Robert DeNiro in a loud Hawaiian shirt makes his way through the VE Day crowd in the opening scene of Scorsese’s NEW YORK, NEW YORK (a film I feel the kids today don’t really know about).
We travel along with him, rising higher and higher. His turquoise chemise keeps him vaguely visible.
Up up up. He’s still in shot but it’s getting to be like a particularly tricky Where’s Wally?
Just when it looks like we’re going to lose sight of him completely in the festive throng —
— a helpful neon sign hoves into view and points him out.
it’s a delightful parallax illusion. In three-dimensional reality, the arrow isn’t pointing at DeNiro, but out of shot in the lower left somewhere, but in two-dimensional movie space, the devil-red arrow is aimed right at his oiled scalp.
The movie is a doomed dream — Scorsese wanted to blend Cassavetes’ psychological realism and improv with Vincente Minnelli’s stylised studio world. And I think there’s a fundamental mismatch. Musicals have to suspend their plots in order to freeze and enlarge a moment of emotion into a musical number. We can’t be worrying about the other characters while we’re enjoying a dance number, or we can enjoy a dance number while we’re worrying about the other characters.
Near the film’s end, Scorsese stages a spectacular show-stopper, an entire MGM musical condensed into one extended number. At least on my first viewing, I couldn’t get into it, much as I admired it, because I was anxious to learn what had become of DeNiro’s character (something of an SOB though he is). It didn’t bother me on repeat viewings because the question had been answered, but movie’s live or die commercially by their first-time audience’s reactions, and NYNY duly died, and that may be why. Execs eventually browbeat Scorsese into removing the number, and the film was rereleased without it and died all over again. Finally the number was reinstated.
Scorsese said he knew the film had some kind of length problem, all the scenes were necessary but if only they could have somehow combined a few…? I don’t know if it’s a length issue. Maybe it’s a tone issue. Maybe the violent, ugly emotions and the vivid colours and theatrical effects work on different, incompatible pleasure centres of the aesthetic sense. Or maybe it just needed a few more crazy touches like the above to keep the romance going in between bursts of psychological angst.
It may or may not work but I’m sure glad it exists.
I was determined to see KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON the very day it opened — we ended up being a day later and indeed the screening went past midnight so we finished watching it two days late. But Friday was a fairly big day at work so it was unavoidable.
Some modest spoilers ahead. Depends how much you like to know in advance.
The film seems to me a masterpiece. Fiona and I exchanged many glances in the darkness of the Vue Ocean Terminal’s Screen 2. Moments so strong they had to be acknowledged. And one shocking image made Fiona gasp aloud.
Also — there are intertitles! But as I don’t have a copy of the film I can’t reproduce them for you. They are unique to the film, mostly, although those in a newsreel of the Tulsa race massacre may be of the period. Of course the movie’s intertitles are in an authentic Academy ratio.
The film’s sense of period is near-flawless and pervasive. The late Robbie Robertson’s score — the film may be the most heavily-scored Scorsese film ever — nimbly keeps one foot in the 1920s and one in the here and now. I think the frequent use of the word “pregnant” was the only thing I even questioned. At the dinner table, it seems likely that people in the ‘twenties would prefer to say “expecting.” In the talkies, the word “pregnant” would be verboten, so I suspect it would have seemed slightly clinical, slightly rude.
The script is by Eric Roth & Scorsese, from David Grann’s book. I was thinking I hadn’t seen a Scorsese writing credit for a long time, but in fact his name was on SILENCE. Before that, though, you have to go back to CASINO. His name is on lots of documentaries, but I give Kent Jones credit for most of those. I do think the films on which Scorsese is a credited writer tend to be those he’s most fully engaged with… one might have to make an exception for TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL… but in his memoir Final Cut United Artists exec Stephen Bach credits the final draft of the script to Scorsese and DeNiro.
Roth wrote FORREST GUMP, a film I loathed, and a bunch of other things like the new DUNE and THE INSIDER and MUNICH and BENJAMIN BUTTON that I don’t like either. But based on this film, I have to give Roth his due. Excellent work, elevated by the handling.
In KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON there remain traces of that tendency to look for opportunities to soften a very dark character — DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart, an objectively bad fellow. Everything he does is bad, or can be interpreted as bad. The movie attempts to suggest that some of his bad acts might be open to more favourable readings, that sometimes he was not fully aware of what was going on, etc. In this case, it works for the movie. If Burkhart is totally unredeemed, you have a GASLIGHT/SUSPICION (if we assume Cary Grant’s guilty) type of movie which could only be told with Molly (the magnificent Lily Gladstone) as the absolute reigning main character, therefore a film not about white guilt and one that ought to have an Indigenous American director. As a film about white guilt, white corruption, toxic masculinity, it’s a highly suitable subject for Scorsese.
The curious result is one of the most complex lead characters in any Scorsese film, embodied in a somewhat limited performance — Scorsese’s cinema thrives on psychological contradictions, and Burkhart is fully compartmentalized — his left hand doesn’t know what his right is doing, but it also doesn’t know what IT is doing — he’s “a dumb boy” as Brendan Fraser’s showboating lawyer says, and also in deep denial, and we have to accept that he loves his wife even as he’s killing her relatives AND killing her.
