The definitive portrait of the life and work of Martin Scorsese

Saint and sinner. This is the title of the third of the five episodes the surely definitive documentary portrait of the life and work of Martin Scorsese which from this Friday, October 17, is available on the platform Apple TV. From these two words, Rebecca Miller found in the exact middle of his fascinating audiovisual journey of four hours and 45 minutes the perfect synthesis of the personality of the director of wild bull y good boys.

The definition (expressed not casually in English and Italian) belongs to Isabella Rosselliniwho accompanied Scorsese as an actress and especially as his wife in one of the most turbulent moments of his life. With the distance, calm and wisdom that the years often give, Rossellini seems to hand over Arthur Miller’s daughter the key to open the chest that holds the entire story of one of the greatest film directors of the 20th century.

Viewers, rigorous cinephiles or simple fans of cinema as a high-flying artistic experience, will appreciate this discovery. The key to the look at the world of a creator who has dazzled us for more than half a century with His violent and pious stories at the same time, full of guilt, punishment and redemption, appear in that duality.

Rebecca Miller tells us that Scorsese could never be fully understood without the coexistence in his head and in his heart of those two attributes. What in anyone else manifests itself as a clash between two completely incompatible extremes, in Scorsese works in an integrative way. Religion and sin coexisting all the time inside a man who once dreamed of being a seminarian.

The synthesis of that apparent contradiction (represented by today’s Scorsese, calm, reflective, at peace with his past and his own conscience) It was only possible after those two elements, holiness and sin, reached their maximum expression in a permanent game of back and forth. Miller tells it and shows it with the best-known narrative and visual resources of the genre, without any forced research or innovations.

Telling Scorsese’s life with the usual documentary formulas could be seen as an elegant and precise way of recognizing him for what he is at this point: an undisputed classic. Miller constantly addresses the impact of his work at a time of radical transformations in the entertainment industry, but at the same time he reminds us with the same rigor that he belongs to the first generation of filmmakers trained in universities.

Like his contemporaries Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese applied his cinephilia to the reinvention of Hollywood history and its most iconic genres in the midst of the turbulent reality of the 70s, the setting in which he began to create his work. and it also led him to play almost lethally with excesses and addictions.

Miller establishes himself from the outset in the center of that world of powerful contrasts, located somewhere in the middle between sin and holiness, which would be so visible in his later work. And it tells us that everything, absolutely everything that happened after, was a necessary derivation from a vital starting point: Today’s octogenarian Scorsese tells us about the beginnings of his life as the little son of a family of Sicilian immigrants in the harsh geography of the edges of New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Extraordinary in this section, marked by the religious imprint of the Italian-American community and the violence (latent or explicit) of daily life built around organized crime, is the testimony of some childhood friends, especially the actor Robert Uricola, who died last year, shortly after delivering his testimony in this exciting documentary divided into five parts.

In that initial section we discover, for example, that Uricola’s brother was the inspiration for the main character of dangerous streets, the first film that shaped the “Scorsese style” especially in the painting of urban violence and its representativesthen increasingly perfected in some masterpieces such as Casino, good boys y The Irish. And Scorsese’s soul mate also appears there, another Italian descendant and contemporary who the director discovered, when he went to try himself as an actor, who had been his companion in the rough streets of Queens: Robert De Niro.

They will be De Niro and the extraordinary Thelma Schoonmakereternal and faithful editor of his films, who will lead with their respective testimonies the illustrated chronicle of the director’s vital and artistic evolution. And through them we enter the darkest and most complex years of that existence, those in which filming non-stop (as the title of the second episode suggests) is not exactly healthy.

Miller does not spare information on the matter, especially the gradual sinking of Scorsese, into a hell of drug consumption that seemed to never find its own limit. In that sense, the testimonies (especially that of the late Robbie Robertson, historical leader of The Band and companion of those addictions at the time) are much cruder than any image.

The director is very cautious and prefers that Let’s build in our imagination the precipice that Scorsese was facing at that time as a drug user, especially cocaine.. There are other turbulent seasons along the same journey, especially those related to their complicated marriages, in which personal issues and projects that did not always end successfully are mixed.

In this sense, Mr. Scorsese It is also the painting of an artist who is establishing his identity through a succession of notorious failures and constant confrontations with different sectors of the industry. (including actors, producers and executives) with whom he used to not get along. An example was the intemperate and violent reaction with which the arrival of The last temptation of Christ in the second half of the 80s.

From this perspective, Miller also provides an analytical account of the visual revelations and innovations that also defined Scorsese as a filmmaker. And he shows us how some of the iconic characters in his best films are fictional manifestations (sometimes with extreme features) of some aspects of his own personality.

The parade of names that participate and enrich this remarkable documentary throughout its almost five hours is impressive, starting with De Niro and Leonardo DiCapriowhich in a moment will occupy the place of reference for Scorsese’s way of seeing the world in the acting sphere. They also speak Daniel Day-Lewis, Steven Spielberg, Sharon Stone, Spike Lee, Paul Schrader, Nicholas Pileggi, Brian De Palma, Margot Robbie and many more.

Some more recent moments move us even more, especially when we see Scorsese caring for and accompanying his last and current wife, Helen Morris, who is suffering from Parkinson’s. Miller does not fail to notice that in this final stage, in which everyone recognizes him as a master, Scorsese seems to have found some peace after so many decades crossed as if his artistic and personal life took place entirely inside a roller coaster.

Mr. Scorsese is the rigorous and dedicated tribute to the life and work of one of the few filmmakers who need no less than five hours to talk about them from the beginning to the end of their careers. With an admirable balance between confessed admiration and the necessary distance that an honest and demanding observer knows how to maintain, Miller closes his work by making it clear that the last word in this case has not yet been said.

Martin Scorsese’s work is covered in almost all of its magnitude in this magnificent documentary. There were missing notes on some films that pass by very quickly or on his exceptional work as a restorer of film classics, there is no mention of Hugo nor to the documentaries he dedicated to some rock figures and his personal history with Italy. But there is the most important thing and Rebecca Miller dares, with reasons, to highlight it from the title of the fourth episode. He tells us that Scorsese’s work is like the Netherlands of ’74 for football lovers: total cinema.

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