A Very Serious 🧐 Study of Martin Scorsese’s Late-Late Period

it's common wisdom that you should make every film as though it's your last say everything you have to say and if you're fortunate enough to make another film then say it again a new way and the result of this Mantra is a repetition of form and theme that generally makes up a director's entire body of work think U and the notion of painting the same Rose over and over I think it's safe to say that Martin soresi has followed this wisdom so much so that you could probably pick any film of his at random from the 70s through now and find it to just as comprehensive ly embody all of his primary thematic interests and speak for itself were it to have actually been his last film of course the lowest hanging fruits sces detractors like to regurgitate is that he only makes gangster films and while a cursory glance at his movies would show just how wrong this is for so many reasons it is of course true that his work all revolves around the same themes of theology moral rot American idealism and man's own undoing but while he tends to Circle these same themes in all of his narrative work like any other he's managed to frequently reinvent himself all the way through his latest Killers of the flower Moon and I believe this film is the skeleton key to understanding the period of his work that's blossomed out of a fruitful late career and into a fully Bonafide late late career the fact that he's constantly Reinventing and evolving himself doesn't contradict the simultaneous fact that his work has long relished in a small handful of go-to approaches and having cemented such a strong and consistent framework he's actually developed a base model from which he's been able to Branch off and Vary with each new film to offer a very reductive taxonomy I like to group his films into two broad categories the first group I'll just call the epics the sprawling rise and fall framework that people probably most associate with him this is your Good Fellas your Casino keeping in the tradition of Citizen Cane or Barry Lyon or Scarface and in the case of his late late films this would include the Irishman it's the framework people are typically referring to when they describe his gangster film considering they also tend to lump movies like Raging Bull and The Aviator and Wolf of Wall Street into that group despite having nothing to do with gangsters that's not to say he portrays operations in his non- gangster films dissimilarly to that of organized crime in the case of Wolf of Wall Street it actually is still organized crime but gangster film is still a reductive moniker that ignores a lot of the other things he's doing within this framework and then he has a much more focused framework which I'll call the cerebral films narrowly isolating an individual on a gradual but constant descent into madness or just sheer Brokenness this would be Taxi Driver after hours Cape Fear shudder Island and again of the latest Trio silence interestingly enough there's a direct correlation between these two camps between what's his more biographical work and what's purely fiction and he's made a habit throughout his career of zigzagging between these bombastic romps and more spiritual pensive meditations refusing to pigeonhole himself and changing course at no discernable risk rhm but with the benefit of hindsight letting us view his filmography in the macro we can identify these repeating patterns however sporadically they land on a timeline so maybe instead of painting the same Rose over and over he likes to toggle between painting a hybrid t- rose and a new donrose depending on what a given project calls for and again this is specifically his narrative feature directorial efforts this is to say nothing of his documentaries his roles as a producer or his efforts in film preservation which all far exceed the scope of this video in keeping with the rose metaphor those would be geraniums and sunflowers and orchids things we don't necessarily have to consider right now anyway these qualities have remained true of his narrative work more or less from the beginning up until now with little digression but there are still these clear period distinctions Mean Streets which also happens to be his first work with Robert dairo marked a pretty clear crossing of the threshold from a lukewarm beginning into the main body of his career you could probably break this body up even further but I tend to think of it as one long midcareer and I think the start of his collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio is as fitting a moment as any to Mark the start of his late career book ended by Wolf of Wall Street that movie illustrates pretty comprehensively the difference between this late career and his mid-career work operating essentially as a new metal Goodfellas it doesn't just match the coked up stamina of his younger self but far surpasses it to keep up with a newer generation with an even shorter attention span if our only metric of authority where how many college students you can sweep up in the world of your film and cause to wrongly idolize its characters and I would argue that this is a legitimate metric then by all accounts wolf is one of the great late period efforts from an American filmmaker and I think the fact that we're now looking at the first collaboration he's done with Leo since that now decade old film not only feels Monumental as it unites his two biggest Repertory players for the first time but it also allows us to see how much Scorsese continued to grow and Advance his VOC vocabulary even within this even later period the most immediate difference I'd identify between these recent films and his earlier work is that Beyond just speaking for themselves as representative examples of his go-to themes there's a new urgency to explicitly weave goodbyes into each film to dot his eyes and cross his teas it's no secret that he's been thinking about death for quite some time now he very well may have many years and many films left in him 8081 is far from an assured expiration date but but he's been the first to admit where so many of his thoughts have led him recently he's addressed these thoughts at various recent press junkets in the most sensitive and emotionally candid manner in particular I'm thinking about the mortally raw moment