caught between the moon and magnolia porter

May 12

Casino. 1995. The fifteenth film.

Casino is sometimes referred to as a better, more underrated version of Goodfellas. It’s one of my least favorite Scorsese movies for that reason, actually- I do find it extremely similar to Goodfellas, but also very lacking in comparison.

In fact, I would say that plot- and theme-wise, Casino and Goodfellas are almost the same movie. Both attempt to build and introduce us to a paradise world, held unsteadily up by barely-concealed crime and corruption. In Casino, its Las Vegas, a world of class and decadence where tens of thousands of dollars are thrown around like pennies. When Vegas eventually comes crashing down, as when the mob bosses in Goodfellas are finally incarcerated, we see the evil in it but also mourn its demise. It’s replaced by a corporate-owned, clean, classless “Disneyland” version of Vegas, and we wonder if it was worth it.

Yet somehow, the similar events in Casino lack the emotional punch they had in Goodfellas. Vegas always seems cold, lifeless, and dangerous. While the mafia life in Goodfellas pulsed with warmth and life and joy, even when brutal murders were being committed, we never get a reason beyond the superficial to care about the casino business. We don’t want the mob life to end because it feels like a life rich in wealth and family, even if both are ill-gotten gains. We don’t want the casino life to end because it feels like something fragile and expensive, and someone will be really mad at you if you drop it. It doesn’t have the same impact.

Robert De Niro, in his final Scorsese role as of writing, plays Ace Rothstein, a Henry Hill-like character who thinks he can game a system that cannot be gamed. Hill believes that as long as he has the balls to take what he wants, he can get away with murder. Rothstein believes that gambling is something that can be figured out, calculated, squared away- he lives in a world of risks, but believes there is no such thing. He is a man who is very very good at guessing odds, but takes no pleasure from it. He is a worrier, who doesn’t stop reasoning and looking to the future even when he has what he wants. It’s almost as though he doesn’t think of himself as a gambler at all, and even when things with his thug friends from back home are spiraling out of control and threatening everything he holds dear, he thinks he has an ace up his sleeve.

But he doesn’t, and we know that right from the first scene of the movie, where he walks to his car, puts the key in ignition, and gets blown to hell.

We find out later that the explosion didn’t kill him- because of numerous factors, most of all luck, the thing he doesn’t seem to believe in. Still, like Henry Hill, he ends up in a purgatory of his own making- once king of the casino, he is relegated to just being a gambler. A really good one, but still just a gambler, a cog in the machine he used to operate.

One of the troubles with Casino is that there isn’t really a common thread that links Rothstein to his downfall. Even his arrogance and showboating after being fired as casino director doesn’t really seem like anything but out of character. You could point to his rocky relationship with volatile hustler Ginger- played by a delightfully out of control Sharon Stone- but really a lot of his problems come from the bad luck of being associated with childhood friend and criminal thug Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci). Nicky uses his connection with Rothstein to muscle his way into Vegas and start his own crime syndicate, on what he feels is “unspoiled land”. But thuggish Nicky doesn’t understand how to play by tight, well-oiled Vegas rules, and his life gets more and more brutal and violent until it swallows him whole in a memorably gorey final scene. But since Rothstein stays hovering on the outside of most of those aspects of Nicky’s life, it’s hard to see the consequences he suffers because of them as anything but slightly unsatisfying.

The greatest and most powerful conflict is between Rothstein and Ginger, which I feel should’ve been the centerpiece of the movie. Ginger, in a way, embodies Vegas: a volatile, passionate, violently unpredictable hustler who Rothstein keeps feeding money into with impossible optimism, but she never pays out. It’s from her, rather than the scary mob thugs Nicky hangs around with, that the film gets most of its sense of danger- mostly from her almost sociopathic lack of consideration for her own baby daughter’s well-being, which the one thing Rothstein really cares about.

But their turbulent, at times hilariously awful relationship is never really resolved. She doesn’t end up having much to do with Rothstein’s life and his fate, and she is unceremoniously assassinated at the end, along with most of the other characters, for “knowing too much” (a montage of murders that suffers greatly in comparison to Goodfellas’s much more artful Layla montage.)

Casino is not a bad movie, but it feels like Scorsese trying to reinvent the wheel. After the stylistic departures of Cape Fear and The Age of Innocence, maybe that is exactly what he was trying to do. But watching Casino doesn’t evoke much more in me than a desire to watch Goodfellas instead.

Next: Kundun

Previous: The Age of Innocence

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Apr 19

The Age of Innocence. 1993. The fourteenth film.

