Martin Scorsese’s reputation is that he makes gangster epics. Yet Rebecca Miller’s stellar five-part docuseries Mr. Scorsese illuminates that, no matter the genre in which he’s operating, the American auteur has, in fact, consistently made movies about himself.
Be it the “underground man” of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, the rage-aholic Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, the frazzled office worker of After Hours, the conflicted Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, the mad genius of The Aviator, or the blustery financier of The Wolf of Wall Street, the legendary director has spent his career telling stories about male resentment, anger, self-loathing, doubt, and loneliness.
His is an oeuvre of sexually frustrated and jealous outcasts desperate for acceptance and power—and willing to do anything to prove themselves worthy. A cinema steeped in Catholicism-informed ideas about guilt, bitterness, vengeance, kindness, and deliverance, it’s a body of work that—to quote one of its maker’s favorite tunes—has “sympathy for the devil.”
Split it into five hour-long chapters, Mr. Scorsese—debuting Oct. 17 on Apple TV+, following its premiere at this year’s New York Film Festival—is as comprehensive a biodoc as any recent artist has received, and it benefits from the enthusiastic participation of its subject, who revisits his life with warmth, humor, and critical thoughtfulness.
Tickled by his unexpected triumphs and good fortune, saddened by his failures, struggles, and missed opportunities, and astute about the ways in which everything that’s happened to him has impacted his films, Scorsese is predictably charming throughout. Miller leads him on this tour of yesteryear with a shrewd attention to the connections between the fictional and the real, even when that means addressing the thornier aspects of his eight-plus decades. Far from a puff piece, it celebrates by comprehending the complex impulses and emotions that make him such a titanic artist.
Mr. Scorsese begins, naturally, at the beginning, with Scorsese’s upbringing with parents, Catherine and Charles, who grew up across the street from each other in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Scorsese remembers his brief time in Corona in Queens as “paradise,” and the clan’s expulsion as a near-biblical event which cast them back to the LES apartment in which his father was born.
There, the asthmatic young boy watched the streets below from his upper-floor windows—a vantage point that the director admits has informed his favorite crane-to-ground-level camera shot, which expresses a desire to move from detachment to involvement. When capable of being outside, he ran with a group of kids who viewed the omnipresent mafia as a normal facet of everyday life, as well as contended with the derelict Bowery residents whose suffering felt intimately related to the community’s divide between the profane (gangsters) and the holy (church).
Miller speaks with many of Scorsese’s old comrades, including Salvatore “Sally Gaga” Uricola, who was the basis for Mean Streets’ wild Johnny Boy, all as she details the director’s auspicious first steps at NYU, initial attempt to get a foothold in Hollywood, and eventual decision, prodded by mentor and idol John Cassavetes, to make a movie from his heart.
Mr. Scorsese underlines that Scorsese’s highs were in many cases born from lows, such that Mean Streets emerged from the disappointment of Boxcar Bertha, Raging Bull from the mess of New York, New York (and his severe cocaine addiction), Goodfellas from the controversy of The Last Temptation of Christ, and Gangs of New York (and the rest of his Leonardo DiCaprio phase) from the middling response to Kundun and Bringing Out the Dead.
Birth, death, resurrection—a fitting cycle for a man who originally considered joining the priesthood and, despite everything, never lost his faith.
There’s little in Mr. Scorsese that cinephiles don’t know, but Miller recounts with incisiveness, aided by candid and effusive new interviews with many of the filmmaker’s closest friends and confidants, including Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Spike Lee, Daniel Day-Lewis, Sharon Stone, Jay Cocks, DiCaprio, and of course Robert De Niro, his most famous collaborator.
Their bond, strengthened by childhoods in the same nook of New York and, moreover, by similar creative instincts, turned both into stars. Throughout, Miller draws links between the personal and the professional, and that extends to conversations with Scorsese’s three daughters Cathy, Domenica, and Francesca—each from a different marriage—who provide insight into the means by which the man behind the camera bled into the images and stories he immortalized on screen.
Miller conveys such ideas through sharp split-screen juxtapositions, and she digs into Scorsese’s process—and his ups-and-down’s influence on it—through chats with his peerless editor Thelma Schoonmaker.
Even at five hours, Mr. Scorsese feels a tad rushed; the heated reception to The Last Temptation of Christ by evangelical Christians, and his friction with Harvey Weinstein during the making of Gangs of New York, get slightly short shrift, at least in light of the fact that the two were Scorsese’s lifelong dream projects. His fruitful 25-year partnership with DiCaprio is also relatively minimized, confined to the series’ final episode despite it dominating nearly a third of his professional life and resulting in his sole Best Director Oscar win (for The Departed) and his all-time biggest box-office hit (The Wolf of Wall Street).
From Scorsese’s meticulous storyboarding, to his essential use of music, to his revolutionary staging, camerawork, and montage (all of which were fully realized in Goodfellas and, to a grander extent, Casino), Mr. Scorsese touches upon every key aspect of the director’s brilliance, and its portrait is enhanced by its understanding that inspiration often springs from disappointment and disaster.
Miller’s doc makes clear that Scorsese’s masterpieces frequently followed intense letdowns (of both a cinematic and domestic nature), and it draws smart, subtle lines between that dynamic and the filmmaker’s enduring fascination with sin and salvation.
With a typically magnetic Scorsese as its guide, it gets at fundamental truths about the artist—and, more generally, about creativity and destruction—with a deft hand. Ultimately, though, nothing speaks louder in Miller’s doc than clips from the movies themselves, whose breathtaking performances, cinematography, editing, and soundtracks are rightly cast as some of the medium’s all-time highlights—and, thus, proof of the auteur’s greatness.
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