he describes in his recent GQ interview in which he ran into an old friend on the street and embraced for 10 minutes before parting ways he describes how these interactions have become more frequent in his life and how having done this with now one more friend he can further narrow down his goodbyes and have peace of mind in one more aspect of his life I think this is exactly what he's been doing with his recent movies which have consisted of tackling one of his lifelong white whales a one last ride with many of his closest friends and a reflection on his own limitations as an artist and the worth these bells and whistles really have but it's not just project selection that's defined to this period for him as I mentioned he is constantly evolving taking these projects that seemingly slot in perfectly with his prior work and completely reconfiguring his perspective where Wolf of Wall Street recaptures the exuberance of Good Fellas for a new generation the Irishman does the total opposite flipping the vibrant lived in Worlds of those older two movies for total pasti and more importantly slow and agonizing Devastation this is largely to express the flimsy nature of memory in the Twilight of one's ears but also to Showcase how out of touch our perspective character is while the characters of Goodfellas in casino and Wolf of Wall Street are no strangers to mental gymnastics their respective movies operate entirely within their warped perspectives blinded by greed and riches and what have you as their lives fall apart we the audience can identify what's wrong with them and what exactly is brought upon their downfall but the movies themselves commit fully to the character's heads space including their self- delusions this has long been the source of misguided claims that sesi romanticizes these worlds with his films he does but he has good reason to and as critical thinkers he expects us to meet him halfway and understand what that reason is with the Irishman though we don't just witness the Fall From Grace in brutally lethargic time but here the fall coincides with sesi stepping out of the character's heads space a little bit and entering a more removed perspective in direct contrast to the ironic ending of Wolf of Wall Street where Jordan Belford's complete mental preservation is the point of the film satire as the Irishman moves along sces slowly steps away from Frank Sheran until we see nothing more than the ramblings of a small delusional man completely isolated from the people around him in other words the movie eventually stops romanticizing ing the life it portrays and begins to soberly showcase a man who romanticizes his own life but I do see it on some level as acknowledging and directly calling out the generations of people who have idolized these worlds the Jordan Belfor Henry Hill wannabes and showing them just how out of touch they are this all makes for a perfect stepping stone to killers of the flower Moon which I went into expecting something more of the kundun Last Temptation Of Christ Camp than the Epic rise and fall genre but of his two prior films it certainly leans more the Irish than silence the only difference is that there's never really a high point to the rise we enter this story already at a point of dilapidation as the characters tried desperately to cling to their prior wealth and only slip further and further the result of stepping back and showing these characters outside of their own head space not objective but a different kind of subjective is that scasi seems to have shifted his moral Target a little bit after a rich history of inditing greed and active knowing malice which necessitated he show us the riches of these worlds he's now focused on passivity and complacency which both Frank Sheeran and Ernest Burkhart are Paragons of in other words he's spent his whole career diagnosing the source of evil but he spent these final chapters exploring how that evil is propagated which I'd argue is much more vital to his prognosis of the American condition he understands that it's not just a few bad powerful eggs you can point to even if that's where it starts the real muscle is in the Thousand tiny Cuts enacted by a massive often oblivious population and it's that population where sesis finally landed his scope there's a very clear one-o-one relationship you can draw between hail and buffalino as authorities of imperialistic systems Sheeran and Burkhart as the unthinking agents acting in pursuit of the most basic dangling carrot and haa and Molly is Paragons of subjugated populations be it the American working class or Native Americans who become the recipients of our lead characters betrayal the main difference between these past two is that where the Irishman Zooms in on one key moment of betrayal which we can then extrapolate universality from burkart's betrayal operates entirely by way of those thousand tiny cuts the Irishman spends three hours showing Sheran in various relationships getting us to believe that the only person he's ever really cared about is Jimmy haa and then at the drop of a hat he puts two bullets in his head and bottles up any feelings he may have had for the guy which increasingly appears to be none at all this scene is the Lynch pin of the entire movie and killers of the flower Moon follows It Up by essentially spending its whole runtime just repeating it over and over every killing is the same kind of betrayal and while they don't carry the same emotional gravity because we don't get the same extent of leg work put into these relationships the repetition and ubiquity of these killings demonstrates their universality and history repeating itself the lack of gravity is the point as the people burkhart's killing aren't so much people he has much relationship with but are all extensions of Molly and represent the Thousand tiny cuts and they're made even more Passive by the fact that he frequently hires other people to do the killing it's this obfuscation and dampening of evil that the system is dependent on and the romance this all revolves around is even by Design not very potent despite many attempts to paint this movie as really a twisted love story at its core burkart like Sheeran lacks the mental capacity to truly love someone both traumatized War veterans a long-term fascination of scesis they've had to