Scorsese is commonly thought of as a director of gritty crime dramas, but over the course of his project I’ve discovered a startling variety in his films. On the heels of his garish modern shock thriller, Cape Fear, is The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1930 romance novel which gently critiqued the stifling social structure of upperclass 1870’s New York. I was expecting another slightly phoned-in “director for hire”movie, but Age of Innocence swept me up in a lush period piece as richly felt as any of his more “gritty” films.

The film is gorgeous. Scorsese captures the repressed yet delicately beautiful 1870’s lifestyle in sweeping shots of women rowing placidly on the lake in flowing white dresses, and rich sitting rooms bedecked in Romantic paintings the size of walls. Some of the shots of 1870’s New York, with kind old brownstones gently illuminated with the purple light of dusk, caused me to audibly gasp at their beauty. I’m happy I bought rather than rented this film, because there’s a particular scene where the protagonists are sitting in an aviary, surrounded with white peacocks and strikingly crimson parrots, that I’d like to look at again and again.

Visuals aside, the story is very well acted and expertly told. I’m not familiar with Edith Wharton, but after watching this movie I think I’d like to be. Much of it is narrated by Joanne Woodward, which lends an appropriately literary feel to the story and adds some nice details that are not strictly visual, such as the comparison of seeing an old lover again to discovering ancient paintings on the walls of a cave. Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is a a young lawyer who privately dislikes conformity but finds it easier to choose not to buck societal rules. He decided to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder), a sweet but unimaginative and shallow young woman about whom he feels “there is no use emancipating, as she hasn’t the faintest idea she isn’t free.” Before his wedding, his attention is drawn by Michelle Pfeiffer’s Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman who was trapped in a terrible marriage in Poland and has left him and returned to America. Everyone in the judgemental New York upperclass society is more distraught by the scandal of her leaving her husband than happy to see her, and only Newland is happy that she has freed herself from her oppressive marital obligations. Being the only two on the same wavelength in seemingly the whole city, they soon fall in passionate love, but fear the scandal that leaving their respective partners for each other would cause.

If I expected a Pride and Prejudice-type period romance, I was pleasantly surprised. The story feels slightly more real than that, and full of tiny moments that seem more honest than the usual period fair, such as the little game Newland plays with himself that he will not call out to his lover if she doesn’t turn to look at him before a boat passes by her on the horizon. Newland eventually marries May at Ellen’s request, though regrets it almost immediately. After months of quiet meetings and frustration over the traps society seems to have placed them in, Newland decides he wants to leave May for Ellen. However, May becomes pregnant, and Ellen decides she can’t handle an affair any longer and leaves the country for Europe. Newland wants to follow her, but May begs him to stay for the sake of their child, so he does.

At the end of the film we see that Newland has lived a fairly stable and even happy life, and is now an old man. His wife passes away, and he find that he truly misses her. By chance he ends up visiting Europe with his son, and they plan a visit to Countess Ellen, known only to his son as a family friend. But before he can finally see his great love again after so many years, his son tells him something that shows him that his seemingly shallow and ignorant wife may have understood him much better than he ever gave her credit for. Moved and slightly shaken, he decides to leave the past in the past and forego his visit with Ellen, saying he is just too “old fashioned.”

Once again Scorsese has surprised me with how well he can do a sweeping romantic drama that moved me almost as much as his more personal films did. Honesty is his greatest strength as a director, but “honesty” doesn’t always mean telling a true story, or even telling your own story. Honesty means telling a story that feels true, or has something of yourself in it. You’d think 1870 high society would be more difficult for Scorsese to relate to than the modern suburban 90’s of Cape Fear, but there seemed much more of himself in this film than that, and it makes all the difference. The film is dedicated to Scorsese’s father, who died before it could be completed. It’s obvious that he took a lot of great care to cultivate this film and make it as lovely and perfect as he could. While it’s probably not the first to come to mind when one thinks of “the best of Scorsese”, I’m happy to say it deserves a place on that list, not only as an example of his versatility as a director, but simply as a wonderfully moving film.

Next: Casino

Previous: Cape Fear

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Apr 13

another note on the difference between the 1962 and 1991 versions of Cape Fear

it just goes to show even more how much scarier and more effective things are when implied rather than stated.

In the 1991 version, we’re told Max Cady is going to try to rape Mrs. Bowden by actually showing him beginning to do that (although she is saved before it gets really bad). The tension is in seeing him force her to take her clothes off, etc., and wondering how far its gonna go. It’s fairly explicit, and the scene is scary and gross because we are literally seeing a repulsive man begin a repulsive act.

In the 1962 version, the director was unable/unwilling to be so explicit about it. Instead, Cady forces Bowden into a powerful embrace; she is fully clothed, he is shirtless. He reaches over her shoulder, picks up an egg from the kitchen counter, and swiftly crushes it in his hand, cracking the shell and spilling yolk onto her blouse. that’s all we see.

