On the Big Screen: SILENCE (2016)

Martin Scorsese has made films about Jesus Christ and the Dalai Lama. Silence, adapted from a novel by the Japanese Catholic Shusaku Endo, sometimes seems like an attempt to reconcile or synthesize Christianity and Buddhism in the historical context of the persecution of Christians by Buddhists in Tokugawa Japan. Two young Jesuit priests, Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Garupe (Adam Driver) sneak into Japan to investigate reports that one of the last remaining priests, Fr. Ferrera (Liam Neeson) has apostasized, renouncing the faith. They minister to underground congregations who revere "Deus" and cherish any material artifact of faith, from crude tiny crucifixes to rosary beads. These people face terrible torture and certain death if their faith is discovered and they refuse to recant by trampling icons. The priests are in constant danger from betrayal, especially from the man who ferried them to Japan, Kichijiro (Yosuke Kobozuka), an abject character whose family was slaughtered despite his apostasy. Kichijiro in many ways is the worst sort of Christian, one who wallows in his weakness just so he can confess it, yet we will see that his faith is in some sense the strongest of all. Ultimately it is Rodrigues whose faith faces the sternest test after Kichijiro betrays him into the hands of Inoue (Issey Ogata), ironically designated an "Inquisitor." Inoue sees Christianity as the foot in the door for unwanted European influence in his country, and claims that it may be "true" elsewhere but not in Japan. He respects the power of symbolism, telling Christians that they don't have to sincerely recant so long as they go through the motions he hopes will demoralize others by undermining respect for the clergy and their sacred symbols. One can also see an ideological threat to the shogunate, at least as seen by a Japanese believer and a Catholic filmmaker, in the Christian insistence on the value of every human life, while Japan's feudal culture -- as shown in many a Japanese film -- holds much life worthless. You can understand the preference for a Buddhism that aspires to the nullification of self and implicitly acquiesces in feudal tyranny, as well as the significance of the apparent conversion of Fr. Ferrera to Buddhism. He claims to be convinced that real Christianity can get nowhere in the "swamp" of Japan, and tries to convince Rodrigues that keeping the faith is worse than futile. He employs moral blackmail, holding Rodrigues responsible for the torture that the audience more likely will blame on Japan's vicious rulers. But if unassailable power holds innocent lives hostage against the priest's apostasy, Ferrera claims they'll be sacrificed to Rodrigues's pride. Through his ordeal, Rodriguez aches for divine guidance, but the film's title tells you what he gets until the climax.

Apart from a couple of pretentious shots early on, this is a relatively austere film for Scorsese, and that may explain why some reviewers find its length oppressive. It's also unavoidably an intellectual if not theological film, for all the gruesome poignancy of the tortures inflicted on Japanese Christians, and for that reason Silence has probably lost some reviewers' attention. One particularly philistine pan asks why everyone makes a big deal about trampling icons, but this issue really is -- pun intended, I guess -- the crux of the film. Ultimately Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks, if not Endo before them, are critiquing a materialist element of Christianity that arguably can be done without. Investing these symbols with such crucial significance leaves the faith vulnerable to the sort of hostile iconoclasm Inoue practices. Rodrigues's initial dismay at the Japanese Christians' devotion to symbols proves the right instinct, and while we see that Christians ultimately can't do entirely without such symbols, it looks like the key to the survival of Christian people is their readiness to sacrifice symbols, on the understanding that the symbols aren't the faith itself. The less Christianity takes the form of idolatry, the less vulnerable it is to Inoue's sort of propaganda. It's an oddly Protestant note to sound as an important theme of a Catholic story, but there it is.

If Silence convinces people of anything, it's that Andrew Garfield still has a future in movies after the Amazing Spider-Man debacle, though Hacksaw Ridge may already have convinced some people. The film ends up on his shoulders and he bears it well. I was even more impressed by the Japanese performing in English. Kobozuka goes all out as Kichijiro, giving the story's Judas a pathetic grandiosity that might remind you of Akira Kurosawa in his more Dostoevskian moods. Issey Ogata gives an eccentrically gnomic performance as the Japanese inquisitor (credit is also due to Tadanobu Asano, more fluent than ever, as his slick interpreter) both verbally and physically creepy. There's a moment where Rodrigues seems to have the upper hand in a debate when Inoue seems to deflate in stages before our eyes; the only missing effect is the steam coming out of his ears. He makes a great villain, though Neeson, in a smaller role than his billing suggests, is arguably more effective the sort of devil's advocate the story really needs. It looks like the film will prove a flop at the box-office, and that makes me wonder why Paramount didn't promote Silence more to the apparently growing audience for religious pictures. It certainly would strike a chord with those Christians who for whatever reason feel persecuted today, but perhaps the film is too specifically Catholic for the faith-based audience here, and maybe some still hold the allegedly sacrilegious Last Temptation of Christ against Scorsese. That'd be unfortunate, since Silence is really a more effective Christian film than that earlier effort. It's still far from Scorsese's best, but it's one of the better pictures of 2016.

