[For my annual
Valentine’s follow-up, I wanted to keep the FilmStudying going and
highlight some non-favorite filmmakers and films. Share your own non-favorites,
film or otherwise, for what is always the most fun crowd-sourced
post of the year!]
On why the
acclaimed filmmaker doesn’t do it for me—and why that’s an American problem.
There was a good
deal of controversy and debate over director Martin Scorcese’s 2012 film The Wolf of Wall Street. More specifically, there was significant debate over whether the film celebrates the Wall Street swindlers and criminals it depicts,
especially Leonardo Di Caprio’s Jordan Belfort; whether it instead portrays those criminals as
over-the-top buffoons; and, for that matter, whether Scorcese has any obligation to think about ethics or
morality at all while making a
feature film about such characters (a topic on which the daughter of one of Belfort’s real-life victims has
weighed in). I never got around to
seeing Wolf (for reasons that this
post will likely make clear), so I can’t offer an opinion one way or
another—but I can say that I have found these same questions to be present and
a significant issue in nearly every Scorcese film I’ve seen, and certainly in
his highly acclaimed Goodfellas (1990).
The protagonists
of Goodfellas, such as the three
leads played by Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Ray Liotta, are of course far more
overtly and proudly criminal and reprehensible than Jordan Belfort. But as far
as I can tell (and I haven’t seen all of the film in nearly two decades),
Scorcese’s film glamorizes and celebrates them far more than it offers any
critique or even analysis. True, Pesci’s hot-headed and violent gangster is
frightening even to his friends, but that’s due simply to his own character
traits and flaws, and if anything is contrasted with the smoother (and not much
less violent) other criminals. Moreover, Scorcese’s choices as a filmmaker—his montages and musical backdrops, his camera
moves and bravura sequences—all seem designed to amplify the coolness and
compellingness of these violent criminals. And his famous final shot of Liotta in witness protection, overlaid by the voiceover in which the character calls himself “an
average nobody … [I] get to live the rest of my life like a schnook,” likewise
contrasts unfavorably with the glamorous gangster life.
I’d say much the
same about the protagonists of many other Scorcese films—the Las Vegas
gangsters in Casino, De Niro’s violent psychopath in Taxi Driver and his violent brute of a boxer in Raging Bull, even the Irish draft rioters in Gangs of New York. Scorcese may want to portray these characters with
nuance and complexity, perhaps examine the social and historical worlds out of
which they emerged—but I find more often than not that he ends up glamorizing
their violence and their crimes, perhaps even more so because they allow them
to transcend and (at least briefly) triumph over their settings. And in doing
so, I’d say his works have tended to fall squarely into a tradition about which
I’ve blogged a few times already: our longstanding and fraught national embrace of the outlaws and the gangsters, of the violent outsiders who seem to offer individual
escapes from our social codes and limitations. Sometimes they’re targeting criminals (like De Niro in Taxi Driver),
sometimes they’re the criminals (like in Goodfellas
and Casino)—but the similarities
seem to me more pronounced than the distinctions. As Jack Nicholson puts it in
the (typically bravura) opening sequence of The Departed: “When I was your age, they would say we can become cops
or criminals. Today, what I’m saying to you is this: when you’re facing a
loaded gun, what’s the difference?”
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Responses to this post or other non-favorites you’d share?
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