A Truculent Pancake

Rating: Null/10 (5 November 2006)

What a shame. Scorcese, the old one, lived in a world that worked differently than the world of most folks. His world has no God, no laws, no fate, no environment. His world is a world of characters who exude the world. If there are apparent laws, it is because of the force of people creating the space they project into.
He works in this way because its his heritage, an Italian legacy both in culture and film. And because it works. A filmmaker's job is to define a world in a film, ideally in the first few moments of a film. There are all sorts of ways to do this and the way we digest what we see has a lot to do with how it is served in this way.
One way, the way the old Scorcese used, was to invest wholly in bodies. Focus the camera completely on people, a few very, very strong people, and grow the world and a whole world system  usually based on simple ethics  around it. It means you have the latitude to develop some loud, apparently full characters, but it also carries disadvantages: we never can fold his movies into our lives. We can never overlap our world into his, because his doesn't exist.
He knows these limits. He's spoken of them privately, and in his last two films you could see him trying to outgrow the limits of the old Scorcese. With "Gangs" he reached far into space, defining places, a city, underground havens, mobs, the flow of rumors through society. He reached to groups. His camera flew, not as expertly as DePalma's but wildly compared to old filmmaker's which was tethered to single bodies. "Gangs" overreached and ran out of money, time and the patience of his patrons, so it was wrapped up with some explosive characters.
"Aviator" showed us a new man. I hailed him as the best new filmmaker of that year. He drifted into the world, away from characters. He designated a watcher in Blanchett, something he has never done before, and he let he bring her tools of folded narrative to bear. It was film worth watching, his first one in my opinion.
And now we have the old fellow backsliding into his easy manner, his cheat. His way of delivering apparent power with no power. Yes, it is well put together. Yes, it has serious actors doing their bit without worrying about how it fits in the symphony. There is no grand design, just speechifying. Yes, the use of music is perhaps the most competent you will ever find.
But it is empty. Again. We lost a filmmaker this year.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.