Raging Bull

Raging Bull (1980) is probably the most overrated movie of the last 50 years, from probably the most overrated director, Martin Scorsese. Admittedly, I’m a biased reviewer. (Who isn’t?) I don’t usually respond to movies about boxing, and in the last few years I’ve developed a real antipathy for films that are about men and men only, with only marginal roles for women in them. (When half of the population is women, and when there are so many good women who act, why are movies so man-centric?) That’s probably why the only thing I liked about Raging Bull was Cathy Moriarty’s performance. She plays the wife of the film’s subject, boxing legend Jake LaMotta, who’s played by Robert De Niro.

Movie-lovers often bemoan the fact that Robert Redford’s suburban-family-coming-apart-at-the-seams drama Ordinary People won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1980, beating the obviously artistically superior Raging Bull. I’ve bit my tongue until now because I hadn’t bothered to watch Raging Bull. Now that I have—an endurance test if ever there was one—I remain securely tethered to team Ordinary People, even if Raging Bull is cinematically superior. It’s incredibly well-made, technically speaking. The stark, naturalistic black-and-white camera-work and the editing are truly masterful.

But the film’s technical achievements do not change the fact that its subject matter and its execution are monumentally unsatisfying and truly disturbing. This is a film about the emptiness of a New York prizefighter who’s consumed with jealousy and reduced entirely to his physical powers in the boxing ring. He’s a piece of meat. There’s no depth to De Niro’s characterization. Pauline Kael (I’ve never been so happy to be in agreement with her on a movie) put it best when she argued in her review that Raging Bull is looking back to the films of Brando and Coppola, trying to top them. Movies that scratch and claw their way to greatness can sometimes be fascinating—especially if they fail—but Raging Bull’s quest for greatness works against it.

Beneath all the showy cinematography and the showy acting of Robert De Niro, there’s very little humanity. Critics have repeatedly used this argument against De Niro (most recently for The Wolf of Wall Street), but not necessarily for Raging Bull, perhaps because they’re convinced by its technical style and De Niro’s macho machinations that the film is a brilliant piece of art. What Martin Scorsese achieves is a really well-made film about terrible people, but the film’s seriousness and its grandiosity make it seem like we should find these people interesting, or redeeming, or worth our time in some way. But that’s not true about any of them except for Jake LaMotta’s wife, whom he beats up on, accuses of infidelity, and then woos back with sweet nothings in a constant vicious cycle. Watching self-destructive men beat up on their women just isn’t that gratifying, especially when the women don’t get to fight back much. (There is one scene where Moriarty stands up to him, but he socks her in the face, and not long after, she’s back with him and all is apparently forgiven. She does eventually leave him, but years later, and the dramatic effect of the act is underwhelming.)

Joe Pesci, as Jake’s brother and manager, is admittedly very good in his role. But like De Niro’s performance, the acting he does turns into a tired, repetitive schtick. He, just like LaMotta’s long-suffering wife, seems always to be coming back to his brother even when Jake abuses him physically and accuses Pesci of sleeping with his wife. (Jake LaMotta’s mood ring is a constant volcanic red, and his absurd jealousy becomes tiresome, maddening and eventually infuriating.) I don’t want to make definitive statements about movies, but in this case, I really do not have any desire to see a movie about these kinds of characters. (And again, boxing.)

Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

How many movies has Martin Scorsese made that were about women? The only one that stands out is Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), starring Ellen Burstyn, whose performance is equal parts tender, histrionic, fraught, and courageous. She plays Alice Hyatt, a thirty-five year old housewife living in New Mexico. When Alice's husband dies in a work-related accident, she and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter, who gives a delightfully cheeky performance) pack up and head for Monterrey, California. They're forced to make extended stops in Arizona in order for Alice to scrounge up enough money to get them to Monterrey, so she finds work as a lounge singer and a waitress.

There's a beautiful scene at the beginning of the movie where Alice sings and plays the Rodgers and Hart song "Where or When," and Scorsese lets us savor it. He cuts away as she's finishing, and we see her 12-year-old son pacing outside, feeling his own version of uncertainty while his mother dusts off her old talents. A few minutes later, another one: Alice and her neighbor/best friend Bea (Lelia Goldoni) tearfully part ways, and Bea cries, "Who's gonna make me laugh?" With very few words, this scene gets at the strong bond between these two women, whose feet have walked on virtually the same ground for all their lives. You feel a sense of compassion in this movie for its characters that just doesn't exist much anymore.

