Playing footsie with the dark side

Rating: 1/10 (2 September 2010)

Martin Scorsese should be ashamed of himself. He is such a brilliant filmmaker, and yet time after time throughout his career he has played footsie with the dark side, and supped with the devil. After all, there are all those gangster movies. What are they, if not glorifications of evil people and evil acts? Here we have Scorsese getting carried away with his own vanity and being 'ever so clever'. He has come up with an ingenious plot twist (although it is not new and has been used in various old movies), which I shall refrain from revealing because it concerns the end of the film, which one is prohibited from discussing on IMDb. But however clever Scorsese is, there is no disguising the fact that this film is dark, sinister, infinitely depressing, and a bad influence. When will vain geniuses like Scorsese exercise a little 'voluntary self-regulation', or indeed just the tiniest bit of self-control? Or are these spoilt brat genius film directors so thrilled by wallowing in their own vanity that they believe anything they do is wonderful and if we don't like it we are stupid? I say this film is bad not because it is badly made, but precisely because it is well made and thereby exerts its insidious influence all the more effectively. Somebody ought to tie Scorsese to an automatic spanking-machine which would wallop some sense back into him. But as long as he is subject to universal adulation, his vanity will swell to inhuman proportions until one day he bursts. And that day cannot be far off. Scorsese has made some wonderful films, such as KUNDUN (1997), MY VOYAGE TO ITALY (1999), and THE AVIATOR (2004). His love of music is very touching, and everyone appreciated his contribution to THE BLUES (2003). But when he tries the horror-thriller medium, as with CAPE FEAR (1991, a really terrible failure of a film, not worth reviewing) and this film, Scorsese descends to the depths of incompetence and uselessness. That is why Scorsese needs to be tied to a spanking-machine, because he is unruly and needs discipline. He needs to be kept away from these dark areas of the evil mind and restrained from manic indulgence, just as young boys used to have their hands tied up at night (see THE WHITE RIBBON) so as not to fiddle with themselves. Leonardo DiCaprio has worked with Scorsese before (superbly, in THE AVIATOR), and when offered this juicy part, where he is allowed to grit his teeth a great deal and show us how grown up he now is by leaping into action at the drop of a hat, squared-jawed and determined (the very essence, he imagines, of a cinema hero, in the hope that one day he might become Harrison Ford), he took it! No surprise! Actors and actresses accept parts! What else is new? Whether they are taking part in a wicked enterprise does not seem to occur to them, which must be why Jodie Foster agreed to do SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. So this dark film about an insane asylum on an island in Boston Harbour does not enhance the value of human existence, but rather adds to the forces of the dark side, and we gain nothing from it but a sterile titillation of the most vacuous kind. And not all the cleverness in the world can disguise the fact that this film is empty.