Review Tales

What’s not to love about Martin Charles Scorsese? He’s short, he’s Italian, he has an infectious laugh, he has cute bushy eyebrows, he still calls movies “pictures”, he literally does all he can to preserve the earliest relics of the medium! Scorsese is undoubtedly an institution of cinema at this point. The problem with Scorsese is that every time you watch one of his films for the first time, you assume it’s his best. 

The Peculiar Decade of the 2000s for Scorsese

As a filmmaker who has been active since the 1960’s, each decade presented its fair share of trials and tribulations, but none more peculiar than Scorsese’s run in the 2000s. 

While it wasn’t his most tumultuous decade, there is a noticeable change in flavour with the films Marty made in the noughties. 

I shall attempt to dissect what happened to the greatest living filmmaker during this time in his career, and underscore why Marty’s films in the 2000s feel a little off in the eyes of many fans (I’m looking at you too, Shark Tale).

A Changing World at the Turn of the Millennium

At the turn of the millennium, the old world seemed less recognizable. With the introduction of DVDs, the rise of style-over-substance music video directors, the CGI revolution, the success of large-scale franchises like Lord and The Rings and Harry Potter, the gaming boom, the internet, the almost complete switch to digital filmmaking and streaming, we were embracing a whole new approach to media consumption. I imagine all this rapid change must have felt alien to Scorsese. The times appeared to have surpassed the master himself!

Gangs of New York (2002)

In a lot of ways, Gangs of New York (2002) represents Scorsese entering a new era in terms of his collaborations. Gone are Bob DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, and even co-writer Paul Schrader! Here is where the maestro first works with the actor who would go on to define the next decades of his career: Leonardo DiCaprio! You can immediately see the potential of the collaboration between the two. 

But an unfocused third act when the Civil War draft riots and a poorly miscast Cameron Diaz, sadly sinks this ship of a movie! Daniel Day-Lewis broke his back carrying the movie, giving a career-best pulpy performance. I still yearn for the Scorsese Cut of Gangs of New York – the true vision of the film that Harvey Weinstein sabotaged. 

The Aviator (2004)

The Aviator (2004) is more or less flawless, but there’s still something lacking that prevents it from being one of Scorsese’s truly great films that’s hard to pin down. Marty shines best when his work is dedicated to hauntingly personal stories of strangulation and suffocation, which makes exploring Howard Hughes the right fit for Marty. 

Up through the 1970s, Hughes was frequently on the cover of national magazines like Time, Newsweek, and Life.  At first, he was venerated and almost worshiped as a multifaceted genius (airplanes, movies, oil-drilling inventions, womanizer, etc.).

Then, after his hermit period set in, he was adulated and hated by the very same people as a creepy nut-case who had gone off the rails. Clearly, Howard Hughes is an interesting figure, but The Aviator struggles to juggle Hughes the film director with Hughes the entrepreneur, and Hughes the OCD germaphobe. All these shades of Hughes never coalesce into a meaningful whole. Instead, this biopic hops all over the place in a valiant but clumsy attempt to explore a complex man.

Perhaps the Christopher Nolan/Jim Carrey biopic that never got made could have been the definitive take on the icon. But alas we have what is essentially a run-of-the-mill Oscar-baity biopic where Leo desperately wants to break away from his heartthrob image to be taken seriously as a legitimate thespian.

The Departed (2006)

The Departed (2006) is a well-oiled crime thriller and is still more entertaining than most Cops & Robbers flicks, but it’s basically a fluff piece. As a remake, it doesn’t really add anything substantial to the original. All the highlights of The Departed are almost directly translated from Infernal Affairs, whereas I had been expecting the movie to take the central concept and do its own spin on it rather than copy the plot beat for beat (it won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Oscars after all). 

Within the film’s DNA lies religious/philosophical musings on male identity and fractured masculinity in post 9/11 America. But the giant rat at the end remains a turnoff for many viewers. Many great films have one shot, line or aspect that is out of place or borderline stupid, and hardly is a rat crawling along a railing after the antagonist is executed inconspicuous. If anything, it works more like a black comedy than some overt symbolism spelling out the message. 

The Departed is a formative comfort movie for me, but I cannot remember the order in which things happen in around the movie; there’s little to no sense of a timeline or cause and effect from one scene to the next. I still like the movie because of the style and acting, but I admit The Departed a weirdly paced and edited movie. I haven’t brought up longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, but her truncated editing choices are a huge part of why Scorsese’s 2000s works feel jarring.

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island (2010) is the least ‘Scorsesean’ film of his. It felt like somebody else could have made it – indeed, Nolan had Leo play a psychologically damaged guilt-ridden widower in the same year. Inception is obviously the one that became a classic out of the two, in part because Nolan drenched his narrative in ambiguity. You’re not allowed to know when characters are dreaming in Inception (minus some folding streets or zero gravity shenanigans). 