Alice has an easy, un-self-important quality to it. One of the problems with much of Martin Scorsese's work is that he's trying to top some other great film. Goodfellas was his attempt to top The Godfather, and most of Scorsese's recent efforts have seen the director once again striving for greatness in a very calculated way. But his earlier work doesn't have that quality. Even Taxi Driver, which I don't have any real affection for, is above that kind of posturing. Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore works because it's about people and relationships. It's not "the women's lib picture," as though there could be only one and it had to be done by a man and it had to be great and it had to be Scorsese. These "women's lib pictures" represent a short-lived burst of activity on the subject. Nowadays, women have gone back to being the boring love interests and sub-important characters. But in the early to mid 70s, there were a few movies that were actually about women. And some of them may have been too generalized (as though there could only be one way to experience the world as a woman), but it was wonderful to see good movie roles for actresses.

When Alice moans, "I don't know how to live without a man," she's voicing the other side of the women's lib movement. She's spent much of the film crying herself into jobs and out of them, but her wise co-worker and chum (Diane Ladd) talks some sense into her. She's been in Alice's shoes already, and managed to walk her own path. Ladd makes a strong impression as the head waitress of a mom-and-pop restaurant where Alice finds a job. She's absolutely wonderful, embodying the brash personality of one of those blowsy talking flowers in Alice in Wonderland. Her big blonde beehive (which Jennifer Lawrence must have been imitating in American Hustle) looks like a giant dollop of cream: She's a tough, sweet gardenia with a strict no-bullshit policy.

Ellen Burstyn cries a lot in this movie, often in short but turbulent bursts. Sometimes it seems like Scorsese and screenwriter Robert Getchell thinking that's the only way a woman can accomplish anything: she must burst into tears to elicit a man's sympathy. And yet there's something real in her blubbering. It's messy and untempered. Burstyn has the looks of an accomplished actress, but she doesn't let herself rely too much on acting chops. She's all over the place in a good way, and she's got the look down pat: the scarves in her hair blowing in the wind as she and her son trek down the Arizona highway. Her son often seems unaffected by his mother's chaotic world, yet we see glimpses of their complex relationship that make it seem much more real than the garden variety sitcom-level familiarity present in most comedy-dramas. The chemistry between Burstyn and Lutter works: they play off each other nicely, and they switch from clownish pranks and smart-ass banter to genuine mother-son affection with surprising ease.

With Kris Kristofferson as Alice's laid-back, cowboyish boyfriend, Harvey Keitel as an early love interest with a scary temper, Jodie Foster, and Valerie Curtin.

The Wolf of Wall Street

A strange mixture of brilliant and repulsive. You don't so much see The Wolf of Wall Street as you experience it. It's like looking into the heart of decay, only it's encrusted with jewels and wrapped in money. I had the same problem last year with Killer Joe. It was one heck of a movie, but I felt ashamed to even admit that I liked it. Is it wrong to enjoy depravity on the big screen? Even a little? Is it a sign of our own moral corruption that we might award accolades to a movie like director Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, which some have dared to call a great film? Mike LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, "Though Raging Bull must still go down as Martin Scorsese's greatest achievement, The Wolf of Wall Street makes the race for No. 2 a lot more interesting." Robert Kojder of the website What Culture concludes, "It's impossible not to become absolutely immersed."

Perhaps J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader sums it up best: "Scorsese's helpless attraction to the very behavior he wants to indict becomes the movie's serrated edge." (All of these quotes were accessed via Rotten Tomatoes. It wasn't exactly an arduous task.) The critics don't all agree of course. Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal didn't like it, and neither did Stephanie Zacharek of Village Voice, calling the film "too much of a bad thing."