Which is SO MUCH BETTER, SCARIER AND MORE MEMORABLE! augh!

Scorsese does not like to pull punches re: violence and most of the time he does it so it works really well. But in this case it would have been better to not be so realistic.

Cape Fear. 1991. The thirteenth film.

In preparation for this review, I watched the original 1962 Cape Fear, starring the great Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum (who both appear in Scorsese’s 1991 remake). I don’t want this review to simply be a comparison of the two films, because the goal of this project is to observe Scorsese’s movies in the context of his entire body of work. However, I’m glad I watched the original first. I’m not sure what I would’ve made of the new Cape Fear otherwise. And I think the best way to outline Scorsese’s influence in this film is to observe the choices he made compared to the original.

Scorsese’s remake follows the plot of the original fairly closely. A normal, upper-middle class family, the Bowdens (Nick Nolte, Jessica Lange and Juliette Lewis), start to be threatened and harassed by ex-con Max Cady who feels their father wronged him and is responsible for his jailtime. Cady threatens them while staying frustratingly within the law, leaving the Bowdens with no legal option except to wait in fear for Cady to commit a crime against them. Finally they abscond to their houseboat on Cape Fear to hide from him, where Cady tracks them down and finally forces a terrifying confrontation, sexually targeting Bowden’s wife and daughter specifically.

Scorsese takes this story and removes the quiet buildup and subtle tension, turning everything up to garish high volume. I got the feeling that he was using this framework to experiment and try new things with his filmmaking: playing with exposure and shocking jump-cuts, having characters look and speak directly into the camera, overlaying shots over others, including strange character details simply for shock value, and so on and so forth. It’s all very over the top, and mostly unsuccessful and distracting- but at least interesting. It was as though Scorsese was throwing different elements at the movie to see what worked and what didn’t, but left all the stuff that didn’t in the final cut anyway.

Strangely though, for every shot in this movie that seems unique in its misguided ambition, there’s another shot that is embarrassingly pedestrian. For example, when Cady confronts Bowden’s daughter in the high school basement, a scene that should be tense and ripe with dangerous sexual tension is filmed with two flat, sitcom-like medium-shots. Each character sits dead center in the frame, and the scene flips between the shots in a workmanlike way, depending on who is talking. It made me wonder if some of the scenes were rushed or had to be re-shot, or if Scorsese just didn’t care.

There are also a lot of unnecessary additions to the story and characters. Presumably these are meant to add humanity and life to the Bowdens, who are originally portrayed as a typically wholesome and uncomplicated American family. But the addition of marital infidelities, screaming matches, and obnoxiously by-the-book teen rebellion actually subtracts from the humanity of the Bowdens. Instead of a kind family you feel you can trust in, they become cartoonish caricatures of a WASPy upperclass family, difficult to believe in or even root for against the threat of Max Cady. Rather than being infused with the honest and richly observed humanity found in the majority of Scorsese’s work, the Bowdens are more closely related to the nightmarish cartoon people that populate his strange anomaly After Hours.

The only addition I found slightly interesting- but still completely unnecessary- was the change to Max Cady’s motivation. In the original, Bowden was a lawyer who saw Max Cady raping a woman, reported him to the police and later testified against him. Cady blamed Bowden for giving him jailtime, rather than understanding that it was a consequence of his own actions.

In the remake, Bowden was Cady’s defense attorney in his case against the girl he raped. While working on the case Bowden learned the girl was promiscuous, had a widely known history of casual sex, and often got drunk and brought strange men home with her. All these, unfortunately, are facts Bowden could have used in defense of Cady, to lessen the severity of his crime in the eyes of the judge. But Bowden knew his client did indeed brutally rape the woman, and didn’t believe that being promiscuous meant she deserved it. Rather than risk a judgement he didn’t agree with, he buried the woman’s sexual history and it never came up in court. In Cady’s mind, this is what doomed him to losing 14 years of his life in prison.

It’s an interesting choice because it’s about the most progressive tack a horror movie about violent rape could take. It’s refreshing to see a protagonist believe so strongly that the “she was asking for it” defense is disgustingly wrong, that he’d bend the law to go against it. Had it been done right, it could’ve been a very effective plot point. We’d understand perfectly why Cady blamed Bowden, but that understanding would make us hate Cady even more. Unfortunately, it’s handled poorly: inserted almost as an afterthought, and addressed in conversation only twice in clunky expositional dialogue.

