The Well Situated Eye

Rating: Null/10 (23 December 2002)

Spoilers herein.
Scorsese is competent enough at what he does, But since `Taxi Driver,' that hasn't been worth watching until now.
The world of film is rife with gangs battling for the soul of the viewer. One of those gangs is led by the `old' Scorsese -- it rallies under the banner of character-driven storytelling. He finds a story with characters of excess, and peoples them with actors of excess. The story spins not from the people or situation, but from the excess itself. This is not native to cinema, it is an immigrant trend, imported into the world of film. All the devices of cinema are subservient to the characters. The camera literally is attached to the (usually) men. that's the old Scorsese gang. Spielberg runs a similar gang.
Opposed are a collection of gangs that build films first from cinematic vision, then enfold story and characters -- the different visions and enfolding techniques differentiate these gangs, but they all hate the interlopers from literature who do illustrated books. These gangs are native to film, and include dePalma, Tarkovsky, Welles, Kurosawa, Kubrick.

But with this film our man Martin enters the world of cinema first before doing anything else and effects a conversion. It is his first film since `Taxi Driver' to assign the camera to the situation instead of the character. In this film, the star is the tone and feel of the place, and the forces surrounding that place: the characters are third in the hierarchy. It is a masterful and welcome switch of allegiance.
Oh, we have a story, the ordinary insipid stuff about a girl and bruised suitors, about political power, about revenge. And we have at least one actor who knows how to control and channel excess (now that Deniro is retired from real acting). It is what everyone will talk about, but none of that really matters. What matters is Scorsese's new eye.
This camera understands the situation while creating it. In the past, his camera has been attached to the man. Here, it is attached to the space instead: most spectacularly the caves under the brewery and in the five points intersection. The eye creates the situation first -- cinematically -- in which the characters move. The fights here, both at the beginning and end, really make the `Lord of The Rings' work seems ordinary if large. That's because longtime editor Schoonmaker has had a similar epiphany and assembles the shots around a scene and not a face. She got her start with `Finnegans Wake' (IMDB has it incorrectly listed with an apostrophe) and here she returns to those roots.
Scorsese is no longer the leader of a gang, but a member of the ones that matter, situated.
Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.