On the Big Screen: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (2013)

After seeing American Hustle last weekend I described it as an "epic Scorsesean farce" and suggested that David O. Russell might prove to have out-Scorsesed Martin Scorsese himself this year. To be fair to Scorsese, I ventured out this holiday afternoon, during what's expected to have been a calm before a storm, to stand in a line outside the local art house to see The Wolf of Wall Street. As it turned out, many of the people in line outside this neighborhood multiplex were there for Philomena -- you never know who'll show up -- and Wolf played to a much less full house than Hustle did on a less pleasant Sunday. The Scorsese film has gotten some bad word of mouth as well as some glowing reviews, and may prove the most divisive film of the holiday or Oscar season. You may have read a story about some old-fogey screenwriter heckling the great man after a Hollywood screening, while professional reviewers, grown impatient in the age of Peter Jackson, have complained about the film's length of almost three hours. But while Jackson may not be able to control himself, Wolf is purposefully excessive in setting up false endings only to have the hero press on irrepressibly, until he's finally repressed. By the end, you might describe Wolf itself as an epic Scorsesean farce, in a Marxist sense. If you think of his Nineties crime epics (Goodfellas, Casino) as tragedies, Wolf seems farcical alongside them. It marks the director's return to his classical mode and his great theme of the rise and fall of a corrupt order that works for a time, yet implodes due to the same uncontrollable desires that fueled its rise in the first place. But since Jordan Belfort's order isn't enforced by lethal force, and Belfort's Qualuude habit sometimes renders him a physical clown, Wolf ends up looking like a comic reprise of Scorsesean themes if not outright self-parody. It's often very funny but Scorsese sometimes undermines its comic potential. He doesn't trust Leonardo DiCaprio's physical comedy to carry the scene in which Belfort, reduced to "cerebral palsy mode" by industrial-strength Qualuudes, must crawl from a country-club lobby to his car. DiCaprio contorts himself quite impressively, but Scorsese feels compelled to add a voice-over when it shouldn't be needed, as if to underline his artistic signature. The standard Scorsesean narrative is erratic here as Belfort usually recounts his story in past tense but lapses into present tense in several scenes, while the director occasionally treats us to other character's voice-overs. Belfort also addresses the audience occasionally in the middle of scenes from his own career rather than from some retrospective point. All this may be a greater sign of some loss of creative discipline than the length of the film.

Wolf shares with Hustle a giddy amorality; it seems more a celebratory than a cautionary tale. Belfort is an earnest young stockbroker who loses his job when his company fails following the Black Monday of 1987. Looking for work, he stumbles upon a strip-mall "boiler room" where telemarketers hustle penny stocks for companies deemed unworthy of listings with Dow Jones. Impressed by the 50% commissions earned for penny stocks -- he earned a much smaller percentage on the Street -- Belfort soon starts his own firm and makes himself a Master of the Universe, cheating all the way. He's been taught by his mentor (Matthew McConaughey in a cameo) that he should indulge all his vices in order to be both aggressive and relaxed while selling. His cronies emulate him and a corporate bacchanal ensues for years, while the FBI and SEC grow suspicious about the company's shady deals. In true Scorsesean fashion, everything falls apart because the protagonists can't control themselves. The false ending I mentioned exemplifies this; Belfort has agreed to a deal with the SEC to quit the business with his fortune largely intact, but changes his mind in the middle of a sentimental farewell speech because surrendering would make him a hypocrite after years telling everyone not to take No for an answer. No one in this picture knows when to quit, and it shouldn't surprise us if audiences interpret this as Scorsese not knowing when to quit. I suspect that Wolf is a film that wants to exhaust its audience and make it feel glad to be rid of Belfort at last.