What’s more, it seems out of character for Bowden, who comes across as an ineffectual douchebag. It’s hard to believe that this guy would feel so strongly about justice on behalf of women’s rights that he’d risk his career on it, when otherwise he wishy-washily cheats on his wife, pays little attention to his family, and cruelly suggests the only reason he sticks around is because he’s afraid his wife would kill herself if he left (just one of many backstory details that are seemingly randomly inserted and instantly dropped, never to be spoken of again). When his friend and would-be mistress gets targeted and raped by Cady, he doesn’t seem too bent out of shape about it, except some mild guilt and worry that his wife will find out about them. At one point he gets so angry at his daughter’s carelessness around Cady that he comes close to physically abusing her himself, which is pretty much the most we ever see him interact with her.

In the original, we get the sense that Bowden is at an impasse because Cady has not broken the law yet in his harassment of Bowden and his family. He believes so strongly in the law that it stays his hand when his instinct tells him to strike. In the remake, we get the sense that Bowden isn’t taking action against Cady because he doesn’t know how or what to do. He doesn’t seem to consider anything about the situation until the scenes where Cady is actually present in the scene with him. He is unable to make real decisions or to act when action is obviously needed, which doesn’t make for very compelling drama.

1962’s Cape Fear had a simple moral: that it is best to abide by the law, and that no matter how threatened you feel, you should never break the law or take it into your own hands. Gregory Peck’s Bowden follows the law to the very end, refusing to even take Cady’s life when he has the chance, preferring that he rots in prison. This ends up being the most satisfying punishment Cady could have, which suggests that the law, even when it seems unfair, will right itself in the end. In 1991’s Cape Fear, the only real message coming across is “Whoah, that Max Cady guy is pretty scary.”

But to be fair, De Niro’s Max Cady is in fact, pretty scary. It’s one of the best and most uninhibited performances I’ve ever seen from De Niro. It’s the one place the movie really works, and helps make it into something that’s actually worth watching. His performance lacks the lackadaisical charm and subtlety of Mitchum’s, but when he goes from a brutish, snarling alligator of a man to a hideously deformed psychopath whooping bible passages at the top of his lungs, its hard to care about subtlety. De Niro plays Cady like a force of nature who is still human enough to take petty offense at the actions of mortals, and has come back up from Hell to wreck disproportionate vengeance. It’s a treat to watch, and once De Niro gets to really let loose in the last half hour of the film, his performance is exciting and almost invigorating in how terrifying it is. The best and most chilling shot in the film comes at the very end, when Cady sinks into the swamp and drowns. His head slowly sinks beneath the water, but his eyes never leave Bowden, burning with singleminded hate even as he is swallowed up into the elements. Although Bowden has rid himself of the man terrorizing him, his hands still shake, because even in death Cady scares the shit out of him.

Ultimately the film is worth watching simply for De Niro’s performance. The rest is a strange mix of crazily misguided ambition, and a complete lack of it. The original is a much better movie in almost every way, but it doesn’t achieve the same heights of insanity and shock that the remake does. Sometimes, even a misfire of a film is as worthwhile as a successful one, even if it only leaves you with a handful of great moments to haunt you after it’s done. Scorsese’s Cape Fear wasn’t a very good movie, but I’ve been thinking about De Niro’s burning glare sinking into the swamp all day, and I think I’ll remember it for a long time.

Next: The Age of Innocence

Previous: Goodfellas

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Apr 9

Mean Streets.

Alright, okay, thanks a lot Lord, thanks a lot for opening my eyes. We talk about penance, and you send this through the door. Well, we play by your rules, don’t we. Don’t we?

Goodfellas. 1990. The twelfth film.

From the opening scene where he narrates, “As far back as I can remember I always wanted to be a gangster,” we know exactly who Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill is. We’re introduced to a young boy in the golden years of the Brooklyn mafia who quickly learns that organized crime is normal and easy, and those who play by the rules simply have “no balls”. Through his eyes we meet a family that really is like a family, full of nice men who want to help you out, keep you from having to go to school, play cards late on the street and know everyone else’s name. As Henry explains confidentially to us, “That’s what the FBI could never understand… that what Paulie and the organization did, was offer protection for guys who couldn’t go to the cops. … That’s it.”

The narration is the key to why Goodfellas is such a perfect film. Henry is sounds confident and knowledgeable, and what he’s saying never goes completely against what’s happening on screen. We think we’re learning what the mafia does, but what the movie is really teaching us is that Henry believes that’s what it does. The brilliance of it is, we don’t need much more than that to understand that his narration is unreliable. All we need to know is that he really believes he can do whatever he wants as long as he has the balls to do it, and we know that’s bullshit, and it’s only a matter of time.