I find myself in a weird middle ground. I don't feel that The Wolf of Wall Street is a great film that will forever be remembered in the annals of American cinema. (Then again, it might be.) But I also didn't hate it. I very much enjoyed the movie, and was rarely if ever bored (which is saying a lot because it's three hours long and I usually get restless after two). I'm fascinated by people who think wealth and stuff will make them happy, perhaps because I have to fight this belief myself sometimes. (Don't we all?) There must be an element of schadenfreude at work here: I'm glued to the screen for three hours watching a heartless S.O.B. steal from lower-middle-class schlubs, abuse Quaaludes like they're going off the market (oh, wait, they already were!), take Penicillin shots every time he sleeps with a prostitute, and treat his family like pawns in his narcissistic little game, and all the while I'm hoping for the big payoff: the fall. That's the appeal of movies: they rise up, and then they fall, and it's a glorious smashing effect full of broken shards of glass and bloody palms and dust settling over the fallen anti-hero's decadent, decaying corpse.

Here's the gist of the plot: Leonardo DiCaprio plays Jordan Belfort, a slick New Yorker with dollar signs in his eyes who starts a successful stock trading company from the ground up. Jordan is ever the slick salesman (a character trait that recurs throughout DiCaprio's oeuvre), and he turns the penny-stock-trading schmucks who work for him into first-class brokers who could make a man buy his own pen from them. Belfort's schemes aren't exactly legal, which gets him in trouble with the SEC and the FBI. And along the way, Belfort becomes addicted to drugs, sex, and the overall celebration of excess. What's a guy to do when he has so much money that transferring it to a Swiss bank account takes six separate trips for five separate people with stacks of bills taped to their bodies?

So basically, it's an ultimate American success story. In America, if you really want to, you can do this. And Jordan Belfort did and got caught, but then he served his measly 22 months and became a motivational speaker and wrote two books. (The script by Terence Winter is based on one of them, of the same name.)

But we're in it for the fall. And boy does Jordan Belfort fall! When leads his considerable staff in some kind of tribal chant (taught him by his mentor, who's played by Matthew McConaughey, in a cameo appearance), where they beat their chests and hum this creepy guttural mantra. It's a money-lover's war chant, and it takes this whole money-laundering thing into an almost prehistoric realm: We haven't changed, but the stuff we chase after has. And the toys are shinier and more expensive. (And those Quaaludes, man! Oh the Quaaludes!)

There's not much more to say about this movie. It's incredibly well-made and it really is brilliant in a sick sort of way. But you've been warned: it's like staring at death, or perhaps a mirror (if you want to take Belfort as an exaggeration of every person that ever valued stuff too much). And there are a lot of scenes depicting drug abuse and sex. So bear that in mind before you head to the theater. With Jonah Hill (whose character I genuinely loathed), Margot Robbie, Kyle Chandler, Rob Reiner, Jon Bernthal, Jon Favreau, Jean Dujardin (who gives a memorable performance as the president of a Swiss bank), Cristin Milioti, and Christine Ebersole. ★★★

Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro as a cabbie who's so disgusted with New York City he develops an inflated sense of his own moral superiority to the grimy, sleazy underbelly of the Big Apple. Taxi Driver (1976) is director Martin Scorcese's paean to violence, or something like that. If you trace the radical change in movies that began around the time of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), you can pretty much tell that Taxi Driver is the ne plus ultra of that evolution, sort of a domestic Apocalypse Now (1979), but less inflated.

However, Taxi Driver never tries to be anything it isn't. It's about a man with a deluded one-track mind. He wants to find his niche in the world, but can't. He's got a charming arrogance that only temporarily hides his social ineptitude. When he introduces himself to a political campaign organizer (Cybill Shepard), he's remarkably sure of himself. But then he blows it by taking her to a porno movie, and acts completely shocked, dumbfounded even, when she's appalled and wants to break the date. And you believe that he generally didn't think it through that a dirty movie isn't her idea of a good time. Somehow De Niro makes you believe that.

As garishly unappealing as Taxi Driver can be, it also has a luridly intoxicating flow to it. You feel as if you're floating through the movie right alongside De Niro. His cab is a "vehicle" by which we experience his disgust with a capital D. He can't seem to get his life in order, and the sleaze he sees, which he deliberately ensconces himself in, helps him distance himself from his own problems. Like most serial killers, he would rather blame the world for his shit than get his shit together.

