In Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Jesus has a vision in which he declines his divine destiny by marrying Mary Magdalene and living life as an ordinary man. Descending from the cross, he seems at once relieved and crestfallen. “I’m not the Messiah? I don’t have to be sacrificed?” he asks, incredulous.
If you’ve seen the rest of the movie — spoiler: Jesus eventually abandons the perks of being a human and rhapsodically reaccepts his crucifixion — then you can work out what the director Rebecca Miller is doing by clipping the scene into “Mr. Scorsese,” her meticulous appraisal of the filmmaker. Miller sees a parallel between Jesus in “Temptation” and her subject in life. Again and again over his eight decades, Scorsese made a choice: Forgo many of the comforts of domesticity to sacrifice his life on the altar of cinema.
That sacrifice might have made him an artistic martyr, but it also left behind a spate of Mary Magdalenes, and part of Miller’s mission in “Mr. Scorsese” is to balance her esteem for the man with a clear eye toward those left in the dust. Scorsese was married five times and has three daughters, two of whom went long spells without seeing him. How his relationship with women evolved over his lifetime is a through-line that Miller traces in her captivating and charismatic profile, which tells Scorsese’s story with help from family, collaborators and a trove of movie moments.
Anchoring the project, which is streaming on Apple TV+, is Miller’s easygoing dialogue with the filmmaker, which she captured over several interviews. (Miller began shooting during the pandemic, with Scorsese seated on her deck.) While many bio-docs cut around their interlocutors, Miller leans into her offscreen presence by presenting the interview as an exchange. Scorsese, dressed in button-down shirts and flashing an enviable row of pearly whites, receives Miller with warmth, good humor and, if not total candor, then a general openness toward the full story, even when it’s less than flattering.
The profile begins in childhood, with Scorsese as a sickly, indoor kid. He recalls halcyon early years in an Italian American enclave in Corona, Queens, and a rougher adolescence in Lower Manhattan. Violence was everywhere, from the mob bosses who reigned over the city to his father’s dispute with a landlord that boiled over into blows. Miller highlights Scorsese’s struggle with asthma as a filmmaking origin story; sequestered inside the apartment, watching the streets below, Scorsese learned to see the world frame by frame.
As an adolescent, Scorsese sought refuge in Catholicism, and took steps toward entering the priesthood. He later enrolled in New York University, where he earned accolades for his short films — cheeky, grainy affairs that channel the gaiety of the French New Wave. But Scorsese’s grappling with his Christian faith continued for the rest of his life. As he progressed in his career, the director suffused his work with religious ideas, most explicitly in “The Last Temptation” and “Silence,” both stories of inner strife. But his secular films are equally engaged with theology, grappling with virtue and sin, ruin and redemption, guilt and grace.
Scorsese also wrestled with the devil (so to speak) in his personal life, most notably in the spell following “The Last Waltz,” his concert documentary about the Band. Freshly divorced and hooked on uppers, Scorsese moved in with the group’s chief songwriter and lead guitarist, Robbie Robertson, in Los Angeles, where the pair fostered a kind of creative partnership motored by cocaine and carousing. The period ended badly, in a drug-induced collapse and hospitalization. Miller stages this low point as an episode cliffhanger. This positioning might have felt overly slick if it weren’t cushioned by a meaningful redemption arc: Robert De Niro, offering his old friend a lifeline, convinced Scorsese to make “Raging Bull.” It was a resounding success.
A dramatic undoing, a triumphant return — this cycle of events would become a pattern for Scorsese, reoccurring in the early 1980s when the commercial failure of “The King of Comedy” drove the director out of Hollywood. Returning to indies, he emerged with the rollicking “After Hours,” a comeback movie and big win. Several years later, the controversy and disappointment of “Temptation” paved the way for a hit: “Goodfellas.”
“Mr. Scorsese” picks up speed in the 1990s and particularly after 2000, hurrying through a busy stretch by focusing on Scorsese’s tie to Leonardo DiCaprio, who speaks of his collaborator with sunny admiration. Together, the pair weathered another iteration of Scorsese’s crash-comeback trend: “Shutter Island” (2010) into “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). The muddle and anxiety of “Shutter Island” caused Scorsese to feel panicked on set, while “Wolf” was an endless party marked by sheer euphoria. (Poor “Hugo,” released in 2011, goes entirely unmentioned.)
Making savvy use of montage and split screens, Miller shows how Scorsese’s life shaped his cinema and vice versa, using his filmography as a graph onto which she plots his ideas and experiences. Marriages are prone to falling apart, as seen in “New York, New York.” Brutality is pervasive, as exhibited in “Taxi Driver.” And above all, virile rage should be bridled, lest it morph into its uglier cousin, violence, as in “Raging Bull,” “Mean Streets” and nearly all of his other movies.
Miller alludes to Scorsese’s propensity for outbursts throughout the documentary — she audibly guffaws after he tells her he nearly threatened meddling “Taxi Driver” executives with a gun — but she saves a deeper dive into Scorsese’s prickly side for the end. The casualties of his aggression were mostly smashed landlines, but it’s still jarring to hear his former assistant recall the stress of his bad days.
Scorsese’s rage relates to an essential question in his work: What makes a good man and a life worth living? The answers he’s found may be best articulated in his films, which vibrate with theories of humility and salvation. He doesn’t have it all worked out, but there’s a clue folded into the fact that so many of his collaborators decide to work with him again. Perhaps the most clarifying insight into Scorsese’s later years comes from one of those associates, the screenwriter Jay Cocks. “He learned that an artist can be selfish about his art, but doesn’t have to be selfish necessarily in his life,” Cocks says. In other words, even messiahs can channel a human spirit.
Mr. Scorsese
Not rated. Running time: 4 hours 45 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+.
The post ‘Mr. Scorsese’ Review: A Captivating and Charismatic Profile appeared first on New York Times.