What’s more, is Henry’s narration teaches us about the life of crime while also teaching us how to watch the movie as we watch it. When Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway casually asks Henry if he thinks their friend Morrie “tells his wife everything”, the screen pauses and Henry tells us “that’s when I knew Jimmy was going to whack him.” And from that point on, the audience knows that whenever Jimmy asks a question like that, that’s what it means. We’re learning how to understand the story, so that when the big moments come, we’ll know it.

The second half of the film’s narration and story come from Henry’s girlfriend, later wife, Karen (played by Lorraine Bracco.) Karen is important because she’s a newcomer folded into the life of crime, to contrast Henry who grew up with it. She’s there to remind us that even a normal girl like her can let herself get involved with a life like that, because even though she claims to see “nothing strange” with the money that’s coming home, we know she’s smarter than that. On their second date, when she asks him, “What do you do?” we know she wouldn’t be asking that way if she didn’t already know the answer. But when her life is a rush of people and food and money and family, she feels “drunk”, and lets herself be intoxicated even when its hurting her.

That’s the second part of what makes Goodfellas great- the sense of humor. Both Henry and Karen are slightly ridiculous people, and it keeps the film energized with dark humor from start to finish, no matter how grim and hopeless it gets. That’s what Goodfellas has that sets it apart from the crowd. It never gets bogged down in itself, and even truly heartbreaking and disturbing moments like the infamous Layla montage are cut away at just the right time to a dark joke about how well things are going for Jimmy.

The film bolts through the decades, giving us just enough to understand what’s going on over the years. It jumps from tense scenes of violence, to friendly old-country banter, to moments of comically absurd decadence and moral apathy. This method of storytelling keeps us as alert and on our toes as Henry must be in order to live this life. Like him, we don’t know whether the people around him are going to be the father figures who would bend the rules of the world to suit him one minute, or the friends who are going to shoot him in the head with a smile on their face the next.

Scorsese plays the tension like a piano, using music cues to indicate lightning-quick changes in moments and time periods. By the end, when Henry is deep into coke and pills, the film uses then-revolutionary editing techniques to give us the feeling that we’re as high and paranoid as he is. But we’ve not just been taken on a ride, we’ve been actively learning. So when Jimmy Conway casually asks Karen “Does Henry say much to the cops?” we know exactly what he’s really asking, and a simple scene of him sending her on an errand down the street is suddenly charged with fear and anxiety. We’ve come to know as well as she does about the way this world works, and how quickly things change and life-ending decisions are made.

At the end, Henry Hill seems to get off easy- he’s doomed the men he grew up with to die in prison by ratting them out to the FBI, and he’s living a new life free of persecution in the Witness Protection Program. But like Travis Bickle, the events of the film weren’t enough to wake him up to reality. For him, having to live a simple suburban life is a hell in itself, and he still believes he deserves everything in the world simply because he has the balls to demand it. We consider how terrible a fate it is that he has to live “the rest of his life as a shnook”, and when the credits roll it sinks in just how much death and destruction he and his family have caused and gotten away with. But by the end we have been so wrapped up in the masterful storytelling of the film, we’ve forgotten that “living life as a shnook” is the lesser horror.

I feel like I’ve barely touched on what makes Goodfellas great. I’ve glossed over Paul Cicero as Paulie, Joe Pesci as Tommy Devito, and barely mentioned De Niro’s top-billed turn as Jimmy Conway. I don’t think it’s possible to list every reason why Goodfellas is a great movie, but I’ve done my best to summarize it here. It’s the best movie Scorsese has made to date, and utilizes all of his previous strengths at their very best heights, while introducing some unexpected new ones. I’d be shocked if any movie on the list after this one surpasses it. Goodfellas is a movie with a lot of layers and a lot of things to admire and love. It’s timeless because it isn’t just a story- it builds a world that exists right under your nose, tells you how to live in it, shows you all of its heights and horrors, and asks you with a dark wink if you’d like to stay.

Next: Cape Fear

Previous: The Last Temptation of Christ

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Apr 8

goodfellas notes

Some notes on gender in goodfellas, which i will not include in the actual review because its not germane:

There are a lot of movies about femme fatales, about dangerous women who use their sex and charms to get what they want out of men. Goodfellas is an interesting example of a male fatale. Ray Liotta’s charm and sexuality are the things that carry most of the movie, and the core love story is about a fairly normal girl who gets swept up in a decadent lifestyle by the powerful magnetic pull of an astoundingly attractive man. If Ray Liotta wasn’t hot in this movie, we wouldn’t buy it, but he is, and we do. When Karen is hovering over him with a gun, confessing via voice over that she could never hurt him, could never even leave him because of how attractive he is to her, we look at him and have to say “yeah girl, you gotta lock that down” or else the movie doesnt work.

