Understood. It is a difficult film to connect to/with, since all of the usual narrative entry points have been eschewed. I felt it was somewhat formless, and even with an extra viewing, am still not certain that Scorsese got it into its best form (usually automatic for him).
I do as well in my own way. I love his work from SHUTTER ISLAND on, excepting THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, which to me harks back to his earlier films, though Scorsese’s command of form is monumental in all of the later films.
With the earlier films, I am just not that invested in narratives about men who make bad choices. It is as simple as that. Whether it is Fast Eddie Felson or Jack LaMotta or Travis Bickle or Henry Hill, their redemption stories hold little appeal for me.
THE DEPARTED seems to represent a break/culmination–the most cynical movie ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and Scorsese’s most cynical effort. He did say that after that film, he only wanted to make films which held deep meaning for him, and Andrew Laeddis and Hugo and Father Rodrigues are a different kind of Scorsese protagonist in my view. I don’t feel as if their films are asking me to have great sympathy for/identification with a male character, whose redemption is not particularly interesting or resonant. I except THE WOLF OF WALL STREET from this group, since Jordan Belfort seems to me to hark back to earlier protagonists.
THE IRISHMAN, for me, is a great systems film. Scorsese pulls back, and you see the system that created and supported such men, but there is an attractive coolness to the work–a lessening of the visceral/visual panache that often accompanied Scorsese’s depictions of violence.
There is violence, but often Scorsese puts a character’s grisly fate on the screen with titles–never visualizing their end. And the violence that is there seems muted compared to earlier films.
He wasn’t, but I think that partly stems from his trying to make a movie outside of his usual wheelhouse. Scorsese films are not usually female-focused (which THE IRISHMAN makes explicit as part of its narrative). Even in KUNDUN, the confrontation between the Dalai Lama and Mao feels like a meeting with gangsters, and the Dalai Lama is portrayed in the mold of a Scorsese hero.
But I will add that just as there is the American expression “Only Nixon could go to China,” Scorsese is the only director who could have gotten that much money to make a movie centered on a story about the genocide of Indigenous people in American history.
“I’m a New Yorker, so for me to have made a picture in Oklahoma, the land and the light… For me an exterior shot is a long hallway with a lightbulb,” Scorsese said as the audience laughed. “Waayyy downtown.”
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