Scorcese is Michaelangelo

Rating: 6/10 (16 February 2007)

In my view, Martin Scorcese, like Michaelangelo, is a great artist and sculptor. His medium is film rather than stone, but he has a similar capacity to create memorable images. The Departed has proved thought-provoking and I greatly enjoyed the story elements dealing with the machinations, the double-crosses, etc. Scorcese's films, with their ferociously kinetic forwarding devices and no-explanations action sequences make violence incredibly seductive. For me, this is due to the chiaroscuro simplicity inherent in the characters that create it. There is no hand-wringing, no questioning. In Scorcese's filmed world, this is simply the way things are, the way things are done.
This said, Scorcese's similarity to Michaelangelo extends to the fact that the man is brilliant at drawing male characters, but horribly deficient at rendering females. Michaelangelo's drawings and sculptures of women (when he did them at all) looked like men with breasts stapled onto their chests. The women in Scorcese's films aren't characters, they're plot devices and interruptions. He seems to use them to establish a quiet respite of a moment. The problem is that such respites are anathema to his style of film-making and so the women are relegated to the sidelines, except when they get trotted out to forward a specific plot device. By and large, the women are never as vital, as supercharged, as fascinating and charismatic as the men. Instead, they're usually passive leeches who are there to be sexual vessels, doormats or harpies. Like the Catholic Church and old school Police Departments, Scorcese's films are a clubhouse that says "NO GIRLZ ALLOWED". Most of the times I have come away from seeing a Scorcese film with equal measures of admiration, resentment and sadness. If only Martin Scorcese could make a movie where his female characters were as cool, as fascinating as the men. Alas, I don't ever see this happening and it is a true pity that an artist as great as Mr. Scorcese should have this regrettable, glaring lack.