compartmentalize their emotions and cons seemingly only pantomim real human behavior which becomes immediately exploitable B only begins to believe he loves Molly once hail plants the seed that they should get together a purely tactical move and without even realizing he's being influenced he essentially goes well [ __ ] you're right I I guess I do love her their relationship is so clearly from the start a piece of systematic puppeteering but burkart is completely unable to look Inward and realize this so their relationship as a whole Becomes emblematic of burkart's inability to realize the role he plays in the broader system to zoom back out a little bit this key difference in his late late work reveals the cesi narrative to be one of perspective probably above all else this is the buzzword that follows him like a plague the reason for such contention regarding his Romanticism it's the reason behind his unreliable narrators or dueling narrators or triple dueling narrators it's even the reason he's dug himself into the Marvel hole not on a crusade against comic book movies in and of themselves but against movies made by committee which represent sheer statistics and demographics and no real perspec effective it's the reason he looks back with mild disdain at works like shudder island or Gangs of New York famously victims of Studio meddling despite his best and often successful efforts to inject as much American Mythos into these popcorn flicks as he does his more personal films and after shifting perspectives across the back half of the Irishman it seems perspective itself has become the broader through line of his latest work the drastic changes killers of the flower Moon underwent throughout its pre-production are well documented and it's not unlike squ a to completely chop up and restructure a source material for a variety of good reasons but the leading Factor here was specifically a conflict of perspective causing him to reshuffle the principal characters around and center the oage a little more thoroughly rather than following an outsider looking in granted he trades one Outsider for another as we follow burkart instead of Tom white this is by no means a film from the perspective of the oage but unlike sese's previous work it's not from the perspective of the perpetrators either or attempting to Revel in their mindset it's not from the perspective of the oage because it can't be from the perspective of the oage or as long as this is on Martin sesy picture from the perspective of anyone but Martin sesy and that's essentially the conclusion the film comes to as sesy himself steps out and MC's a bastardized Jed G Hoover sponsored Radio Show in which he reduces his entire cinematic vocabulary down to a few hokey Foley gimmicks and parlor tricks the film then above all else is a about an artist figuring out in real time how to handle the material he's working with for this reason I'm sympathetic to the notion that aour theory has overshadowed the subject matter a little bit here I don't think it's necessarily A film's obligation to serve a humanitarian purpose or Inspire practice but I understand considering the sensitivity of these still very recent events and the express permissions he sought to tell this story that using it in some capacity as a vehicle for his own personal exploration is maybe a little dis ingenuous after all he's even spitballed a future project about Jesus in which he would play yet another role himself burrowing even deeper into this apparent late late career existential introspection to offer up some introspection of my own I'm sure part of the blame falls on me the reviewer for buying so thoroughly into alur Theory and any attempt to rigidly classify an artist as an effable es soresi into the neat convenient periods is a Fool's errand we're talking about a man who focuses primarily on Raw emotional expression and only decides on technique and structure from there there's no scientific method for what's so largely a spiritual journey and I sometimes hate that I default to such clinical terminology and worse to do this is to effectively miss the tree for the forest to get so caught up in macro through lines that I ignore how rich the specific material at hand is taking the great man history approach to cinema not only ignores the efforts of his frequent collaborators F maun maker Rodrigo prietto Robbie Robertson but also the many oage artists who worked on this film not just ensuring that the Mis onen brought their culture to life on screen but that the specifics of this event the collective trauma they still experience and the political ramifications that have prevented them from telling this story on a wide scale for so long were all honored the shift from scorsese's more pointed indictments to targeting obfuscation itself which I've identified as a crucial development for him would not have been possible without these Authorities on the matter having such an essential role in the film's DNA it's certainly not for me to say if the film is Rich enough in engaging with the plight of the O AG nor is it for Scorsese to say but it seems he's at least trying to step outside of himself so the great Paradox of this film is that it does in fact cement itself as one person's perspective the epilog makes this fact undeniable but the voice of that perspective is explicitly asking us to listen to other voices essentially performing an aoristic self-destruct this is not the idea of film by commit I was talking about with Marvel this is still inherently a curated set of voices in pursuit of a specific perspective and expression but soresi is unwittingly at the source of it and all he can do is push the boundaries of this barrier of self while coming to terms with the fact that he can never fully break out of it this sounds like a bit of ego death but it's apparently been the most clarifying and liberating thing for him claiming that the whole world has opened up to him now actual tangible knowledge of oneself is an unattainable goal but with killers of the flower Moon as with every film before it he inches infinitesimally closer thank you for watching and goodbye

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

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Id: RMtSoTFGIOA

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 17 2023