“The Departed” (2006)
Marking both Scorsese’s first Oscar for directing and his first time collaborating with fellow ‘70s film legend Jack Nicholson, “The Departed” is a latter-day Scorsese triumph. It’s an adaptation of the Hong Kong film “Infernal Affairs,” but feels entirely a product of the city of Boston and its director. The film follows two parallel tracks in the Beantown crime world: Scorsese’s 21th-century muse Leonardo DiCaprio is good-man-playing-bad Billy Costigan, who attempts to move past his family’s history with crime; meanwhile, Matt Darmon co-stars as wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Colin Sullivan, a mole working inside the organized crime unit with the state police. The film is ostensibly about their dual struggles with identity, but of course, Nicholson looms large as Irish mob boss Frank Costello. Like Nicholson’s Costello, “The Departed” blooms a bit broader than it probably should, but it’s an energetic return to form and genre for the director. Thanks to the hilarious, profanity-spewing turn by Mark Wahlberg (he drops the “c-word” less than 10 minutes into the movie), it’s also Scorsese’s funniest film, with plenty of caustic asides also coming from Alec Baldwin’s police captain. Critics might say that Scorsese’s statuette was more of a lifetime achievement award than one deserved for directing this single film, but we were rooting for him to win based on this movie’s merits alone. [A-]
“Shine a Light” (2008)
What makes “Shine a Light,” Scorsese’s Rolling Stones IMAX concert documentary, especially frustrating is that at the beginning of the movie, we see Marty planning his shots and how the documentary is going to look. He talks about how he’s going to track this way and that and add some real Hollywood-special-effects-oomph to the Stones’ already electrifying stage show (at one point be hilariously bemoans, “We cannot burn Mick Jagger.”). The problem, of course, is that the stage show he describes (and the movie he envisions) isn’t the same one that we, as an audience actually get to see. Instead, it’s a fairly humdrum Stones documentary that occasionally splices in vintage interview footage of the band and some other insignificant razzle dazzle (the first of the two nights doubled as a benefit for one of Bill Clinton‘s philanthropic ventures, with the former president on hand to introduce the band, every bit as rock star as anyone else on stage). Given Scorsese’s long-standing history with the band (how many times has he used one of their songs?) and his nimble ability with visual pyrotechnics, you’d think that the movie, the filmmaker’s first in the large-screen IMAX format, would have been something special, bordering on the downright remarkable. Instead, with an over-reliance on rapid fire editing (which doesn’t really work with an image projected that huge), and strangely uninventive direction, it becomes one of the few Scorsese films in which the music is much stronger than the images. [C+]
“Shutter Island” (2010)
Scorsese is as much a film fanatic as he is a filmmaker, and with “Shutter Island,” his sprawling, rococo thriller about a missing mental patient on an island full of them, the director was able to indulge his love of B-grade horror movies and loony bin melodramas (you get nods to Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray and Henri-Georges Clouzot among others). Depending on your sensibilities, it was either an embarrassment of riches, a gorgeous, gilded ode to splashily exploitative drive-in movies, or a waste of considerable talents (not only of Scorsese himself but his crack team of collaborators, including cinematographer Robert Richardson, longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker and star Leonardo DiCaprio). We tend to fall somewhere in the middle. DiCaprio plays a rattled U.S. Marshal who is given a new partner (Mark Ruffalo) and sent off to the titular island, home to an insane asylum, off the coast of Boston. It’s 1954, and DiCaprio’s character has already faced the horrors of World War II concentration camps, which makes for some very vivid flashbacks brought to life in wonderfully poor taste. It also somewhat dampens the fun of the more phantasmagorical aspects of “Shutter Island,” where fantasy and history (both personal and cultural) uncomfortably mix into one paranoia-infused stew. “Shutter Island” goes for broke in such a manner that it almost makes a virtue of its somewhat clunky plotting (at one point a character explains the plot in front of a chalk board where major narrative beats are literally spelled out for the audience) and cartoonishly broad characters; the entire enterprise is bloated with a kind of more-is-more over-the-top-ness. Either you’re on board, or you can’t wait to leave this island. We were happy to stay, through what is no doubt one of the filmmaker’s slightest features, but who said Scorsese has to always be so serious? [B]