So, the movie does an interesting thing- it presents him as a hot guy, while still keeping him a relatable character and somewhat ridiculous in his capricious decadence. We laugh at him, we relate to him, but we also see a hell of a lot of him because his manipulation of girls using sex is an important plot point. He’s sort of sexualized and objectified out of necessity. WHICH IS PART OF WHAT MAKES THE MOVIE FUN TO WATCH (for me)

Its just interesting is all, seeing a story about a tough guy using his sexuality to get what he wants rather than violence and stuff (although I guess he does use violence in this movie, though not really against women.)

I wonder if watching this movie is a different experience if you are a straight guy/lesbian, or if his charm is more of a “universal” thing, like james dean.

Also, they must have prettied him up with makeup or something for his movie, because he does not look half as good anywhere else. I’m almost positive he’s wearing eyeliner or mascara or SOMETHING like that.

aw yeahhhhh

Apr 7

The Last Temptation of Christ. 1988. The eleventh film.

I read a book of interviews with Scorsese the other day, interviews conducted over the course of his life by a close friend. Both he and the interviewer seemed convinced that one of the strongest themes in his works was that of betrayal. Reading that surprised me a little- I would’ve thought his major theme was something like “the struggle to take care of something important when its almost impossible to do so”; something like that. However, when I think about it, I agree with them in a sense. But to me, the betrayal in his work seems to have more to do with people who behave in ways that make their own betrayal inevitable, almost as though they were subconsciously seeking it. Their betrayal is almost always brought upon themselves.

Harvey Keitel in Who’s That Knocking At My Door, who cruelly refuses to see his girlfriend’s rape as anything but her betrayal of his trust in her innocence and purity.

Keitel again in Mean Streets, constantly putting himself in harm’s way for De Niro’s character when he has never done anything but let Keitel down.

De Niro in Raging Bull, so single-mindedly convinced that his brother and wife will betray him that he forces them violently out of his life; a self-fulfilling prophecy.

De Niro in King of Comedy, who puts all his faith and trust in a celebrity who he can’t admit isn’t really his friend, and can’t see anything but 100% support from him as a betrayal.

Finally here, in The Last Temptation of Christ, we see Willem Dafoe as Jesus literally begging Harvey Keitel as Judas to betray him so that he can finally die.

Growing up, Scorsese thought he would either be a Catholic priest or a movie director. He chose movies, and the influence of religion in his life isn’t always strongly felt in his work, but Last Temptation was his passion project. Based on a book by Nikos Kazantzakis, the story portrays a Jesus who is frail and human and full of doubt for his entire life, for whom his role as Messiah is a terrible burden. He hears footsteps behind him when no one is there, he convulses in pain at the sound of voices in his head. When a woman asks him if he’s sure it’s God and not the Devil, because the Devil can be cast out, he ruefully laments that it is God, and you can’t cast Him out.

In order to fully appreciate this movie- or any strongly religious movie- it requires the viewer’s agreement that at least for the purposes of this story, God is real and what’s happening on the screen is actually happening. There were times, however, when I was impressed with how challenging this portrayal of Jesus seemed to be. Rather than being above such things, he longs for a romantic and sexual relationship with his would-be lover Mary Magdalene, and when she tells him “My heart breaks every time I look at you” we get the sense that it really is a terrible sacrifice on both their parts to not let themselves be in love. When Jesus tells his mother that his true father is God, it hurts her and makes her feel tossed aside, unimportant. A friend tries to reassure her, saying he really must be the Son of God, because she could see that there were “thousands of blue angels standing behind him.” “Were there?” asks Mary, in a defeated voice. “I wish there weren’t.”

Most of the film is a retelling of the story of Jesus, all the major beats- his trial in the desert, his turning water into wine, and so on. The whole time, however, we see a Jesus that seems slightly unhinged. God keeps telling him so many conflicting things, and gives him so little to go on, that he knows he must seem a little crazy to those around him. His rock throughout the whole thing is his friend Judas, who to me was the best character and performance in the film. Judas was ordered to kill Jesus because he threatened the Jewish revolution against the Romans. However, he believes in Jesus and becomes his strongest disciple, but promises he will kill him if he takes one step out of the line towards revolution.

In the end, Judas “betrays” Jesus under Jesus’s own direction, putting him up on the cross so he can die and be sacrificed willingly like a lamb to slaughter. However, in the middle of his torture, an angelic young girl appears to him, and tells him he’s suffered enough- that God doesn’t want him to suffer anymore. She takes him by the hand and leads him to a new place, where he can take Mary Magdalene as his wife and live a simple earthly life to the end of his days.

