‘Mr. Scorsese’ Is the Definitive Portrait of Our Greatest Living Filmmaker
There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese Directs, the 1990 American Masters episode on the filmmaker that played on PBS around the release of Goodfellas, where a gaggle of talking heads wax poetic about their friend and colleague’s encyclopedic knowledge of movies. After testimonials about his incredible recall of individual shots, complete filmographies, whoever helmed some obscure sci-fi B-picture — he always remembers the name of the director — someone off-camera mentions that it’s a recurring theme when people speak about him. You can see Scorsese noticeably bristle before replying: Yeah, sure, I know a lot about cinema history. So what? Don’t I have opinions about life, death, love, hate, sin, salvation? If I’m simply someone who can spit out facts and figures about the moving pictures and have nothing to say the world around me, who the fuck cares?!
Rebecca Miller, an extraordinary storyteller in own right, undoubtedly came across this clip when she was constructing Mr. Scorsese, her five-part docuseries on the livewire cinephile and cineaste who gave us Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, and The Irishman, to name just a handful of landmarks. (It premiered at the New York Film Festival this afternoon, and will drop on Apple TV+ on October 17th.) More importantly, she seems to have taken the message to heart. Divided into a quintet of distinct chapters and covering everything from Scorsese’s formative years on the mean streets of downtown Manhattan to prepping his 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, this marathon-length look at a true American master has its share of best-in-show highlight reels. You want side-by-side matches of signature shots spanning different eras, most of them soundtracked by — who else — the Stones? A litany of quotable tough-guy moments and second-hand savagery, bumping up against spirituality and Catholic iconography? “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to ME?!” You got ’em.
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But it never loses sight of the man behind the movie camera, paying close attention to the good, the bad, and the ugly of his life while giving him plenty of space to reflect on all of it. And that, more than anything else, is what makes this look at Mr. Scorsese as exhilarating, urgent, invaluable, and perpetually rewatchable as Mr. Scorsese’s own work. It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the definitive look at our greatest living filmmaker.
If there’s an equivalent to a Rosebud for the subject of Miller’s exhaustive deep dive into Scorsese’s life, the doc identifies it as being an incident that happened in Corona, Queens, where young Marty was living with his older brother and his parents as a boy. The neighborhood was like an outer-borough Eden to this city kid, full of fellow Italian-Americans and an upwardly mobile, lower-middle-class vibe. Until his father Charles, a garment-district worker, got into a street fight with the landlord. No one knows what the scuffle was over, exactly; “I remember someone brought out an axe” is the best that Scorsese can do in terms of specific details. But the boy witnessed the whole thing, this uncomfortable mix of family, violence, tribalism, and an atmosphere can change and become charged on a dime. The two respective camps settled the matter before things led to fatalities, but the result was that the Scorseses had to leave — “We were cast out of paradise” Scorsese says, ruefully. They ended up sent “back to the tenements,” he adds, and settled into a place on Little Italy’s Elizabeth Street. The rest is, y’know, history.
To hear Scorsese talk about this moment early on, which is then followed by a collection of sequences from his films in which children bear witness to horrific acts of aggression (notably in Raging Bull and The Irishman), is the sort of connect-the-dots business that Miller will gracefully drop in by the ton over the next five hours. The standard beats of his backstory, well-known to even the most casual fans, are there in full, as dutifully visited as the stations of the cross: LES to NYU, the Corman apprenticeship, the literal highs (and health lows) of the cocaine years, the comeback from the brink of death, the coronation as “the Mob-movie guy,” the evolution of going from angry young man to still-very-angry middle-aged man to elder statesman of cinema. Collaborators from editor Thelma Schoonmaker to musician Robbie Robertson to lead actor du jour Leonardo DiCaprio get side profiles within the bigger picture. Miller ends the first chapter with Marty’s longtime friend Jay Cocks saying there’s someone his buddy should meet circa the early 1970s, and we cut to present-day Robert De Niro, doing his patented I-heard-things head nod with a quiet chuckle.
It’s everything you’d expect from a documentary covering a vast and versatile career recognized as a genuine achievement in the motion picture arts and sciences, even if the actual academy that rewards such things took their sweet time in bestowing honors to the man of the hour(s). But Miller keeps lacing this tour through the past with insights on not just the films but about who he is, where he came from, where he went and how he both stumbled and survived. Every one of his marriages is examined, with several of Scorsese’s kids attesting to how his ambitions and absences didn’t always make him the ideal dad. Temper tantrum anecdotes are abundant. Home movies taken from the director’s youth mix with scenes of Sicilian immigrant life from the mid-20th century, as Scorsese offers context for a diaspora culture with its own set of rules, traditions, and ways of looking after its own. It isn’t always pretty.
The series delves into the hazy, druggy world of the Seventies, when Scorsese balanced a workaholic lifestyle with after-hours slipping into darkness, and the industry shifts that made him a golden boy one second, an outsider and pariah the next. Most American lives get a second act if they’re lucky. Scorsese seems to have logged in 22 of them. Miller doesn’t just interview the famous and the powerful. She talks in depth to the gents that Scorsese palled around with before he became “Martin Scorsese,” then digs up the around-the-way guy who inspired Johnny Boy (!) in Mean Streets.
Everything about the making of the movies, the big ones and the small ones and the hits and the so-called misses, get lots of lip service as well, in addition to thousands of pictures that have influenced, and continue to influence him. Cinema has always been an obsession bordering on a pathology with Scorsese, and Miller makes sure his unabashed love of the seventh art is balanced out with his work as an artist. Movies were an escape for him, but they were also a window onto the wider world, a reflection of the world he knew, and ultimately a means of expressing himself. (The window analogy isn’t just metaphorical, by the way; the doc’s subject directly ties all of those high-angle perspectives and sweeping crane shots in his films to a youth spent spying on the street life below his second story bedroom.)
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That last part is ultimately what separates Mr. Scorsese from the other admirable docu-portraits done on this veteran filmmaker: The emphasis on the who and the why behind those creative expressions as much as the when, where, and how. That and the length, of course, but Miller justifies the running time with an expansiveness, a patience, a curiosity and a lack of judgement that truly sets this work apart. It’s not a hagiography, nor is it a hit job. The subject isn’t someone defined by binaries in any case, anymore than he’s a jukebox auteur giddily using his pictures to show off his versions of DVD libraries and Letterboxd fave lists. Mr. Scorsese is an artist who’s always had something to say about the world he sees around all of us. Mr. Scorsese lets you enter into a conversation with him about that for five hours. The only thing wrong with this endeavor is that it’s not twice as long.
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