China Shop

Rating: Null/10 (30 May 2002)

Spoilers herein.
I'll be right up front. I admit Scorsese's skill but just don't like his films and certainly don't see any art in them.
That's because I disagree with him on what cinematic storytelling is all about. For him, characters are everything, which is why he needs sledgehammers as actors, and spikes (gangsters, etc) as the roles. Then he arranges for them to explode or simmer or steam, or explode again.
Every element of the eye is subservient to the character. He (always he except for his experiment with poor Alice) pulls the camera around. We as bound audience follow. It is all about involuntary submission to manufactured charisma. I don't like this style of storytelling. It ignores the greatest power of the camera's eye: to allow the audience to move in and out of spaces: personal spaces, narrative spaces, time folding, sometimes God, sometimes his victim. There's freedom and imagination when the eye is freed, and this is the real power of the filmmaker.
But with Martin, he ignores this power: the camera is bound. We are the weak sidekick, forced into respect. All the competence (here the editing is superb) is turned to an end which ruins the experience. Scorsese knows this, in fact at this point in his life he was feeling it, and that is why we get what we do. A camera that forces respect.
But alone of his films (I am re-seeing them all), this has a sweet pleasure. In the midst of the obligatory scene where DeNiro takes to himself in the mirror, we get a wonderful reference to Brando. This frames the film and explicitly acknowledges that most films (except those of the real geniuses) are about other films, not life. `Bull' stands on `Waterfront's' structure.
And DeNiro stands on Brando's shoulders. How brave to mouth the lines. Brando was intense, but that was not his innovation, it was an ability to project two performances simultaneously. Here DeNiro tries to equal or best that by playing three characters: himself besting Brando, his character equalling Brando's, and Brando wrestling with his character (which we see in `Waterfront' as a man wrestling with his inner self).
Watch how DeNiro tries. How he pushes too hard (something we can now call the Pacino/Cage error), how he loses control and knows it. Scorsese knows it too, and it speaks highly of them both to put DeNiro's `not world class' broken actor as representative of the broken `not world class' boxer. I appreciate that honesty. It makes this my favorite film of his (Scorsese).