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.

scent of an Oscar?

Al Pacino has deserved several Academy Awards but has only one once. It wasn't for either of the great Godfather films, it wasn't for best supporting actor in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it certainly wasn't for Scarface, although in retrospect Tony Montana is surely the most culturally important movie role of the past twenty-five years. (Fishscale, anyone?) This year the smart money says the Academy will finally recognize Martin Scorsese as best director, but why have they denied him before and does he deserve it for The Departed?

Let's get straight to the point: Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar because of racism. Racism, you say? But he's white, isn't he? As in everything, it all depends on who's doing the looking. I hope we can all agree that all the racial categories of past and present are biological fictions. Their only reality is in people's minds. (If I need to explain this to you, then perhaps you're at the wrong website. Try this one instead.)

Scorsese has been nominated five times and has deserved it at least two of those times: 1980 for Raging Bull and 1990 for Goodfellas. But let's consider all five nominations and the winners :
-1980 Raging Bull (Robert Redford for Ordinary People);
-1988 The Last Temptation of Christ (Barry Levinson for Rain Man);
-1990 Goodfellas (Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves);
-2002 Gangs of New York (Roman Polanski for The Pianist); and
-2004 The Aviator (Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby).

Any group of people can be constructed by others, or by themselves, as a race, and racial identities often have hierarchies within them. Are the Irish a race? They were to many of the English who occupied their country and starved them out of it. They were to the white Americans to whose country they then emigrated. Today they're a 'nationality' or an 'ethnicity', perhaps equally imaginary categories but less susceptible to discrimination. In the twenty-first century, many Americans have racialized Muslims (a religious group) and Arabs (a language group), which only goes to show fluid and adaptable 'racial' discrimination is.

The category of 'white people' has always had its internal hierarchies in the States: there are white people, and then there are 'ethnic whites' or 'white ethnics'. For many people—consciously or unconsciously—to be an 'ethnic white' is to be white but not quite. The category usually includes Italians, Poles, Greeks—basically any European population group that is Catholic or Orthodox Christian and/or generally swarthier-complected than WASPs. To the ignorant people who care about degrees of whiteness, Jews are somehow beyond the pale. (For the record, I don't subscribe to any of this racial rubbish. I'm just trying to characterize a racist set of attitudes that one encounters in the world. I believe that racism exists but race doesn't.) (Second aside: if you ever watch Spike Lee's Jungle Fever again, pay attention to the Italian-American candy store scenes. Michael Badalucco's character explicitly talks about his ethnic envy of Robert Redford. Spike Lee knows what I'm talking about.)

Now scroll back up to the list of Scorsese's nominations. Do you see any patterns? Scorsese most deserved to win in 1980 and 1990 for New York-based films about Italian-Americans, and he was beaten both times by Redford and Costner(!), non-'ethnic' white guys making films about non-'ethnic' white people way west of New York. And Clint Eastwood? Eastwood is the icon of the stoic, no-nonsense white man of the west. Scorsese is not just Italian-American. He's also short, asthmatic, a fast-talker, and a New Yorker. In person he talks even faster than Woody Allen in Annie Hall. I'll even go one further and say that much of America, especially in the 70's and 80's, racialized New Yorkers in general. We were one big cesspool of pollution to the red-blooded, and blue-blooded, states. (Woody Allen expressed New Yorkers' internalized racism eloquently in Annie Hall: 'Don't you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.')

Things are getting better at the Academy and in the States generally, but the Academy has historically discriminated against Scorsese as an Italian-American, as a New Yorker, and, compared to Eastwood et al., as a non-Hollywood masculine body. It's racism and more, and it stinks. Will the Academy, as expected, right a historic wrong this year? And if Scorsese wins, will he deserve it? For the answer to the last question, tune in tomorrow for part two, tentatively titled 'Hong Kong comes to Boston'.