picture,” but Malick isn’t Stanley Kramer (nor is he Spielberg, an early adapter of “production design cinema”). As a result, the film moves through the plot while also emphasizing moody moments in Franz’s life, and Fani and Franz’s moments of happiness and separation.

Malick has injected Christian themes into his films since The Tree of Life (2011). He is, however, a more subdued Christian than Scorsese, whose recent Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019) have cringeworthy moments where the Catholic faith is depicted as the one right, unassailable position. For his part, Malick is intent on depicting lowercase “c” Christian behavior more than doctrinaire belief, so here Franz and his wife are seen helping other people while they are being persecuted by the Nazis.

Along these lines, a priest (Michael Nyqvist) is a prominent supporting character. He is on Franz’s side, but he serves as a devil’s advocate as well, asking Franz what he is really achieving by refusing to sign the loyalty oath — the Nazis won’t be affected in the slightest and, most importantly, Franz’s small family (wife, her sister and his mother, and their two children) will be left alone to run the family farm.

The priest’s supremely logical argument is taken up later by Franz’s lawyer and the head of a Nazi tribunal (the superb Bruno Ganz, in his last movie role; above). Franz is reminded that war is about to end shortly and it’s possible to secure him a position as a medic in the Army, so that he is taking no part in Hitler’s destructive activities. Franz holds fast, though, and his moral stance is shown to be a completely private decision (supported by his wife) that is the only path which the headstrong and resolutely moral Franz can take.

Images in Malick’s films are everything — he is a modern American master of dreamlike montage — but here the “forward thrust” of the plot does give a greater importance to the dialogue. In Knight of Cups and Song by Song, the dialogue was poetic but ornamental. At various points here, Franz spells out his beliefs with simple phrases, especially when pressed by the other characters. When he is told that signing the loyalty oath will set him free, he responds with beatific calm, “But I *am* free…”

Malick is indeed so “imagistic” that one can sometimes forget the fine work done by his actors. Diehl is excellent in the lead, conveying Franz’s rigid morality as both a sort of selfishness and a deep caring for others. Neuhäuser is also excellent, as the film is as much Fani’s journey as it is her husband’s.

Hidden Life is not the usual WWII drama. It was ignored by the Oscars for obvious reasons — there’s no conventional uplifting finale, it’s profoundly moral but not preachy a la Spielberg, and it’s not “production design cinema,” of the kind that Scorsese and Tarantino now make. Sympathy for the lead character is not even elicited (as it would be in a Best Picture Oscar-winner) through violence. Malick in fact abstracts the little violence we see through montage and slow motion. American viewers need and want clear cut heroes and villains and things to be outraged about, even in a fictional context. A film about memory and choice rather than suffering isn’t a “satisfactory” WWII story for most audience members.

Malick was recently included in the newly written (in 2018) foreword to Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer by Paul Schrader, who himself proved his work was “as tough as Bresson” in the very Bressonian First Reformed (2017). Schrader labels Malick a practitioner of “dream cinema” in his (Schrader’s) chart of “slow cinema” filmmakers. Malick is in the “Tarkovsky ring” (meaning his films play in theaters, not just at film festivals and at museums) in the “Art Gallery” designation.

Ever the minimalist, Bresson would’ve frowned at Malick’s reliance on professional actors and the length of his films, as well as their intentional non-linearity even in chronological works like Hidden Life. However, Malick is very similar to the French master in his ability to depict — Schrader’s favorite phrase — transcendence. Bresson’s final films ended pessimistically, with little hope for mankind, while Malick (now age 76) has remained a hopeful, upbeat artist. Who thankfully continues in his senior years to craft indelible images and create work that challenges viewers.

Cinema in the time of computer graphics: De Niro’s “jaundice face” and other side-effects of The Irishman

Two young actors not
seen in The Irishman.

I spent a good part of my adolescence and 20s worshipping Martin Scorsese as a filmmaker. I still admire and respect him as an archivist, a curator, a funder of restorations, a writer of film texts, and above all else, a brilliant cinephile. As a filmmaker, his output became a matter of small surprises after Goodfellas, with the best, most interesting titles being the odder items that didn’t fit his persona — Age of Innocence, Kundun, Hugo.

The items that pertained to his former strong suits — from Cape Fear to the current Irishman — and his attempts at massive-budgeted pageantry — from Gangs of New York to Silence — were bloated, directionless, bloodless works that, while gorgeously directed, didn’t  *need* to exist in the way that his earlier, rough-edged, eternally watchable films were, and are.

