Josh Reviews Mr. Scorsese

Mr. Scorsese is a riveting five-part documentary, directed by Rebecca Miller, that digs deeply into the life and films of master filmmaker Martin Scorsese.  In the main titles of each episode, the series is described as “a film portrait”, which I think is a beautiful and accurate description.  I was absolutely riveted.  (I’m so glad that what was originally planned as a feature film was expanded to this five-episode mini-series.  I’d have happily watched many hours more!!)  Mr. Scorsese is available to stream now on Apple TV.

I just described Martin Scorsese as a master filmmaker, and I suspect that few would argue with that assessment today.  However, one of the many wonderful aspects of Mr. Scorsese is how it reminds us of the many times, over the course of Mr. Scorsese’s long career, that he was basically finished and out of Hollywood!  His persistence and ability to continue to claw his way back into making another picture is perhaps worth just as much praise as his tremendous skill at actually making the movies themselves.

But, wow, what a career.  I’ve enjoyed Mr. Scorsese’s many documentary projects, shedding light on deserving artists such as Fran Lebowitz (in Public Speaking and Pretend it’s a City) and George Harrison (in George Harrison: Living in the Material World), and it’s a pleasure to finally get to see a documentary spotlight on Mr. Scorsese himself.  I am such an enormous fan of so many of his films.  What a career!!  My favorites are Goodfellas, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Hugo.  But this man also directed Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Color of Money, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon, and so many others!!

Ms. Miller has done a beautiful job with this film.  The documentary is centered around a series of lengthy interviews with Mr. Scorsese.  I love how Ms. Miller has allowed Mr. Scorsese to tell us his own story, and I was impressed by the skill with which she unfailingly draws out of him everything we’d want to know.  Mr. Scorsese has a persona as a talker, and it doesn’t seem hard to get him to wax poetic about movies.  I could listen to him talk about movies all day.  I loved that Ms. Miller also gets Mr. Scorsese to talk about his family, his rough and tumble upbringing, his drug abuse, his marriages, his struggles when his films went under-appreciated by audiences and critics, and more.  In other words, we get to hear Mr. Scorsese talk about his failures and struggles as much as his successes.  Not in a trashy, gossipy way, but rather in a way that allows us to get to know and understand Mr. Scorsese as a human being in addition to as an artist.  I found this to be endlessly fascinating.

Thankfully, Ms. Miller also understands that what many/most of us want from a project like this is to explore the behind-the-scenes stories of the making of all the amazing movies that Mr. Scorsese has directed in the course of his long and storied career!  And Mr. Scorsese delivers on this in spades.  Through these five episodes, we get to spend a delightful amount of time walking through all of Mr. Scorsese’s major works (and many of his minor ones as well!).  The doc is full to the brim with a generous number of clips from Mr. Scorsese’s movies, and we get to hear a wonderful array of stories about the making of those films, many of which I had not heard before.  Time and again, Ms. Miller’s doc is able to provide us with fascinating insight on the themes and inspirations behind key scenes and moments in so many of Mr. Scorsese’s films.  It takes a great filmmaker to make a documentary like this about a great filmmaker.  I was impressed.

I wrote above that this documentary is anchored by Ms. Miller’s interviews with Mr. Scorsese himself, and indeed, those interviews form the backbone of the series.  But they’re supplemented by a delightfully diverse series of both new interviews and archival footage tat allows us to hear from so many others.  We get to hear from Mr. Scorsese’s family: his parents, his wives, his children.  We get to hear from so many of his most important artistic collaborators, including editor extraordinaire Thelma Schoonmaker (whose contribution to Mr. Scorsese’s films cannot be overstated), and the actors Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, each of who have seemed to have been Mr. Scorsese’s on-screen muses, both in their own way.  I was fascinated to hear those two tremendous actors talk about their collaborations with Mr. Scorsese across so many films.  We also get to hear from actors like Jodie Foster & Daniel Day-Lewis, writers like Paul Schrader (who wrote or co-wrote Taxi Driver and several other of Mr. Scorsese’s films) and many of Mr. Scorsese’s master-director peers such as Steven Spielberg, Brian de Palma, and Spike Lee, and so many more fascinating people, including Mick Jagger and Robbie Robertson (who was involved in creating the soundtrack for many of Mr. Scorsese’s films).  I particularly enjoyed getting to see Mr. Scorsese schmooze with his buddies from the neighborhood from when they were all kids.  It was fascinating hearing these old guys talk about the hard-to-believe reality of their lives on the tough New York streets when they were kids.  Possibly the best moment in the entire doc is when Marty’s buddy Robert Uricola convinces his cousin Sally to sit for an intervoew.  Sally was apparently was the inspiration for De Niro’s character Johnny Boy in Mean Streets.  To say that Sally is still a character is an understatement!!

I’ve been thinking for years that I needed to make time for a major re-watch of Martin Scorsese’s movies, and after watching Mr. Scorsese, I am on fire to do that.  I need to re-watch all of these films immediately!!!  In the meanwhile, I’m so glad I watched Mr. Scorsese.  If you’re any kind of a fan of movies and movie-making, this is a must-watch.

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