The director (and writer Terence Winter) may need to make Belfort wear out his welcome because they have genuine trouble making him out as the villain that, objectively speaking, he should be. More so than Bradley Cooper's selfishly ambitious Fed in American Hustle, Wolf's FBI nemesis (Kyle Chandler) comes across, probably unintentionally, as a killjoy. He's a likable enough character, and he gets sympathy for remaining an ill-paid subway commuter, but Scorsese and Winter never allow him to articulate why what Belfort's doing is wrong and why our protagonist deserves to go to jail. Perhaps they thought that would seem like preaching, and perhaps they thought Belfort's wickedness would be self-evident. You don't want to take stuff like that for granted in our time. What Wolf shares with Hustle is not so much literal amorality but a certain blind spot. In neither film are we shown how the protagonists' schemes and scams hurt people. There's no suggestion that people are losing their life savings or otherwise ruining their lives by getting suckered by these films' con artists and hucksters. Rather, both films see their protagonists as rags-to-riches antiheroes, Scorsese apparently seconding Russell's argument that "everyone hustles to survive" and the implicit corollary that everyone is fair game. Both films, if not both directors, seem alienated from bourgeois morality, which in this case isn't necessarily a pejorative. Scorsese has consistently offered an alternative to the bourgeois myth of success. As many bourgeois moralists have said, with varying degrees of sincerity, the key to success -- to rising from rags to riches -- is self-denial, the deferral of gratification. In Wolf, the McConaughey character tells Belfort that he must not defer gratification; the mentor makes a point of masturbating several times a day to keep sharp and clear. In the classical Scorsese universe, the key to success is pursuing gratification without restraint, to get what you want as soon as you can by any means necessary. Those who defer gratification are the schnooks who drive Pintos or ride the subway to work -- and our final shot of the FBI man still riding the subway seems intended to question whether it benefited anyone to prosecute Belfort. I felt more moral qualms about this approach after Wolf than I did after Hustle, but that doesn't mean Wolf is the worse film. It may just have been a cumulative effect after seeing the two so close together.

Wolf is minor Scorsese, however. There's a sense about it of Scorsese trying to prove to the world, or to himself, that he's still Martin Scorsese after all these years. With that comes a very deliberate sowing of wild oats and a relentless parade of nudity and drug humor, kind of like Kubrick at a like age staging orgies in Eyes Wide Shut. While it's consistently funny to see DiCaprio debase himself -- and to mock Titanic in an otherwise utterly gratuitous sea-disaster scene -- a little of Jonah Hill as Belfort's neighbor turned business partner and best friend goes a long, long way. I haven't seen much of Hill (and definitely wasn't impressed with him in Django Unchained) but he seems like another of today's gross exhibitionists who pass for comedians without being especially funny.And if DiCaprio is game -- and it helps that he looks more like a young Howard Hughes now than he did during The Aviator -- when he gets especially shrill in arguments with his wives I couldn't help imagining Ray Liotta in his place and finding the two interchangeable. Still, Wolf is funny often enough that I could stand its running time fairly easily. And lest I seem a killjoy myself for criticizing the amorality of this and American Hustle above, lets remember to cut comedy some slack. Comedy is often a fantasy of transgression, thrilling us as the comedians get away with things that we normally can't, or never get a chance to, and probably never should, until the punch line brings them back down to earth. In that sense, Wolf is a more comic film than Hustle, since Belfort actually falls after rising. And in that same sense, not only Wolf but Goodfellas and Casino are comedies -- and Wolf of Wall Street is definitely the funniest of the three.

On the Big Screen: HUGO (2011)

With an irony that will probably prove the project's undoing at the box office, Martin Scorsese has employed state-of-the-art cinema technology to celebrate the most primitive forms of special effects in his heartwarming infomercial for film preservation. Hugo is a film that will more likely find its audience on home video, as a TV perrennial or an oft-watched DVD. It's too intimate a children's film, if you even want to call it that, and too humanely paced to provide the constant spectacular agitation multiplex audiences seem to demand. Is it a children's film at all? I guess it is, since The Invention of Hugo Cabret is considered a children's or young-adult story. But where are all the one-liners, the insults, the slapstick, the potty humor, the pop-culture references? There are chase scenes and cliffhangers, but I wonder whether one guard chasing one boy on foot through a train station will stimulate young audiences as much as is usually thought necessary. In any event, Hugo is above categorization. Working in the classical style, Scorsese would not think of making a film only for children -- the little brats wouldn't get many of his homages anyway. I'm sure he'd like the kids to be dazzled by the magical cityscape of 1930s Paris, enthralled by the tunnels and clockwork of Hugo Cabret's world, fascinated by the pageantry of Georges Melies' pioneer moviemaking. But I have my doubts, which reflect more on American youth than on Martin Scorsese. He's made a charming, even heartwarming picture that pulses with his love for movie history, but in this latest autumn of Twilight that love will go mostly unrequited. But that only makes Hugo more poignant, since the tale of a movie artist losing his audience is the mystery and the heart of the show. The likely massive loss of money won't kill Scorsese's career, but the hunch that this film will flop only confirms its own message that such tragedies happen.

