Martin Scorsese and the End of Cinema

Back when he was doing press for The Elephant Man, young director David Lynch said that Stanley Kubrick was the greatest living filmmaker, and “Martin Scorsese lives right next door.” In the 20 years since Kubrick died Scorsese's moved into his house and, while he may be moving to gauzier pastures sooner than we'd like, the director of The Irishman has shown no diminution of creative capabilities. Instead, he's made some of his finest pictures including The Wolf of Wall Street, The Departed, Silence, The Aviator and this new one, which feels like a career summation while still proving that the master has fresh arrows in his quiver.

As a backdrop to this specialty theater-to-Netflix release is Scorsese's recent claim that contemporary superhero/comic book movies are "not cinema." Whether you agree with his position depends how you define cinema, but without getting into the weeds it seems that the statement and the sentiment behind it has a lot to do with the brutally reflective final act of The Irishman.

A number of great directors have had a chance to make their "final" film, even when they still made one or more afterwards, movies that feel like the artist knows the end could come any time and they'd best make their best last statement.  I'm thinking of John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a deconstruction of mythic Western heroism boiled down to the philosophy that "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." Whether a self-justification for his career or a cynical reveal meant to warn the audience, it felt like Ford's last big statement, and the film itself still feels sharp due to the POV and fresh due to Lee Marvin's very modern performance. In that sense and at least one other, Scorsese is doing one of his idols justice.

Yes, even though it's the upteenth Scorsese gangster movie, even though the biggest conflict revolves around a "mad dog" who can't be controlled and must be put down (De Niro's Johnny Boy in Mean Streets, Joe Pesci in both Goodfellas and Casino), even though he's parading the great leading men from the first half of his career (including Who's That Knocking's Harvey Keitel) in front of the camera, this one has some new things to offer. For one there's the shooting style - not so much in your face as standing back, the audience is an innocent bystander, mouth agape, watching men brazenly shot in the head on the sidewalk or a shopowner getting his hand stomped on the curb. With this picture Scorsese is demanding that you reflect, just as the narrator and main character, Frank Sheeran (De Niro) is reflecting, an ancient mariner of mid-to-late 20th Century mob life at the point where it intersected with the Teamster's Union and it's once all-powerful leader, Jimmy Hoffa.

The key comes late in the movie when Sheeran shows his young nurse a photo of himself with Hoffa and she has no idea who he is. We've seen the whole gang of mobsters, including Pesci's Russell Bufalino, Fat Tony Salerno, Anthony Pro, go from masters of the underworld to crumbling wretches in prison. We've seen Sheeran ghosted by his very own daughter. We've seen unspeakable betrayal in the name of business. The question that can't be suppressed: Was it all worth it?

Is The Irishman an apology for a life spent away from family and children making some of the world's most acclaimed movies? Sure, there's plenty of metaphor to go around. By midway through the movie I was asking myself why Scorsese is asking us to empathize with this monster of a man, this order-taking high-efficiency death machine? And how is it he's able to pull off the trick of us actually caring for Frank - for his soul?

The Irishman demands we look elsewhere, and that's where its resonance lies. Scorsese, 76-years-old now, and his loyal cast and crew are in the twilight of their legendary years. Time is the most remorseless hitman of all. How long before a generation comes that, like Frank's nurse with Hoffa, doesn't recognize an image from a Scorsese movie, doesn't recognize De Niro's Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta? Can even Leonardo DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort last in the public consciousness for another half century?

So maybe the end of cinema is on Scorsese's mind when he talks about comic book movies. There's a telling reference to French New Wave filmmaker and ongoing enfant terrible Jean-Luc Godard at the start and end of The Irishman, two times when the words "I Hear You Paint Houses" flash on the screen like a direct homage to Godard's use of text in Two or Three Things I know About Her, La Chinoise and virtually all of his films since. Godard is another artist whose entire molecular structure appears melded with 20th Century cinema, and he's been sounding the alarm for the death of cinema (if not Western Civilization) for at least a dozen years now.

Alfred Hitchcock made one more film after his 1972 Frenzy but it was something of a lark, as Frenzy was the one that brought him back home to his native London, site of his career start, for one final triumph. It was also the most viscerally violent of all his films, with acts shown rather than suggested, something Hitchcock complained that Universal studio chief Lew Wasserman had refused to allow him to do previously. Hitch wanted the world to know that he was the filmmaker who had paved the way for the New Hollywood provocateurs, directors like Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah who were shocking audiences and making the old guard, including Alfred, look passé. The graphic rape/murder scene in Frenzy actually sparked controversy and even outrage, but it made the ancient director feel fresher than some of the young ones nipping at his heels.

The final shot of Frenzy is a freeze-frame on box that has just been delivered, a box that contains the key to the innocence of the main character. It's a box that closes the book on Hitchcock's lifelong artistic theme of the wrong man being accused and, after all kinds of travails, exonerated. However, there's no mistaking the sense of the box as casket, as if Hitchcock thought this might be the very last shot in his collected works, and as such would be a fitting one.

The final shot of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is an old man close to his demise seen though the crack of a doorway. What to make of this shot? Is this the audience drawing away, like Kate being closed out of Michael Corleone's ascension as head of the crime family in The Godfather? Or maybe it's meant to give us distance, a moment to thank our lucky stars that we were only visiting Frank's world, even if for a not-so-brief 3 1/2 hours.

The shot it most recalls is from the John Ford film that became the cult favorite of Scorsese and his fellow "Movie Brats" (George Lucas, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, et al). At the end of Ford's late career masterpiece, The Searchers, we see the same shot that opens the movie, a doorway leading out from the darkness of the homestead cabin to the wild West beyond, with John Wayne's Ethan Edwards filling that space. Sheeran, like Edwards, is on the other side of that doorway, but Sheeran is inside, trapped, rather than outside and (arguably in Edward's case) free. And while the door shuts on Wayne, the one on Sheeran stays open, allowing us to contemplate his lonely sociopathic figure in the shadows.

That's part and parcel of what makes Martin Scorsese our greatest living filmmaker. His career may end, the age of cinema may pass, but he won't leave you with the kind of dazzling self-aggrandizement of a VFX-filled extravaganza. He wants us to know that for all the fun of a career filled with dazzling gangster entertainment there is a price, and wherever you-the-viewer take this metaphor, the master has delivered his warning in a timely manner before this moment, too, goes the way of all flesh.