And thus The Irishman, a Faustian bargain made with the endless financing of Netflix, which has as its core a character study of a nasty fucker and is blown up to epic length (the book it’s based on was 384 pages in hardback; the film is 210 minutes in length). It also contains Scorsese’s deepest-dive into CGI technology. He started using computer-tech in his films most noticeably in Kundun (one gorgeous, unforgettable image was a “computer fake” that was made with that year’s state of the art technology). Here, he lets the CGI blight the acting and create strange creatures onscreen that are at once actors we know all too well but are “touched-up” versions of them, an attempt to provide youth in the guise of “cleansed” digital imagery.

There are lovely things to be found in the film. Firstly, the visuals are gorgeous. All of Scorsese’s films, even those bereft of any palpable human feeling (Bringing Out the Dead, The Departed), have been miracles of craftsmanship. The soundtrack is a beautifully arranged melange of unobtrusive music by Robbie Robertson and some vintage orchestral music that conjures up the times in which the film takes place (and then doesn’t move on chronologically — meaning that either the characters are stuck in the Fifties/Sixties, or the filmmaker is). One of the nicest inclusions in that regard is the theme from Jacques Becker's Touchez pas au Grisbi (1954), the great masterpiece about aging gangsters, which clocks in at a lean, tough 83 minutes. (My in-depth tribute to Becker can be found here.)

There is the cast, which is a short list of Scorsese’s most important actors — Harvey Keitel, the one I wanted to see most, gets the short end of the stick and has seemingly been permanently supplanted by Joe Pesci as the “actor allowed to work in the most scenes with producer Robert De Niro under the direction of Mr. Scorsese.”

"I killed everyone worth killing!" -- Frank Sheeran

There is also the matter of cross-talk. The film’s script by Steve Zaillian is way too long and should’ve been sliced and diced down to a two-hour length, but Scorsese CANNOT bring himself to edit his films down below two hours (even the soulless music docs run for eternities). The script contains some amusing cross-talk moments, which used to be the finest moments in Scorsese’s films. The back-room discussion between Keitel and De Niro in Mean Streets will always be a high-water mark of this kind of humor.

Here, the cross-talk scenes are enjoyable — but, like everything in the picture, there are lots and lots of them. And they go on for long periods of time. And they don’t have the spontaneity of that great scene in Mean Streets — like the film as a whole, these cross-talk comedy bits are older gents revisiting something they did to perfection as younger men but now “telegraph” (and keep on telegraphing).

In 1995, shooting Casino.

The matter of length also is reflected in the fact that Scorsese is revisiting familiar turf here, turf which he covered beautifully at first in masterful movies with running times in the vicinity of two hours. In this period of his career, where *everything* he signs as a director must run to an epic length (be it a period piece, a gangster drama, or just a regular old rock-doc), The Irishman is the natural result of this beached-whale running time (which I thought he had hit the wall with, in the least-interesting pic he ever made, The Departed). 

So, The Irishman at 210 minutes is a remake of a remake (Casino, at an unwieldy 178 mins) of a remake (Goodfellas, at 146 mins) of a sublime rough-edged, lower-budgeted crime drama (the 112-minute Mean Streets). As a point of comparison, this reviewer loves Rivette and Tarkovsky, saw and enjoyed Satantango, and has happily watched Berlin Alexanderplatz and Out 1 twice. But man, oh man, Marty's "pictures" became endless as of the 2000s. (New York, New York, on the other hand, is incredibly rewatchable, because its schizo-cocaine construction is amazing to behold; it's fascinating when it's working and fascinating when it's failing... big time!)

He'd spit on CGI fx for his actors.

Scorsese seems to have a Howard Hawks fetish (I first noted this here), but with Hawks his final film was a shorter remake (Rio Lobo, 114 mins) of a shorter remake (El Dorado, 126 minutes) of a masterpiece (Rio Bravo, 141 mins). Only the most diehard Hawks fan would make an argument that El Dorado and Rio Lobo are utterly essential viewing. They’re both better than Casino, though….

25-year-old De Niro, Greetings.

But let’s set aside the beached-whale aspect of the film and get to its most conspicuous aspect, the “de-aging” digital makeover that Scorsese is so excited about (and audiences and critics say “melts away” as the film moves on). This gigantic aspect of making the film cost an amount that is not less than 15 million dollars (quite the Faustian bargain, that!) and perhaps several million more. The budget breakdowns online got murkier when Scorsese started this costly process — all because he couldn’t emulate his cinematic heroes and cast younger actors as the younger characters. De Niro rrrrreally wanted a tour de force Oscar bid!

This de-aging business was clearly the result of De Niro’s ego, and so he plays a character who ages from his mid-20s to his 80s, while he himself was 73-74 (the film was shot from 2017 to ’18). He produced the film and it is clearly intended as a “return to form” (since he now makes many, many, MANY wretchedly bad movies just for the money). Oddly enough, it’s not a return to his actual form, but instead he is a kind of a CGI creature onscreen, a hitman variant of the “Gollum” syndrome (where a live actor plays a computer-created creature).