Which he does, although things are not quite right. Mary is killed- “taken at the height of her happiness,” assures the angel, not quite convincingly- and just out of sight, Israel and the world begin to burn. But Jesus himself lives a life free of those things, until on his comfortable deathbed, surrounded by loved ones, Judas comes to him, full of hurt and anger, and tells him Jesus has betrayed humanity by abandoning the cross. No one has been absolved for their sins because the Messiah fled instead of letting himself die.

Keitel’s performance during this scene is heartbreaking. Throughout the film his strong, steadfast face serves as a reminder of the will of Jesus and his people, and what they are fighting for. Seeing it nearly break down into tears without quite getting that far is shattering enough to show us the magnitude of what Jesus has done.

But in the context of this film, its difficult to blame Jesus for betraying God and his people, who have caused him nothing but pain and torment, and placed every possible burden on his buckling shoulders. Even the “good life” which is the titular last temptation is only fraught with simpler, more common struggles than the ones he faced before. No respite is possible for him until the last seconds on his life, when his bloody face is overcome with zealous joy and he laughs “It is accomplished.”

Visually, this is the most beautiful and ambitious Scorsese film to date. The camera sweeps over vast desert vistas and cliffsides, the most striking being the scene of Jesus hunched alone in the cold desert night, in a drawn circle, like the grim bullseye in the center of the world. The costume designs in the film are unlike anything I’d seen in a Scorsese movie before- women and men bedecked in robes and gold bangles, with flowing tattoos on their ankles and foreheads, with images like blue flames and ancient alphabets. But what’s strongest is the visual metaphor of the body and blood. Animals are constantly being killed and cut open, spilling their shining organs in the sun; Jesus bites into an apple offered by the devil, and it spills into thick blood over his hands and face; at one point he plunges a hand into his body and pulls out his own beating heart to show it to his disciples as an angry prize. It’s hard not to be enraptured by scenes such as this; they are beautiful in a visceral way, and they communicate the message that this world is one of harm and violence, where the innocents are torn up and the good things might still kill you. The only answer is for Jesus to “baptize the world in fire” through his salvation of the people. Jesus says the only hope for the world is “the heart” and later, “the axe”- and while those things seem conflicting, we come to understand as the movie goes on that the heart and the axe might be one and the same.

For me, watching this film was a somewhat alien experience. I was not raised religiously and while I’m fascinated by the subject, it is still strange for me to see the ultimate climax of the film being Jesus deliriously dying in torment, with no real confirmation of the presence of God other than the absence of the Devil. But this seems to be the purpose of the film- that sacrifice is not true sacrifice if its easy, and that Jesus died in torment betrayed by his friends because he wanted it- because it was the only way to ensure the salvation of humanity. This film was a struggle for Scorsese to create, but its clear it meant a lot to him, and it’s what makes the film feel so urgent and vast. What’s somewhat heartening is that this is the first of his “betrayal” stories where in the case of Judas the betrayal is actually meaningful and good, and in the case of Jesus, it can be forgiven and fixed. Even in a world of torment and doubt, Jesus has Judas to help him, and in this story even such a great wrong as the messiah turning his back on a dying world can be healed in the end. It must have meant a lot to Scorsese, and his passion for the story is so strong, it ended up meaning something to me.

Next: Goodfellas

Previous: The Color of Money

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Mar 23

The Color of Money. 1986. The tenth film.

Good news, readers, I think this will be my first “short” review since Boxcar Bertha. The Color of Money is the sequel to the 1959 film The Hustler (which I have not actually seen) with Paul Newman revisiting his role as “Fast Eddie” Felson. It’s not Scorsese’s characters or story, clearly one of his “director-for-hire” jobs, so I don’t have too much to say about it.

It’s an enjoyable movie, particularly if you like this sort of “young hotshot makes it big with the help of an old jaded pro” story. Which I do. Paul Newman is great and though I’m unfamiliar with his character from the first film, I liked that this one showed his breaking points as well as him just being impenetrably cool. I also really liked Tom Cruise’s performance. I know I’m in the minority here but I always liked Cruise and felt he was a better and more natural actor than people give him credit, and it shows here- it’s easy to buy him as a young man who is so talented and charming that he doesn’t understand how tough the world is.

But really you can barely even tell this is a Scorsese movie, except maybe in a few of the pool scenes which use some nice uninterruped “moving camera” shots and do some fancy “pool table view” angles. There’s a little bit of the old father-figure betrayal theme that Scorsese likes so much but its hard to tell how much is his influence and how much comes from the original story and books.

Anyway, it was a nice, relaxing movie that I enjoyed watching but didn’t really get anything out of it. I hope Scorsese made a lot of money making it because as I recall the next film on the list gave him a lot of trouble in that department. It’s also the last film in the “major Scorsese canon” that I have not ever seen before, so get ready for a much longer review next time.

