Scorcese's Satyricon

Rating: 3/10 (2 January 2003)

Do the people who describe Martin Scorcese as our greatest living filmmaker ever actually watch his movies? Perhaps his fans are hoping that, since he has been making essentially the same movie for the last two decades, one of these days he is bound to get it right. Scorsese had 30 years, and 100 million dollars of Harvey Weinstein's money to show the world what he is really capable of, to produce his masterpiece, the one to cement his reputation and put him into the pantheon next to Griffith and Welles, et al., and what do we get - an overblown Freudian psychodrama that says more about Scorsese's Oedipal confusion than it does about New York City's so-called history. What shocks me about Gangs of New York is not that it is the same Scorcese crap, but that it is so technically inept. At least Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Kundun, Last Temptation of Christ, and Casino (my favorite version of the never ending Scorcese project) had some stylistic razzed-dazzle to distract from the unpleasant characters, mind-numbing violence (did we really need to see those bones scraped in Gangs of Tibet; did Jesus really have to pull his heart out in Gangs of the Holy Land?), and cynical, mean-spirited world view that constitute the Scorcese universe. In Gangs, we get flabby, brownish cinematography from Michael Ballhaus; overbuilt, artificial-looking sets from Dante Ferretti; and clunky, choppy, inept editing from Thelma Schoonmaker. All the extras look Italian, the CGI stinks, and the costuming is ridiculous. Not for a second in this 3 hour clunker of a so-called docudrama did I believe that I was seeing real people in a real place enacting real events. This movie says nothing about the birth of a great city and everything about the death of a great director. At least Federico Fellini had the courage of his own florid romanticism when he made Satyricon, his eye-popping, defiantly ahistorical dream of history. Scorcese has been irrelevant as a director since The King of Comedy bombed. In Scorcese's best movies (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King), the psychotic loser achieved some sort of redemption in the end. Now the redemption is gone and only the violence remains. This is the lesson that life has taught one of our most revered filmmakers? How sad.
This movie is about one thing and one thing only: Bill the Butcher. Despite what the reviews might say, despite what Scorsese might say, Bill the Butcher is not the villain of the piece; he is the hero. The movie is a celebration of his life, and a lament at his passing. He is huge, a titan, a warrior, a god, both feared and revered by the puny underlings who surround him. As the last of his kind, and a man who can only measure his worth in battle, he is saddened that, after the death of Villon, no other warrior is worthy of his mettle. (WARNING SPOILERS) One sees, in his treatment of Villon's son, Amsterdam, (which really makes no logical sense: he should kill the boy in order to prevent a future threat, and should have killed him at the theater), Bill's fervent hope that he will once again meet a great adversary. The fact that Scorsese's sympathies lie with Bill, and not with Amsterdam, is shown in the films strange, murky climax. Just as the two men are to meet in battle, the city explodes around them. Bill is finally brought down, not by Amsterdam, but by the forces of history that conspire to destroy his world. Bill lets Amsterdam finish him off, because he knows that he no longer has any place to go. The triumph of the weak has led to the substitution of politics for combat. The meek have inherited the earth.
This is Scorsese's proto-fascist vision, rooted in a longing for an all-powerful father/protector, which he has been promulgating since Taxi Driver, where the psychotic, Mohawk sporting Travis Bickle finds redemption when he defeats Harvey Keitel's Apache pimp. The inarticulate Travis, who is being driven slowly insane by the cesspool of modernity, and whose first target is, appropriately enough, a politician, becomes a man when he becomes a warrior, whose true worth is forged in purifying violence. So why is Taxi Driver a masterpiece and GONY an unparalleled stinker? After all, the animating vision is the same in both. Unfortunately, in GONY, Scorsese catastrophically misunderstands his talent. Scorsese's best films are intense, focused examinations of character. They are compact, tight, vivid portrayals of this monstrous vision that has haunted his psyche since he was a young asthmatic staring admiringly out the window at the neighborhood toughs. Scorsese has no real feeling for history or for narrative. His settings are dreamlike, symbolic spaces that externalize the main character's point of view. In short, he is the antithesis of the epic filmmaker. That is why GONY crumbles around the figure of Bill the Butcher. It's as if Tennessee Williams had tried to shoot Ben Hur.