Computer-masked De Niro at 25. The computer
was mistakenly on the "young Anthony LaPaglia" setting. 

So much for those who claim that the yellow-ish, blemish- and wrinkle-free face that was painted on De Niro’s own by CGI technology “melts away” as the film moves on. It really doesn’t, and simply can’t for those who have watched De Niro over the years and remember quite clearly what his face looked like when he was young (before the persistent wince-face that grew on him in the Eighties). Since he started working in film, he has rarely taken time off, and so we’ve seen him age from 25 (when he appeared in Brian De Palma’s Greetings) to 76 (his current age). He has never looked anything like the yellow-faced guy who appears in The Irishman.

A younger person can be made up to look old, but an older person playing a much younger person is fighting the laws of nature — and gravity. One only need to see the scene where “young” Frank Sheeran (De Niro), who is supposed to be under 40, beats up a guy who shoved his daughter, to see the gait of an old man who is trying to behave like a young one. It’s been noted online that there was a “posture coach” on the set of The Irishman to aid De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci to behave like younger men. Does it work? Well, kinda, but that’s mostly because they are seen sitting and talking for much of the film’s running time, so the matter of their old-man bodies adhering to the laws of gravity isn't as troublesome as it could've been. Of course, there's another logical problem — as they get older, most men get fatter; "young" de-aged De Niro has the un-toned, chubbier physique of a 74-year-old man.

This CGI de-aging business is akin to two things. First, a bad facelift, since the computer-enhanced expressions inhibit the emotions seen on the performer’s face. One need only think of the last few movies Cher appeared in, where her kabuki mask of plastic surgery inhibited her from any complicated expression on her face (and she was quite a good actress before she started revamping her head).

Fred Travalena wearing
a prosthetic face as De Niro.

The second are those amazingly scary full-head prosthetic masks that Fred Travalena wore in his later years — leaving nothing to chance, Travalena had masks crafted that looked like cartoon nightmares. Here, 77- to 78-year-old Al Pacino is wearing a digital version of that — as Jimmy Hoffa, his hair is stunningly phony-looking and his de-aged face looks around 60 when he’s supposed to be Hoffa at 44 and remains 60 when Hoffa is 62.

For his part, De Niro was surely one of the best actors in the world in the 1970s and ’80s – perhaps the best film actor working at that time. However, as of the early ’90s he fell into self-parody (by This Boy’s Life, he was an actor doing a De Niro impression). The de-aging process “erases” his wince-face look, but it adds nothing in its place. The smaller range of emotion he’s had for the last 25 years-plus is made even smaller by this state-of-the-art tech that produces a digitized Kabuki mask.

And this technology truly is state of the art. Although those of us who do acknowledge the movement of time realize that there’s nothing that ages faster than “state of the art” tech. One imagines that in 20 years (perhaps 10 or even 5?), audiences will look at the yellow-ish “jaundice-face” that De Niro has in his “youngest” scenes here and smile (if not laugh), recognizing that what was cutting edge in 2019 is quaint (if not downright primitive) in their own time. [UPDATE, 1/7/20: I was wrong. The costly CGI de-aging technology is already out of date! A "deepfake" expert found a way to do a "clearer" approach to de-aging De Niro's senior mug (and it does look much better than what you see in the film). It took him seven days and he used *free* software! Here's the Esquire piece that links to a video clip showing the improved approach.]

De-aged old guys. De Niro in
his Robin Williams mode. (The drawn-on
eyebrows don't help matters any.)

To deflect one from focusing on how inappropriate (and egomaniacal) it was for this digital “erasing” to have been used, one can play a little game while watching The Irishman: try to figure out who De Niro looks like in any given scene. In the “youngest” scenes, his digital face has some of the young Alec Baldwin about it. As he grows older and “age” (but not much!) was added to his face, his digital mug looks like his old costar (and Belushi-visiting buddy) Robin Williams. At one point, I thought he resembled Glenn Ford; at another, his face is so round he looks like W.C. Fields. When he’s super-old (read: older than his current age), his snowy white hair and old-guy demeanor made him the spitting image of the latter-day Robert Loggia. One thing is certain throughout most of the film: the digital face of De Niro doesn’t look anything like the younger Robert De Niro that we saw in all those films.