Next: The Last Temptation of Christ

Previous: After Hours

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Mar 11

After Hours. 1985. The ninth film.

For this project, I don’t really like to look up the movies online for much context- I want to just experience them and write about them in the context of Scorsese’s total body of work. However, this film was like nothing I have ever seen or expected to see from Scorsese and I really wasn’t sure what to make of it. The film doesn’t do much to explain itself- it feels a little like a live-action Looney Tunes directed by Martin Scorsese, and it came way too out of left field to accept it at face value.

The story follows Griffin Dunne as he leaves for SoHo for the night on a date with a cute girl he had just met. She turns out to be not quite what he expected, but the “date” launches a series of misadventures and strange coincidences that prevent the poor guy from ever getting home. There’s not much more I can say about the plot without simply listing the events, and that’s not really the point of the movie anyway (if it has a point at all).

It’s almost as though this was Scorsese’s attempt at directing a weird, wacky 80’s sex comedy- except that rather than fun and goofy, it seems dark and hopeless, like an endless repetitive nightmare that you have to jolt yourself awake from to get it to end.

I wouldn’t say I disliked the movie- in fact I very much enjoyed it while watching it, and though the humor was very dark, there were several moments where I laughed out loud, although I could hardly describe why exactly I found it funny if I tried. It was also a rather strange portrait of the 80’s New York art scene and SoHo in general, making it seem kind of terrifying in its avant-garde-ness, as though everyone was so beyond societal expectations that there didn’t seem to be any rules at all anymore. The idea of the New York art scene is kind of a commercialized joke now, but there must have been a time where it seemed strange and new, and laughable in a way that was still threatening.

Although I enjoyed the movie, I have absolutely no desire to ever see it again. By the end, I was yearning for an escape not just for the character, but for myself. The pleasure in nightmarish movies like these is that it confirms that we are not alone. Sometimes everyone has an endless night where they just want to go home, and everything seems to be going wrong. Sometimes everyone finds themselves in a place where what’s familiar and right to them seem completely alien, and the social rules and expectations are suddenly completely beyond their grasp. There is a humor and thrill in following those feelings to the very worst places, and After Hours succeeds in that regard. But Scorsese has made other movies about much worse situations- murder, organized crime, drug abuse, any kind of abuse, etc. etc.- and somehow I have a much better time returning to those movies. It isn’t as easy to enjoy something that feels like an exaggerated nightmare version of the kind of night everyone has, once in a while.

When reading up about this movie, I learned that it was originally slated to be directed by Tim Burton, and while I’m not a fan of Burton’s current whimsical romps, I think the Burton of the 80’s who made movies like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and still had some satirical bite in him would’ve been perfect for this film. Having said that, I’m glad Scorsese directed it. A movie like this, filmed with his unique flair and visual/musical obsessions, is unlike any movie I’ve seen before. Thelma Schoonmaker, his editor and filmmaking partner for the majority of his career, edited the film with a lightning fast touch, slashing 45 minutes out of the final cut to keep everything moving at a violent pace. It feels like an aggressive hurtle of a film, which is appropriate and almost a relief. Though well-executed, it’s nice that the film rips its uncomfortable scenes right off like a bandaid, wasting no time throwing the protagonist from one strange indignity to the next.

I’m tempted to call the movie “pointless”, as it doesn’t really seem to have a message or reason to exist beyond the sheer strangeness and discomfort of its content. But I guess that’s reason enough. I’m glad I took the time to see this movie, and I’m glad there are still movies in Scorsese’s body of work that are capable of surprising me and shocking me. I honestly had no idea he was capable of making a film like this, and I’m excited to see what more he’s capable of.

Besides, as unbelievable as a movie about a series of cartoonishly unlucky experiences can be, it had a core of honest emotion. Why not make a movie about how it feels to be exhausted and exasperated after a long night, when it feels like nothing will ever go your way again? That’s as worth examining as any other emotion, and that it feels so true and familiar means it’s struck a real chord, no matter how meandering and meaningless the story.

Next: The Color of Money

Previous: The King of Comedy

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caught between the moon and magnolia porter

basically the main thing on this tumblr is me being a douchebag and talking about dumb shit all the time. oh also some drawings i made i guess you can read my webcomic here you'll probably like it! it's called Monster Pulse and its about a bunch of kids whose body parts become fighting monsters.

another note on the difference between the 1962 and 1991 versions of Cape Fear

goodfellas notes

basically the main thing on this tumblr is me being a douchebag and talking about dumb shit all the time.

oh also some drawings i made i guess

you can read my webcomic here you'll probably like it! it's called Monster Pulse and its about a bunch of kids whose body parts become fighting monsters.