Hugo is a very old-fashioned tale of an orphan who maintains the clocks at a Paris train station in his uncle's absence while struggling to repair the title invention, a mechanical man his late father had been tinkering with before his death in a fire. Hugo's thefts of parts and tools from a bric-a-brac dealer with a shop at the station leads to his discovery of a closer connection between the dealer, "Papa Georges," and the mechanical man. He eventually learns that the old man is the long-forgotten, believed-dead Melies, the director of A Trip To the Moon and hundreds more fantasies of innovative trickery. The invention proves a McGuffin, as the real story becomes the effort to get the embittered old man to re-embrace his past and accept the collective embrace of early film buffs and historians -- to realize, one might say, that he had a wonderful life despite all his defeats.

So benign is Scorsese's vision this time that he gives us Christopher Lee as a perfectly benevolent bookseller -- and somehow I can imagine the great man hectoring the director about what Paris was really like back when he was a boy tourist -- Lee would have been close to Hugo's age at the time of the picture. Lee's presence at this late point in his career is always a plus, and here particularly his casting is yet another token of Scorsese's adoring cinemania. It's also typical of the peculiar casting and dialogue direction that renders Paris circa 1931 a colony of the British Empire. Even Sasha Baron Cohen, practically invited to turn his awkward security guard into a Clouseau homage, steers clear of anything resembling a French accent. His character takes us back to the good old tradition of comic bumbling cops, but Scorsese can't help humanizing him while milking his leg brace for politically-incorrect humor and ultimately redeeming him. Cohen's subplot is part of a not very convincing argument that World War I was to blame for Melies's decline as well as the guard's poor attitude and his obsession with catching orphans. This approach elevates Melies's rediscovery into a moment of national healing, represented by all our various eccentric characters partying together -- but the history of cinema argues against any claim that the Great War killed audiences' appetites for fantasy. The overstatement doesn't really hurt the film, however, since its real point is rediscovering a legacy that was lost, whatever the reason for the loss.

Along with Lee and Cohen, Ben Kingsley is predictably excellent as Papa Georges, and Asa Butterfield and Chloe Grace Moretz are very likable as the lead kids. Some of the character actors get relatively short shrift, as if Scorsese thought they'd keep our interest just by looking funny. The attention he pays to these characters without really giving them much to do slows and pads the film a bit, but the lesser characters are never on so long that they try our patience. Visually the production and cinematography are beautiful, but sometimes the 3-D only gets in the way. Scorsese puts the process through its paces and often achieves remarkable effects. But the stereoscape, as usual, eventually hits a CGI wall that flattens the illusion of reality. If Scorsese were still building massive sets like he did for Gangs of New York, or had been able to film on authentic locations, the 3-D would have been far more impressive. Instead, despite the tremendous efforts of Scorsese, Robert Richardson and Dante Ferretti, Paris still ends up looking like a video game sometimes, however attractive. That being said, Hugo is still easily one of the best 3-D movies of the current generation, and perhaps the best of them in pure movie terms. The more you like movies -- the more movies you like -- the more you'll like this one.

Conversations With Scorsese

Martin Scorsese's motormouthed enthusiasm for movies can be grating sometimes, but the man often has interesting observations to make. That makes Richard Schickel's new collection of conversations a promising volume: you get the observations in reasonable doses without the cartoonish voice. The book is a survey of Scorsese's career up to the surprise hit of Shutter Island (a public endorsement Schickel and to a lesser extent Scorsese himself find "astonishing"), bracketed by reflections on the director's upbringing and education and general comments on his techniques and artistic principles. Memories being what they are, and the earlier canonical works having been well gone over elsewhere, there's less talk about Taxi Driver or Goodfellas than about The Aviator and The Departed. This book is no substitute for a comprehensive artistic autobiography, and the nature of the format makes the book a hit-and-miss proposition, but it's an entertaining read.

With such a project the whole is inevitably less than the sum of its parts, but you probably read it for the flashes of insight (or their opposites) and the odd bits of trivia. You learn here, for instance, that Leonardo DiCaprio considered Out of the Past "the coolest film I've ever seen" when Scorsese screened it for him prior to The Departed. You also learn that Akira Kurosawa panned The Age of Innocence, complaining that "I do not like movies about romances" while chiding Scorsese for using too much music in his films. That news reminded me that I missed a discussion of Scorsese's career as a character actor, including his role as Vincent Van Gogh in Kurosawa's Dreams. The two directors clearly had some sort of artistic relationship that barely gets touched on here.