And yes, the de-aging was used on Pesci and Pacino as well. Of the two, I’m fascinated by the critical praise lavished on Pesci. The de-aging in his case (as with De Niro in some scenes) changes the shape of his head, to the point where Joe’s noggin looks like a walnut. Setting that aside, he seems very tired — not only in his character’s old-guy moments but also when the gent is a younger, influential gangster. Pesci has opted to stay out of film for many years now, and his return here is welcome on a general level, but he seems at points to not want to be in front of the camera, especially compared to the super-wired performer he was back in the Eighties and Nineties.

Pacino, as can always be expected, is the exact opposite. He’s super-wired and doing his “AL PACINO!” hyper-acting, to the point that Jimmy Hoffa is the comic relief in the film. At times he’s the only character you’d actually want to meet. De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is an odd, mostly quiet cipher and Pesci’s Russell Bufalino is some Pennsylvania Mafioso whose purpose in life seems to be cautioning Sheeran that he (or Hoffa) is getting out of line.

As for the plot, it seems to be about, as critics and criminologists have dubbed the real-life Frank Sheeran, “the Forrest Gump of organized crime.” The validity of Sheeran’s claims has been debated via articles that say he was confessing to things he had no part in. The addition of him being the sole killer of Joey Gallo seems ridiculous on the face of it, and the bizarrely circuitous way in which Sheeran is asked to kill his friend Hoffa is mind-boggling (as if only HE can do it — the Shakespearean aspect is melodramatic and the very definition of “incredible”). And, of course, like everything else here, it is time-consuming.

De Niro and Pacino in Rightous Kill (2008).
De Niro is 65; Pacino is 68. Both were in the thick of
their "we will play in anything we're offered" period (which has yet to end).

In closing, I’ll just return to a notion that I wrote about in 2010 when noting the fact that Scorsese’s work was very definitely different (and lesser) than it used to be. I quoted from a piece he wrote for a book on the immortal Robert Bresson. In that book he said:  “Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he’s writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson?” (Robert Bresson, editor: James Quandt, The Toronto Film Festival International Group, 1998, p. 579)

Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951),
a film that influenced Taxi Driver.
Cinema that is much "tougher"
than the present-day Scorsese....

In that 2010 entry I noted: ... perhaps he’s just not making films “as tough as Bresson” anymore, or perhaps it all comes down to his having said several years ago that it rankled him when he was considered merely a “New York filmmaker” — he wanted to be considered a “Hollywood filmmaker.” He also said in an interview with Bob Costas that he envied Steven Spielberg for the way that Spielberg was able to direct crowds, a la David Lean. The fact that Scorsese’s strong suit has never been and never will be pageantry, and the bigger and more Hollywoood-like that his films have become the less soul they’ve had, has apparently escaped the man himself.

I still firmly believe what I wrote then, and it’s become obvious as the years have gone by since then that Scorsese doesn’t want to make a “small movie” (Godard’s worshipful term) EVER again. He made “news” when he commented about Marvel movies not being “cinema.” He is 100 percent right (my thoughts about this are here). But is it “cinematic” to use computer tech to disguise an actor who is too insanely old for a part? It can easily be viewed (third metaphor!) as the CGI equivalent of hiding the visage of an aging glamour queen with soft focus or Vaseline on the lens. If you’re making a serious drama, using tech to de-age an egotistical performer-producer is about as cinematic as, well, the technicians who work on Marvel movies having to insert an apocalyptic landscape behind actors dressed in capes and tights.

Scorsese also utilizes computer-tech that has been put to exquisite use by foreign filmmakers. (And the saddest thing of all is that the majority of the present-day Netflix viewers – and even the bulk of those who saw The Irishman in a theater – haven’t seen a foreign film in eons.) Just one example: the super-slow-mo used for a pointless wedding scene. The technique was used by von Trier in his brilliant Antichrist and Melancholia. Here, it’s used to slow down a wedding sequence, in order to show us how mobbed up the affair is. von Trier’s use of the effect was evocative, emotional, and moving. Scorsese’s is ornamental and pointless. The Irishman is “arthouse lite.”

An actual arthouse film. "That you should see...!"

Possibly Scorsese can’t make small films anymore — he has become addicted to the gargantuan budgets he’s been allotted, and unlike Coppola, he’s not going to move backward and make a character study or a “short story” (in the manner of Youth Without Youth). More’s the pity, since his two-hour and under films are marvels of concision and rough-edged brilliance. And right about the time that I endured the fourth or fifth cross-talk conversation in The Irishman, the bristling-with-energy (and, let’s be honest, cocaine) brilliance of King of Comedy and After Hours (both under 110 mins) seemed just about right for a palate-cleanser….

Arthouse filmmakers reflect on Jerry Lewis

To commemorate Labor Day, I offer up a montage I featured on the episode of the Funhouse TV show that aired this weekend. For the past 21 years I have done a Jerry Lewis episode for Labor Day weekend and, since the end of the telethon, I've been looking for new angles from which to approach Jerry (there are about twenty jokes that could follow that sentence, but I'm not going for any of 'em).