The dream world is shot no different from the real world. With Shutter Island, one only gains a different lens to view things after the first watch. Basically, the plot reads like a pastiche B-movie with higher production values set in an asylum on an island, with pristine execution and presentation. The movie is like a car with a faulty engine but an excellent paint job. Scorsese’s best films excel as “mood poems” with a story tacked on (Goodfellas is basically just one big montage that barely ever stops). 

It is those subtle things that make the difference between a masterpiece and just a fun film. Shutter Island is the best M. Night Shyamalan film M. Night Shyamalan never made. The bait-and-switch twist, however predictable, forces the viewer to re-contextualize the entire film up until that point; making rewatches a richer experience. If it were made by M. Night, it would have been the pinnacle of his filmography.

Scorsese’s Genre Films and Shifting Moods

Scorsese making genre pieces isn’t new or problematic. It’s important to remember that when Scorsese left NYU, he thought he would be a genre director along the lines of Peter Yates or Sidney J. Furie. He went and made his exploitation piece Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman.

 He showed Bertha to John Cassavetes, who scolded him for spending a year of his life on a “piece of crap.” This pushed him to make Mean Streets, but then he parlayed that artistic success to make a “woman’s picture” for Warner Bros., Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. He followed Taxi Driver with a love letter to the Old Hollywood studio system with New York, New York. 

When Marty’s happy and content, we see that he reverts to being that genre director. That’s what we saw in the 2000s. This was also when he worked on some documentary passion projects because he was just in a relaxed place. Long story short, Marty’s a multi-faceted emotional director whose mood reflects his output.

The Theme Park Decade

Michael Powell (an idol of Scorsese and ex-husband of Schoonmaker), in his autobiography Million Dollar Movie, wrote about this phenomenon where successful careers tend to end with bloated projects, too many stars, too many locations, too much money, to hide the absence of interesting ideas and flatter inflated egos. 

Powell might have been thinking of people like David Lean. But he wrote it when discussing his last films with his filmmaking partner Emeric Pressburger. Powell’s observations could apply to Scorsese in the noughties: it was the decade where the maestro was most beholden to the Hollywood machine with a bigger budget and a polished production. These movies were profitable and accepted by the mainstream. 

It’s no wonder Marty won his long-awaited Oscar in this decade. There’s none of the stress-inducing and addiction struggles he had in the ‘70s and ‘80s. A lot of Scorsese fans will squint their eyes when reading my next words……but I feel the 2000s was his Theme Park decade. It was the era where Marty was given the keys to the carnival, bankrolled by the most influential producers, and star-studded with bankable leads.

The Return of Focus in the Post-2000s Scorsese

Whatever your thoughts are on late-stage Scorsese films, at least they felt like they were about something. 

• Hugo (2010) was a love letter to cinema preservation disguised as a 3-D kids’ adventure.
• The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) critiqued the allure of American greed masquerading as frat boy machismo.
• Silence (2016) was a small-scale epic meditation on the daily struggle between faith and doubt. 
• The Irishman (2019) was a lamentation on ageing and life regrets in the trappings of a mob flick. 
• Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) was a contemplation on insidious American rot hiding in a Western whodunit. 

These post-2000s movies were focused with a lot to say about life and the American dream, much like vintage Scorsese. But the films of the ‘00s are either struggling to say something or saying too much. Marty has always viewed crime and amorality through a theological lens. You can’t make a movie about the devil without showing us why people love them.

Scorsese’s Reflective 2000s and Beyond

I want to reiterate that Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, and Shutter Island were good films and this is perhaps Scorsese’s most consistent decade. However, there is something about these movies, as good as they are, that don’t stick out as much as other Scorsese films. These aren’t as indelible as they could be, especially when they bear the brand of the greatest living director. I also get distracted by the monotony of having a greenhorned Leo as lead actor four times in a row. 

I posit that Marty in the noughties moved from the exploration of human themes to making more escapist entertainment; films that are a bit more “fun”. I’ve watched The Aviator probably six times and that Llama lunch scene kills me every time. I can quote The Departed in my sleep. I find Gangs largely entertaining while also crossing over into a “statement” film. Maybe Marty was still grappling with the loss of his mother Catherine Scorsese in 1997. 

Maybe Marty was mellowing out a little, having fun while he still had the energy. Maybe he was seeing his own mortality creeping up and wanted to just entertain for a while. Maybe it was a slight midlife crisis, like “look how punchy and badass my movies STILL are! “. I think he was trying to find his creative voice again; the master was learning to make movies again like a student.

I’m glad Marty got to have his fun in the 2000s – who’s to say that the cinema legend didn’t earn the right to freestyle for a bit?! Eventually, the 2008 Financial Crisis leading to the Occupy Wall Street movement would inform the making of The Wolf of Wall Street, rejuvenating Marty’s anger. Now that he’s facing his mortality, he’s back to making dark and personal fare like Silence, The Irishman, and Killers of the Flower Moon. And I for one cannot wait to be seated in the front row for the next Scorsese picture!