Scorsese and Roth have decided the love story is genuine, which presents difficulties since everything Burkhart does seems to contradict this. So they have him simply ASSERT his love for her, multiple times, which usually inclines one more to doubt a character than believe them. But in odd moments DiCaprio manages to suggest that Burkhart has, somewhere inside him, a love that is true. In his reaction to the bombing aftermath, DiCaprio is brilliant — he seems astonished by something he absolutely knew was going to happen, and properly puzzled by his own surprise. Does not compute. Elsewhere, his baffled scowl is a bit overdone. A berk at heart, it’s surprising Burkhart holds out under questioning for even an hour.
A central problem in Scorsese’s films is Why do these smart women go for these toxic men? In fairness to him, it’s a central problem of the world, too. LaMotta, Henry Hill, and Jimmy Doyle in NEW YORK, NEW YORK are so obviously problematic we are forced to wonder. Is it credible that Travis Bickle should even get so far as to have one incredibly bad date with Betsy? But one answer is available — in the world of these films, choices of male companionship are very limited.
The setting here is more rustic than we associate with this director, who likes westerns but doesn’t much care for horses. The production designer is Jack Fisk, who did DAYS OF HEAVEN (and who is the Man in the Planet in ERASERHEAD) — the Masonic Lodge spanking scene is the best room we’re likely to see in a movie this year. And this is a countryside that’s had the city scattered over it, Pierce Arrows instead of horse-and-buggies. It’s just a very big city with greater distances between everything, and those distances are occupied by photogenic scenery.
This is a very very very good film. Like THE IRISHMAN it’s long and engrossing. It’s also fancier — THE IRISHMAN is some kind of strange epic chamber piece. The stylistic flourishes we associate with this director are back in force — the God’s-eye-view overhead shots; moments of swirling Steadicam; aggressive zip pans (but sparingly used); drone shots that approach and then stop dead, unnaturally.
Then there’s the welcome return of the redundancy joke from WHAT’S A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU DOING IN A PLACE LIKE THIS? “My friends always say to me XYZ.” Cut to a friend, labelled “a friend” by a helpful subtitle, who then says “XYZ.” He does it again here. “I always admired his ambition. I told him so, and the thanked me.” FLASHBACK: “You know, I’ve always admired your ambition.” “Thanks.”
Those aerial views first showed up in TAXI DRIVER — hard to find the spiritual dimension in that film, but the ceiling track post-bloodbath does feel like an out-of-body experience. They recur intermittently in Scorsese films, leaping whole decades — LAST TEMPTATION has lots. They attach to images which have a kind of ceremonial quality, though sometimes it’s merely the ceremony of paperwork. (“All this,” gestures Travis, “means nothing.”) But sometimes, as in Hitchcock, it really is the viewpoint of a purely hypothetical deity who remains, in terms of Their attitude, completely opaque.
And the spiritual dimension — the approach of death is vividly rendered in maybe-hallucinatory images — adds a touch of the sublime and numinous to a gritty, troubling narrative of all-too-earthly greed and brutality.
We’d just knocked another video essay on the head, but it got up again, so we’ve knocked it on the head AGAIN.
By the end of this month I should have disposed of two more video essays and will have some viewing/blogging time, I hope. Unless another video essay job lands on my desk, which wouldn’t be bad exactly.
I’ve also been delivering a series of screenwriting lectures at Edinburgh College of Art. Here’s a sample:
Structure is considered of essential importance in a script, but there’s not a lot of agreement about what it is.
Nor do you see much curiosity in the screenwriting manuals about why structure is supposedly so important in screenplays. William Goldman says “Screenplays are structure,” a peculiarly useless dictum, and leaves it at that.
I think structure is important in all narrative forms, but more so in plays and films because they’re designed to be consumed at one sitting. A novel can be looser because you usually read it over several days, and many of the very greatest novels are very loose, in some respects.
To learn about screenwriting, I recommend first watching films with a curious and analytic mind, then reading short stories, then reading and watching plays. Sergei Eisenstein felt that movies, even long movies, are more like short stories than novels or plays. I agree with Sergei.
Most short stories are designed to be read in a single sitting. They simplify – they tend to be about ONE THING. You get to the end not long after you’ve started and so you can immediately look back on the whole thing and see if it hangs together, if it makes sense, if it contains unnecessary irrelevant material, if it produces a feeling of satisfaction.
I’m still sympathetic to filmmakers who don’t think in terms of an act structure. Scorsese is right to say that acts don’t actually exist in a film — no curtain descends after the first half hour. Films are made of sequences, he says, and you can have as many as you like. This is true. Kristin Thompson, analysing the pacing of many Hollywood movies, did however detect accelerations and decelerations roughly dividing features into four — we could call them four acts, or three with the big turning point in the middle of act two. And I think that whatever Scorsese says, he’s somewhat stuck with the fact that his films start and finish, and there’s something in the middle called the middle, which we could also call the second act.
Of course, you can disguise the shifts from one to the other, or you can ignore them, or you can highlight them.
He’s fondly quoted Roger Corman’s advice: you need a good beginning because the public wants to know what it’s all about, and you need a good ending because they want to know how it turned out. Nothing in between really matters. He calls this the best sense he ever heard in the business. It’s also very good news, because we all get lost in the second act and have to muddle our way through.
You can do this by following the truth of the characters and the logic of the story and the shape the sequences want to follow, but if you bog down, then some general principles can, I think, be helpful — a turning point in the middle to re-energize things, a sense of the doors locking at the end of the second act, wherein the characters no longer have the option of walking away from the problem and leaving it unresolved.
Anyway, this is the sort of stuff I come out with in my lectures — discussing the specific problems of a specific story always seems more helpful and less windy, but an awareness of guidelines developed by previous generations can be somewhat helpful…
shadowplay 