The 1970s ushered in a lot of violent movies, and thus a lot of talk from filmmakers, studio executives, critics, the media, and audience members, about the impact of violence on viewers. The violent scenes in Taxi Driver, as unpleasant as they are, transform the main character into a local hero who rescues the kid prostitute from her swarthy pimp. Is heroic violence that glorifies violence still bad? Is violence bad? It's certainly a reality in the world in which we live.

The script is by Paul Schrader, who showed an even deeper proclivity for sleaze in the George C. Scott drama Hardcore (1979). Jodie Foster co-stars as a very young hooker. Harvey Kietel plays her vile pimp, who shows a true virtuosity at being a complete sleazebag. Albert Brooks plays the nerdy political aide who's hot for Cybill Shepard but unwilling to break the professional veil of xerox machines and political rallies and business meetings.

Shutter Island

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Somehow I missed seeing Shutter Island in theaters, where it must have been all the more exciting to experience. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a marshal who journeys, by ferry, to a foreboding island off the New England coast, called Shutter Island. On it is an ominous facility that functions as a lunatic asylum, run by the calm, collected, and creepy Dr. Cawley (played with stiff, serene menace by Ben Kingsley). DiCaprio, along with his partner (Mark Ruffalo), has come to help locate an escaped patient. The people on Shutter Island are totally deranged, so it's a dangerous situation. Director Martin Scorsese is intent on keeping you on edge from start to finish. However, I found myself almost completely relaxed. I enjoyed the plot and how it unraveled, and there were suspenseful moments, but there wasn't the unbearable tension and anticipation you might expect from a movie like this. At least, I didn't feel it.

Perhaps it's because from the word go I was expecting some kind of bizarre, shocking plot twist. We've--audiences--been conditioned to expect such things. I think modern audiences can look back to The Sixth Sense as the moment we were so embarrassingly (or pleasurably?) fooled by a movie. Of course, it's been done dozens of times before, but in recent movie memory that is the movie that stands out for sheer tom-foolery. Hitchcock did it with Psycho. More recently than that, Jonathan Demme did it at the end of The Silence of the Lambs.

Audiences these days seem to fancy themselves uber-sophisticated when it comes to figuring thrillers out before they reveal themselves to us, yet desperately in need of the kind of movie that takes us along for the ride and completely dupes us. Thrillers, in that sense, deliver the most visceral and exciting experience that we get from movies. We love stories because we love watching them unfold, and the suspense makes the work of an audience member akin to the work of a detective, fetching clues and trying to make guesses about the outcomes, the motivations, and the mysteries, of movies. This must offer at least a partial explanation for how well horror movies--even dumb ones--do at the box office.

A thriller is almost a sure thing as far as making money is concerned, especially if you can get Leonardo DiCaprio to star and Martin Scorsese to direct. Scorsese piles on the atmosphere here, and yet the movie has stark, rich colors to it, colors you don't typically find in a dark and eerie suspense yarn. He goes against that film noir dark-alley quality. Even the scenes in usually dimly lit places are disturbingly well-lit. DiCaprio lights a match that might as well be a spotlight. It never seems to burn out, either.

The opening shot looks obviously computer-generated, though, and that's one of the things modern movies struggle to fight. Filmmakers may save a lot of money to construct the scene virtually, but there's often a phoniness to the scene that floats to the surface, and you wonder how the actors can really trick themselves into believing they're on a real boat and a real ocean. But, for all that, the opening shot also retains a noirish quality, thanks mainly to the costumes. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wearing their hats and their trenchcoats look like two separate Dana Andrews in Laura. They're bound and determined to figure out the mystery that confronts them, but then the movie takes on a sort of Key Largo turn: a magnificent storm disarms the asylum's security system and the inmates start wandering about. All of them are homicidal maniacs (or very close), we're told.

If Shutter Island doesn't blow anyone out of the water, at least it's refreshing to see Scorsese making a movie that's just out to entertain you. He's not trying to do something important and Oscar-worthy like that awful mess The Aviator, or even The Departed, which finally got him what many considered a long-overdue Academy Award. The movie is a hallucinatory mess of a good time, nowhere near as bloated as the misfired Christopher Nolan movie Inception. It's just a crackling, old-fashioned thriller. From the novel by Dennis Lehane. The supporting cast is appropriately nightmarish: Max Von Sydow, Michelle Williams, Emily Mortimer, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, and John Carroll Lynch.