What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the modern age with his masterpieces Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Departed. Even when he strayed from crime subjects, the native New Yorker often seems tethered to his urban terrain: Taxi Driver, After Hours, Bringing Out the Dead, and Gangs of New York presented a city whose grandeur and squalor were somehow interchangeable.
Yet careful observers will note that Scorsese has always been more eclectic than his public image suggests. Even Taxi Driver was bookended by a kitchen sink drama of a single woman’s evolution (Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore) and a musical (New York, New York). If anything, Scorsese, now in his 80th year, has grown more restless with time—witness the accumulation of such heterogeneous projects as Shutter Island, Hugo, and Silence. At the same time, part of the pleasure of his recent body of films is finding the subtle but definite connections between them.
Read Full Article »