Hong Kong comes to Boston, or, why Scorsese deserves the Oscar

Part two of two on Scorsese. Click here for part one.

I still have a couple of films to see in the best director category, but I am prepared to say that, if Martin Scorsese finally wins this year, his Oscar will be deserved. (Check back Saturday night for the complete list of my Oscar predictions and preferences.)

People sometimes speak imprecisely about what a director does and doesn't do. The best case I can think of is another Scorsese film, Gangs of New York (2002). There were several awful things about that film, chiefly its insufferably stupid screenplay, but the film's problems cannot all be laid at the director's feet.

Visually, Gangs of New York is an outstanding and inventive film. I only saw it once—I can't bear the thought of watching it again—yet one shot has stayed with me since. Scorsese created a waterfront 360-degree pan that, in one revolution, told the entire story of the Irish in America: first we see the Irish immigrants stepping off a ship, then we see the newly arrived being recruited and outfitted for the Union army, then we see them setting off to war, next we see the coffins returning from the battlefield, and finally the coffins are loaded into a ship to return to Ireland for burial. All that visual storyteling occurs in a single rotation of the camera. That is great directing.

A film director's main task is the visual interpretation of a screenplay. The director also bears the theatrical responsibility of directing the actors, but to my way of thinking, that comes second. Acting-wise, Gangs of New York was a wildly mixed bag: Daniel Day-Lewis's ferocious and frightening fury as Bill 'The Butcher' Cutting versus the limp intertness of Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz. But on filmic æsthetics alone, Gangs is a great feat of directing. (Who should have won the directing Oscar that year? Pedro Almodóvar for Hable con ella. Easily.)

This year, Scorsese is nominated for The Departed, his adaptation of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs (2002), starring Tony Leung and Andy Lau. Many Hong Kong police films since the 1980's have featured a pair of doubled or opposed male leads. John Woo's The Killer (1989) and Hard Boiled (1992) come to mind. In Infernal Affairs, the doubling is ratcheted up to new levels as we follow a police mole in the mob and a mob mole in the police trying to outwit and discover each other. Hong Kong screenplays are typically cavalier narrative affairs. People don't watch HK hyper-violence to scrutinize the details of plot points. Even so, by local standards Infernal Affairs had a tight plot with few obvious holes.

This then is the film Scorsese chose to remake: a proven international box office smash with an intricate and intriguing double cat-and-mouse plot. But the script is not a director's responsibility. The cinematic interpretation is. And Scorsese has managed to make this film his own while working in several visual cues to its Hong Kong roots.

The film's visual HK borrowings include some slow-motion and a Chinatown scene wherein DiCaprio, in the Leung role, spots his fleeing nemesis in the suspended shards of a glass hanging ornament. Without knowing the geographic source of the material, one might find these bits hokey, but they ought instead to be recognized as very economical and clever ways of paying homage in an adaptation that winds up being all Scorsese from start to finish.

Infernal Affairs relies on Tony Leung's typically melancholic eyes to provide the film's emotional weight. In The Departed Scorsese replaces HK cool with genuine horror at the violence that men do. I know that some of my readers will strenuously object to my saying this, but it's Scorsese's most eloquent portrayal of the ugly side of masculinity since Raging Bull. No particular shot stands out in the way that the dock scene did in Gangs. It's more of an overall impression achieved, in part, by a revision of earlier Scorsese moments.

Readers may remember the scene in Goodfellas where Ray Liotta uses his gun to bash the face of the Long Island neighbor in Lorraine Bracco's driveway. That was a deliciously nasty little scene, but the neighbor had invited revenge by attempting to impose himself sexually on Bracco's character. When we first witness DiCaprio's violence in The Departed, he finishes a guy off by ramming the hook end of a coatrack into his face. True, the guy was a mobster, but it's a far more chilling scene than in Goodfellas, not simply because DiCaprio is a cop, but because he is doing it to prove his tough-guy bona fides to an invisible audience of other men. There's no quotable, amusingly demented Joe Pesci here. ('Whaddaya mean I'm funny?') Just darkness and men behaving badly towards each other. Even the Rolling Stones' 'Gimme Shelter', by now a Scorsese mainstay, is back, but this time we're not along for a drug-addled automobile ride fleeing a police helicopter with a pot of tomato sauce possibly burning at home, as in Goodfellas. This time we hear the shout of 'War, children, it’s just a shot away' as Jack Nicholson's ganglord character recruits a child into mob life. The gang's induction—or is it seduction?—of children in Goodfellas invited our identification with Henry Hill's acceptance into his new 'family'. Here the scene is sickening.

Acting-wise, I finally see why Scorsese has persevered in his belief in Leonardo DiCaprio. I had written off DiCaprio's adult career as a series of failures, but here he rises to the occasion as his character sinks into despair and isolation. His suffering is not as economically portrayed as Tony Leung's—how could it be?—but he achieves genuine pathos and clearly works for it. Matt Damon makes the devilish most of his deceptively boyish face. And Jack Nicholson? He stays on the right side of the line, ham-wise. It's Scorsese's conspicuously dark lighting in his first scene that defines the character, not Nicholson's sometime tendency to run rampant through a film. But if Scorsese's directing is visible in the acting, it's in DiCaprio's surprisingly mature suffering.

Going into the film, I expected none of this. I thought it would simply be a tight thriller and perhaps a compromise by Scorsese to go for the gold with a proven seller. It was anything but the latter. Instead, it was a very good Scorsese film and one that should earn him a deserved Oscar.