Scorsese At His Best - And Worst

Rating: Null/10 (17 February 2000)

Since GOODFELLAS, Scorsese's gone beyond Great Director status; his talent, vision and confidence, combined with his unofficial coronation among serious moviehounds as King of the Medium, have elevated him to Virtuoso. Every one of his 90s projects feature staggering camera movement, audacious violence, tour-de-force visual setpieces. The opening of this film - DeNiro spinning up and out of an exploding Caddy in glittering slo-mo, segueing into credits superimposed over state-of-the-art montage work...your opinion of the film's morality aside, it's the kind of jaw-dropping stunner that has become a Scorsese trademark. Like the Copa sequence in GOODFELLAS, it's the unbridled brio of a director who has not just Arrived, but occupies a plateau where his only remaining competition is with himself. If only he had the ability to pull back now and then and maintain some perspective...but his style of complete immersion into the story he is telling, more and more often these days, leaves him adrift without a moral compass here. And, Lord, could CASINO use one. It's not simply the violence on display, but the soul-dead callousness of every last living, creeping or crawling thing in the film that numbs me even as I'm awed by the compositional fireworks of the filmmaking. Everyone in this film is either vicious and corrupt, or weak and corrupt, and several characters are both at once. The 'love' story between DeNiro and a shrill, hollow Sharon Stone is like a sick parody of romantic love. The gangster/buddy angle is nil, as we see from frame one that De Niro and Pesci's 'friendship' is mutually suspicious and parasitic. The Vegas 'backstory' angle, which dominates the first hour, is visually riveting as you'd expect - Scorsese employs every type of shot in the lexicon of moviemaking here, taking the viewer on the ultimate insider's tour of how a casino operates - all in the service of the most cynical of themes: the fix is in, there are only predators and prey, and the prey deserve their agony - otherwise they'd be in on the feeding frenzy. This is part of the increasingly ugly side of Scorsese: his conscious sacrifice of any moral center, the better to solidify his appeal to the sociopath audience, probably embodied in the gangster types he grew up with in Little Italy. Or am I alone in noticing that the amoral-adolescent audience (of ALL ages) who fetishize unfeeling 'hardness' respond and identify so strongly with his latter-day work, almost as visual aids to help achieve a zen-like serenity in ruthlessness? I've heard audiences laugh in approving hilarity at some of the most appalling brutality in his films, dating back to RAGING BULL but really emerging with GOODFELLAS, which parallels his increasing disregard for protagonists who represent any kind of moral conflict. The Joe Pesci of RAGING BULL was a torn and vulnerable individual; the Pesci of CASINO is a conscienceless thug, period. You feel nothing when he dies, not even revulsion at the blood and viscera of the scene. He's one more fly whose time has come to have his wings pulled off. There are no more Charlies (of MEAN STREETS) in Scorsese's urban films, or even Travis Bickles, to truly disturb an audience by awakening their own dormant conflicting emotions. There are only Max Cadys, Nicky Santoros, Jimmy Conways. Heroes, even nominal ones, are quickly trivialized into hypocrites, cowards, rats and larval psychopaths. One wonders if Scorsese, for all his brilliance, could have ascended so high in the current pop-culture firmament without throwing out any belief in something better than remorseless efficiency and murder-as-commerce like so much sentimental ballast. He could have been, still can be, the Michaelangelo of cinema. Of course, Goya was a great artist too, but how long before he abandons being Goya for Joe Coleman?