Since I frequently feature “arthouse” cinema on the Funhouse, it was only natural to edit together a montage of scenes in which arthouse auteurs (not all of whom are French, mind you) either talked about Jerry in interviews or evoked him in their films. I came up with seven instances that I think make a very entertaining montage, while also exploring Jerry from pro, con, and “wtf?” aspects.

The contents are (since I don't intend on posting the list on YT; the sequences are already titled in the video):

– Martin Scorsese in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis, 1985
– a scene from Jacques Rivette's “missing” (at least in the U.S.) L'Amour Fou, 1969
– Louis Malle in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis, 1985
– a scene from Luc Moullet's Brigitte et Brigitte, 1966
– Orson Welles on The Dick Cavett Show, 1970
– a scene from Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year with Thirteen Moons, 1978
– Jean-Luc Godard on The Dick Cavett Show, 1980

For those others keeping score, there are a few other filmmakers featured in Bonjour Monsieur Lewis (Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Spielberg) whom I didn't include for purposes of time and/or salience of the discussion.

Those who loathe Jerry will particularly enjoy Welles' remarks. Those who love him will dig Malle's unmitigated praise. For those who want an insightful discussion, we always turn to Uncle Jean, who says about le cinema du Jer: “I think it's very funny – even when it's not funny, it's more funny....”

JLG knows the score.

"Hugo": a love letter to cinema (and respite from Leo!)

I’ve already noted on this blog my great disappointment in the beautifully crafted but soulless work produced by Martin Scorsese in the years since Kundun. His latest film, Hugo, contains several elements that would seem to make it yet another venture into multiplex-land: a massive budget, a kid protagonist, a “heartwarming” promotional campaign, and 3D. Instead, the film is the best thing Scorsese has made in a decade and a half, and the first time his holy cinephilia has been “smuggled” (his phrase from Personal Journey) into a fictional narrative.

The film is a few minutes too long — Scorsese can't really answer his own question to young filmmakers, “is it as tough as Bresson?” (read: lean) — and is also incredibly sentimental. In this instance, though, the sticky-sweet sequences are evenly spaced out, and in the latter half they are hooked securely to the love of cinema in a way that makes them quite touching.

In the end, there are two key elements that make Hugo vastly different from the last decade of Scorsese “pictures”:

— it was made in England with a predominantly British cast, thus ensuring that no wildly miscast American star (Cameron Diaz, Gangs of New York), comatose lead (Nicolas Cage, Bringing Out the Dead), or preening wonder boy (Marky Mark, The Departed) shows up to utterly disrupt the narrative.
— no Leonardo DiCaprio (hosanna)!

The greatest joy of Hugo is that it seems to exist for an actual reason (was/is there any reason for The Departed to exist — and be 151 minutes long?), and that reason is for Scorsese to use state-of-the-art technology to conjure up the most primitive cinema there was, and the most magical: the works of Georges Méliès. It’s a perverse decision to be sure, but one that succeeds beautifully.

3D is a gimmick, one that was created in the Fifties to combat television and has been reintroduced into the marketplace to combat movie downloads. It has held no interest for me, as it has been used to gussy up the kid-centric fodder that occupies every multiplex everywhere. However, if this resurrected and improved technology is used with an experimental purpose in mind — as in Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams and Wenders’ Pina — the effects can be remarkable.

In Hugo Scorsese first creates a clockwork universe that seems derived in equal parts from Tati and Jeunet, and then takes us into the less intricate but more riveting world of magician-turned-filmmaker Méliès (right). Though chronologically “primitive,” Méliès’ films remain far more impressive than the computer-crafted flicks that currently flood into the multiplex.



So, as Herzog used the third dimension to convey the nuances of prehistoric cave paintings and Wenders spotlighted the spaces between dancers, Scorsese uses the current technology to underscore the hard work and surplus of imagination that went into Méliès’ handcrafted films. Hugo may have a young protagonist (two in fact), but it aims quite higher than the usual raft of anthropomorphic animal (or doll, or car) movies that are being presented in 3D (oh, and that nightmare of tedium that is “motion capture” — just make a fucking cartoon, guys, or a live-action feature!).

Here Scorsese draws on the tradition of French films about children leading independent lives (Forbidden Games, Truffaut’s work, and a healthy dash of Zazie dans le Metro). The constant succession of chases in Hugo does parallel what goes in most kid-centric H’wood pap, but here it evokes the races-against-time that distinguished silent cliffhangers from the likes of Feuillade and Griffith.