On his own work Scorsese is most interesting when most critical of himself. Shutter Island is clearly a touchy subject for him, especially since Schickel doesn't seem to have liked it. Scorsese was still smarting from a perceived betrayal by the studio that pushed the release date from Fall 2009 to February 2010, even though he has to admit that they must have had the right idea based on box office. Going back a few years, it seems that Scorsese still doesn't understand what went wrong with Gangs of New York. He tells Schickel that his dream project might have gone over better had he not run out of money while staging the New York Draft Riots. That sounds like a way to blame the money men for his own story problem. He could have filmed the riots with thousands of extras, but it would not have helped the picture as long as the riots remained irrelevant to the final showdown between DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis's gangs. The deeper flaw in the often-brilliant Gangs is its insistence on a hero implausibly innocent of bigotry in such a bigoted age, its option for a generic revenge storyline instead of something more challenging.

Taking a larger view, I was intrigued by Scorsese's acknowledgment that Bringing Out the Dead marked the end of something for him. I didn't think much of the 1999 film, but I'd agree that there remains something essentially Scorsesean about that project that's missing from his films of the new millennium. While he still clearly has a creative passion about the making of images, the passion often seems to have gone out of his stories, leaving them the work of a master craftsman, but without his signature drive. Shutter Island is probably his best film of this period, but it's Dennis Lehane's story, not Scorsese's. While the director says nothing to confirm my hunch, I still feel that he hasn't been the same since 1995, when the public rejected Casino because it seemed too much like Goodfellas, which was like saying you'd allow John Ford only one cavalry movie. The most interesting thing Scorsese says about Casino is that he considers Joe Pesci's death scene the most brutal thing he's ever shot, and doesn't want to do anything like that again.

By the end, I recognized kindred spirits in both Scorsese and Schickel. I mean that almost literally, since it's on page 356 when the following exchange occurs regarding a film I haven't yet seen. I could hardly express better the value of film beyond its aesthetic or literary merit as a mirror of its time and place in history.

Schickel: The artifacts of history in film are terribly important. I mean, the worst movie in the world will contain clues to how we lived, how we dressed, how we talked.

Scorsese: That is what I was pointing out in 1979. There was a film called The Creeping Terror, a silly sci-fi film shot in the Midwest. They got everybody in some town to act in it. So you actually saw the way people dressed. And you saw how they behaved in everyday life. They were 'acting,' but they really weren't. The plot was not the point. What was important to me was what it said about America, and about our culture. It was very moving.

And sometimes so is this book.

In Brief: SHUTTER ISLAND (2010)

It's been nearly two weeks since I saw the new Martin Scorsese film but I've had a hard time working up a review. In part that's because it's hard to describe without potentially spoiling the story, though by now I think everyone knows that at some point in the movie you're supposed to question the reality of what you're seeing, or at least the perspective through which you see it. It's based on a novel by Dennis Lehane, a cleverly conceived period piece that plays on our perception of period paranoia. It raises possibilities that keep you guessing all the way through, even after the film seems to settle on one particular version of events. Scorsese made a good choice directing this, since the psychological subjectivity in play is the best platform yet to ply his post-Casino trade. The public rejection of that film seems to have made it impossible for the director to make more films in his once-characteristic style, since Casino was condemned for being a do-over of Goodfellas. It was like telling John Ford he shouldn't make any more cavalry films, but Scorsese took the verdict to heart and resolved, after a Buddhist bildungsroman and some ambulance chasing, to become the new Michael Powell instead. The results of that transformation have been quite mixed. I like the visuals of Gangs of New York and the flamboyant performances despite its travesty of history. The Aviator had a few striking moments but overall left me asking "so?" The Departed is mostly effective but a cartoon compared to his classic films. Now at least Scorsese can let rip with lurid Fifties-ish gothic expressionism and cut loose from literal realism. At least I hope we're not meant to take anything we see literally. If reality is as one character describes it, in detail, towards the end, then it's one of the most ridiculous stories I've ever seen. But we don't have to take that person's word for it, however much the film hints or insists that we should. The nature of the tale lets us and Scorsese have it both ways. So there are beautiful, uncanny moments as well as a banal bit when Leo DiCaprio spreads his arms, gapes heavenward and yells, "NOOOOOO!!!!" in the middle of a Leave Her to Heaven homage. There are wonderful turns by Ben Kingsley and Max von Sydow, while Mark Ruffalo is largely wasted as DiCaprio's straight man. There are times when you think this is the American Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and times when you can imagine it as an informal sequel to Inglourious Basterds. So is it a kind of counter-history, an account of a crazy man, or of a crazy director? My answer: sure... Give it a shot sometime.