As noted, I detected the influence of Jean-Pierre Jeunet throughtout Hugo, and this is just as it should be, since, as I’ve noted on the Funhouse TV show, the most interesting uses of CGI effects in the past decade has occurred in French films (Rohmer’s The Lady and the Duke, Vidocq, every film in French by Jeunet), creating distinctive period pieces, but also fashioning interdependent universes in the Metro, a bar, an apartment building, and so forth (take a glance at Amelie, or Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, and you’ll see the blueprint for Hugo).





Scorsese demonstrated his debt to the French New Wave in his sublimely rough-edged Seventies masterworks (think of the Alka Seltzer scene in Taxi Driver, evoking Godard’s Two or Three Things…). Here he openly pays tribute to Godard and Truffaut by having an “expert” (Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley, above) supply an entertaining lecture on the beginnings of cinema, looking straight at us. Kingsley’s Méliès is every expert Uncle Jean introduced to explain something in detail to a character, as well as every Truffaut character who spoke directly to us rather than another character, to tell a story from the past.

A few quibbles aside, Hugo is the film that older Scorsese acolytes of old have been waiting for — giving us a respite from the deadening central presence of Leo. It’s a film that reminds us exactly how expert a filmmaker Scorsese is, putting his technical proficiency at the service of a storyline that evokes genuine emotion and wonder.

I can only hope that Scorsese continues to make British or European-themed films, as it can reinvigorate him as it has reinvigorated Woody Allen. Never forget that European and British funding allowed Funhouse deity Robert Altman to survive when he was out of favor in Hollywood (which was quite often).

I’d love to see “le grand Marty” produce another picture that is “as tough as Bresson”; I’m not sure that’s ever going to happen again, now that he’s infatuated with big, large, massive, colossal budgets. I’ll settle in the meantime, though, for something he really cares about, that isn’t a star vehicle and is worth rewatching. Merci, MS.

*****
Méliès' work is available in profusion all over the Internet because (unless the film in question has been wildly tinkered with), it has fallen into public domain. Thus, you can see numerous copies of his most mind-warping films, but I would recommend these as a “starter kit.” First, the “greatest hit,” featured heavily in Hugo, “Voyage to the Moon”:



“The Man with the Rubber Head,” from 1901:



“The Merry Frolics of Satan,” from 1906:



“Fantastic Butterfly,” from 1909

Why I'm not rushing to see the latest "Scorsese picture"

“I have to wonder whether or not young people who have grown up on digitally engineered effects and DTS soundtracks can actually find the patience required to watch a film by Bresson or, for that matter, an Ozu or an Antonioni. In a way, it seems impossible: it’s as though they’re from different worlds….”

“Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he’s writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson?”
--Martin Scorsese, on filmmaker Robert Bresson

I was a child of the Seventies, so Martin Scorsese’s best films are works I can never shake, and would never want to. His masterpieces from the Seventies and Eighties are some of the best American films ever made, and even his big, wildly miscalculated coke-fueled messes from that period (think New York, New York) are fascinating to me. I have committed his older work to memory, but have absolutely no desire to rewatch anything he’s made in the last decade after I’ve seen it once. What exactly happened to the kinetic stylist who made character-driven films, the finest American filmmaker of his generation?

Well, perhaps he’s just not making films “as tough as Bresson” anymore, or perhaps it all comes down to his having said several years ago that it rankled him when he was considered merely a “New York filmmaker” — he wanted to be considered a “Hollywood filmmaker.” He also said in an interview with Bob Costas that he envied Steven Spielberg for the way that Spielberg was able to direct crowds, a la David Lean. The fact that Scorsese’s strong suit has never been and never will be pageantry, and the bigger and more Hollywoood-like that his films have become the less soul they’ve had, has apparently escaped the man himself.

Scorsese is one of the most devoted film fans in the filmmaking community, and a god in the preservationist world. He has often noted his utter adoration of the Golden Age directors who worked under the studio system, and are hard to get a handle on in terms of a visual style or an “identity” (as opposed to stylists like Ray and Fuller, whose personality is emblazoned in every frame of their work): brilliant craftsmen like Hawks and Wyler who made great movies in every genre and worked smoothly with the biggest stars of the Thirties and Forties. And who, of course, lost major ground and fumbled around in the Sixties (excepting the terrific The Collector), the era when Scorsese’s generation was beginning to forge a new approach to filmmaking. The traditional studio system, it seemed, was entirely dead and has remained so. But not so Scorsese’s desire to make that kind of film.

Thus, he’s chosen to make a string of extremely long, epic-themed films with Leonardo Caprio, an actor of limited means who was a superior child and teen performer, but has demonstrated a far weaker presence as an adult lead (thus his constant scowling, to approximate an adult demeanor). This phenomenon started with The Gangs of New York, where slight Leo was supposed to be the physical equal of the scenery-chewing Daniel Day Lewis, and is now continuing with Shutter Island, where Leo will once again do a “Bahston” (please, Mr. Scorsese, stop it please with the bad Boston accents already!). What seems to be going on here is that Scorsese views DiCaprio as a kind of Rock Hudson for the 21st century, an actor who couldn’t ever hack it in grittier films, but has a certain type of “glamour” — and more importantly, who had studio heads interested in him post-Titanic, although the success of that film was a convergence of elements and not specifically due to his presence. What DiCaprio seemed to represent was a performer who could get the movie financed and also, at the hands of a Douglas Sirk-like filmmaker, become a really interesting screen presence, despite his lack of range as a performer and the fact that his idyllic good looks limit his ability to play earthy characters.

Well, it hasn’t worked. The DiCaprio-Scorsese as Hudson-Sirk experiment that has gone on for three films and continues with the current Shutter Island is one that does not seem to have stirred a major interest in most viewers, but it has continued unabated. Each time De Niro worked with Scorsese in their shared heyday, there was a buzz of expectation from fans and in the press (this was quelled by the workmanlike and unnecessary remake of Cape Fear). Perhaps the nicest remark I’ve heard from movie-mad friends when discussing this constant casting by Scorsese of the Baby-Faced One in his films has been, “well, he was okay in The Aviator, he really tried in that one.” Yes, he tried, but the film was a giant, overblown biopic that got stuck on a Hughes court case that just wasn’t interesting. The scenes in which Leo was naked in the screening room were welcome in that they were strange and downright odd for a Hollywood biopic, but they also required an actor who didn’t look as if he was wearing fake facial hair while writhing around the room.

The obvious change in Scorsese’s style seems to have come from the fact that he was in personal transition throughout the period when his best films were made, and now that he’s a comfortable icon of cinema, he is making films that are sheer craft — technical experiments that have far more in common with David Lean than they do with his onetime mentor John Cassavetes. Casssavetes famously chided Scorsese on having made the (actually pretty great) Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman, telling him to stop making “crap” and do something he really cared about. One can’t imagine what Cassavetes would’ve made of The Departed, a bloated adaptation of a tight, nothing-budgeted Hong Kong cop thriller that finally got Scorsese the Oscar he deserved for the rough-edged, uneven-but-yet-curiously-perfect films like Raging Bull. The craft pleases the eye, but the brain and emotions are not engaged. The “Leo era” has not been an interesting one for fans of Scorsese’s work.

Admittedly, the Scorsese style of the Seventies was already starting to become self-citation in the Nineties: in the brilliantly cast (supporting roles only) but wildly uneven Bringing Out the Dead, one wasn’t sure if the film was taking place in the Seventies or the Nineties, as he attempted to update his Taxi Driver style sans the energy, devotion, and drive (and chemical stimulants?) of that era. (As for the stimulants being a part of the TD process, this has gone into common lore, and was the premise for the plot of the only good episode of the cartoon series American Dad). In Casino, he offered a smoother, more stylized version of the Goodfellas approach; this was unfortunate, as the splendid Goodfellas was already a work that seemed to be intent on sanding off the rough edges that made Mean Streets such an eternally rewatchable work about a low-ranking mob member (the exquisite use of pop music from the Sixties that began in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? reaches heights of dazzling brilliance in Goodfellas — and then tapers off to become the umpteenth use of “Gimme Shelter” in The Departed). We can count our blessings that the Dino project, the proposed Scorsese adaptation of Nick Tosches' immaculately detailed Dean Martin bio, was never produced, as it in turn would’ve been a “cleaner,” smoother version of Casino (like a Russian doll version of the same film, slightly transformed with each larger-sized version….).

However, even though Terrence Rafferty this week in the New York Times remarked that the last decade has been the “liveliest, most varied, and most consistently inventive stretch” of Scorsese’s work since the Seventies, I’d make the argument that the very bumpy Nineties was the most varied era for Scorsese in recent memory, as the last two films of his that had a genuine emotional “kick” were the ones that seemed the most uncharacteristic and atypical, The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun (1997). Both were films I thought would be odd exercises for him, but both had small emotions at their core and were absorbing and brilliant as a result. Who would’ve thought that the story of the search for the Dalai Lama would’ve been the last truly involving film made by the filmmaker who made such cornerstones of gritty, challenging NYC cinema as Taxi Driver and King of Comedy?

But there haven’t just been fiction films, there have been documentaries. And yes, they have been very long. Scorsese’s love of cinema and rock music is unparalleled, but oddly, each time you watch his documentaries, you feel overwhelmed by duration, yet only in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies did it seem like he opened a doorway to invite viewers to actually experience the works he was praising for themselves. His study of Italian cinema, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, is a hermetically sealed work that offers Cliff Notes-like plot synopses of each Italian film which tend to make the viewer feel as if he or she has taken in the whole film — they don’t inspire the inclination to view the complete film that just seeing a significant scene or two would produce (American viewers feel that if they know the plot, they’ve seen the movie already, or read the book).

His Dylan documentary was a project he inherited and didn’t do the interviews for — thus it was the polar opposite of his work on The Last Waltz or his wonderful film about his parents, Italianamerican, which can be seen here. Also, Dylan and/or his people clearly approved of the squeaky-clean image given of him in the film — thus it seemed as if (scenes of Greenwich Village from underground films aside — that was the old Scorsese!) he was making a record company-sponsored portrait of Bob that was really, really long (and Todd Haynes reached the core of the artist in a shorter time with a “fiction” film). His Stones concert docu, Shine a Light? I won’t kid, it’s the one Scorsese film I haven’t yet seen, and am not racing to catch it on the home screen.

I reflect on all this because the latest “Scorsese picture,” Shutter Island, looks to be a dedicated exercise in style with some beautiful craft (there will NEVER be a bad-looking film by him) but no emotional drive. The visual effects showcased in the trailer exhibit that Mr. S has watched a bunch of “J-“ and “K-horror” (Japanese and Korean) films lately, and wanted to try out some new visual tricks. That kind of mega-budgeted recreation of lower-budgeted Asian action fare has the feel of Quentin Tarantino, not the man who clearly (among many) influenced Tarantino with his own lean, spare, and haunting work. Unlike Scorsese’s personal work, which really needed to be viewed in a theater, Shutter Island will most likely be more overwhelming and eye-catching on a TV screen.

The Rafferty piece in the Times went along the lines of nearly everything written about Scorsese in the mainstream press (to wit, the Leonardo films have been “bold and exciting”). His best filmmaking work is indeed indelible, his work as a preservationist and a champion of the great films and filmmakers is unassailable. He is an incredibly valuable individual for film fans in so many ways. Thus, journalists and mainstream critics will not honestly reflect on how the films he has made have become less and less (and less) interesting in the last decade. To do so would be to not be able to interview him, not be able to hang with him, or simply to greet him at movie-industry parties (he does seem like a nice guy, and certainly a helluva conversation partner). This means that movies that are “al dente” (to quote Raging Bull on the subject of cooking, “it defeats its own purpose!!!”) and lack an emotional core are hailed as being in the same league as films that were angst-ridden masterworks.

I will continue to see his work, of course, as I hope he will somehow offer us a personal work at some point in the future. The model of countless “senior” European and Asian directors, as well as Funhouse god Robert Altman, seems to be the only way to proceed as a filmmaker grows older (unless, of course, the filmmaker started out as a crowd-pleaser, in the Spielberg fashion). In a phrase: “small movies.” Films based on character and plot, little films made on lower budgets, funded outside the established Hollywood studios. Films that are “as tough as Bresson.”

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And since, like “Marty,” we all love to watch movies, below are remembrances of the filmmaker when his films were smaller. Interestingly, there are NO interviews with the intense, fast-talking, bearded Scorsese on YouTube (it can’t be that they don’t exist, I have a few on VHS — does no one else have them, or were they taken down?). There was absolutely nothing like the intense pace that Scorsese used to think and talk at. Here, for example, is a rare audio interview from 1975



UPDATE: Somehow when I was writing this, I forgot that *I* put up a slice of Scorsese during his amazing "beard era." Here he is discussing Jerry Lewis in a French documentary:



The unforgettable beginning of Mean Streets:



Who needs a documentary about the senior-aged band when you have this?



The trajectory of Taxi Driver as recounted by Scorsese; mentions of Hitchcock, Godard, and Fassbinder:



The beginning of the De Niro-Pesci team. They had quite a way with comedy team-style dialogue (and where the hell has Joe been in the past decade?):



Very strong, extremely personal cinema:



The details are the picture: check out the gentleman on screen right mimicking Rupert’s every move:



Jerry lets loose, and the result is a sublimely uncomfortable sequence:



A memorably small, dark paranoid comedy:



The film that was the closing of the “golden era,” along with Goodfellas. The one he was born to direct, the uneven but visceral and powerful and VERY brilliant Last Temptation of Christ:



The 2000-year-old man said you could learn a lot of new words from Scorsese’s films. Here’s one:



And in closing, from the days when Scorsese's films excited us all incredibly. Note that, even though the video was made by the time that he had shaved off his beard, the pics used are all of him from the bearded period. The album version of the song is even more maniacal, as John S. Hall inserts the word "fuck" in every sentence: