“The Departed” - Martin Scorsese (2006)

Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) was another one of his dazzling crime thrillers (such as Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019)), which featured atmospheric and emotive coverage of a gangster underworld.  On this occasion, Scorsese had a $90 million production budget and a star-studded cast, featuring Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Martin Sheen, and Alec Baldwin, to help ensure that The Departed would be another blockbuster at the box office.  And sure enough, the film won great favor with the public and the critics [1,2,3,4].  It also garnered four Oscars, including the one for Best Picture.  One of the other Oscars that the film gained was the one for Best Director – the only time that Scorsese has ever won that particular award (he has been nominated for such an Oscar eight other times over the course of his illustrious career).  Nevertheless, The Departed has not won universal acclaim from all critics, and I am among those who have found some shortcomings with the film [5,6,7,8].

One of the main things that fascinates viewers of The Departed is its convoluted spy-versus-spy story structure.  It has a plot based closely on that of the popular Hong Kong crime thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) that was directed by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and written by  Mak and Felix Chong.  William Monahan’s adaptation of this same story for The Departed won him an Oscar for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay.

The story for The Departed is set in South Boston and involves a struggle between a mobster’s gang in that area and the Massachusetts State Police (MSP).  The leader of that underworld gang is Frank Costello (played by Jack Nicholson), but he has so far been too cagey to ever get arrested by the police.  We see an early example of that caginess when the film shows how Costello has groomed a young man from his neighborhood, Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), to be a mole for his gang inside the police force.  Sullivan advances quickly inside the MSP and is soon accepted to join the Special Investigation Unit (SIU), which is headed by Captain George Ellerby (Alec Baldwin) and whose current main goal is to pin a rap on Costello.  So a spot in the SIU is exactly where Costello has wanted Sullivan to be.

Meanwhile a student about to graduate from the MSP academy, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), is recruited by Captain Oliver Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Staff Sergeant Sean Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) to become a spy for the police inside Costello’s gang.  Queenan and Dignam then appropriately doctor Costigan’s already sullied background to be suitable for him to join Costello’s outfit.

Much of the rest of the film follows the parallel, and mostly separate, narrative threads concerning the activities of the two moles.  Since their identities and activities must be kept secret, the secret identities of Costigan and Sullivan are unknown to each other, as well as unknown to their colleagues on each side of the fence.  When both Costello and the SIU eventually figure out that each of the contesting groups has an unknown rat informant in their ranks, it is not too surprising that both Costigan and Sullivan are then tasked with the jobs of uncovering the hidden mole (i.e. themselves) in their respective groups.

Things get even more entangled when both Sullivan and Costigan wind up talking separately to a young female police psychiatrist, Dr. Madolyn Madden (Vera Farmiga).  And, of course, what should never happen in such circumstance, does indeed come about – Dr. Madden soon has sexual relations with both Sullivan and Costigan.  This unlikely plot contrivance provides a particularly striking narrative opportunity for dwelling on one of the film’s major themes – establishing one’s true identity.  

Throughout the film, we see interactions among people with hidden identities.  And these veiled interactions set up opportunities for the endless double-crosses that take place in the story.  One mind-blowing additional identity obfuscation is revealed when, well into the story, Costigan learns that gang leader Costello is actually an FBI informant and therefore protected.  

But there are two aspects of identity – external and internal.  The external is what is presented to other people, and that can be falsified for opportunistic gain.  But one’s internal identity is how one sees him-or-herself, and this was a matter of deep concern for Sullivan and Costigan.  In particular, Sullivan was concerned about his manhood and sexual identity.  His implied impotence even leads him to unconsciously question his own sexual gender preference.  Costigan, on the other hand, had a guilty conscience and was concerned about his authenticity and the control of his volatile temper.  

Another theme in the film, and one that is common in Scorsese films, concerns masculinity.  Of course this is probably always an issue in the criminal underworld, but it is heavily emphasized in this film.  Sullivan is particularly concerned about his masculinity, and his self-doubts are starkly contrasted with the hyper-confidence of his idol, Costello, whose motto is

    “I don't want to be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me!"

Anyway, the various encounters involving masculinity confrontations and identity misunderstandings only accelerate and fuel further double-crosses as the story proceeds.  And these lead in the closing scenes to a string of murders undertaken for revenge and self-protection.  There is no morality or sense of human justice in this gangland underworld.  Eventually, most of our principal characters wind up getting killed – Sullivan, Costigan, Costello, Capt. Queenan, and Costello’s right-hand man French (Ray Winstone).  But is there a narrative purpose or resolution to all these killings?  What is the story being told here?  It seems that many viewers have problems on this score.  In particular Sean Dignam’s murder of Sullivan at the very end of the film has left many people wondering why (although some plausible explanations have been put forward [9]).

So, overall, what do we walk away with at the close of The Departed?  Although, as I mentioned, the film did win many awards and success at the box office, I would still say that there are a number of weaknesses that detract from the viewing experience.  I have already mentioned the aimlessness of the narrative, but there are other major problems with this production, too.

• Film Production
  Unfortunately, the cinematography of Michael Ballhaus and film editing of Thelma Schoonmakeris is pointlessly agitated, and these only serve to distract the viewer.
      
  
• Acting
  The over-the-top acting, particularly on the part of Jack Nicholson (as Frank Costello) and Mark Wahlberg (as Sean Dignam), is also distracting for the viewer.  Wahlberg is constantly exploding into epithet-filled diatribes that almost lead us to believe his character is incapable of normal discourse.  Even worse is Nicholson’s ham acting as Costello, a key figure in this story.  It is reminiscent of his satanic characterizations from earlier films, but it is way too exaggerated here.  On this score, critics Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez have commented on how Nicholson’s performance helps bring the whole film down [6]:
  

  “Quoting James Joyce, cursing with racist glee, enjoying cocaine-drenched interracial threesomes, and licking squashed bugs off the palm of his hand, his [Nicholson’s] is a routine of typically outsized Jack-ness that’s chillingly fearsome and daunting in spurts (i.e. when his gaze remains stern and his arching eyebrows remain lowered) but flamboyantly cartoonish in its entirety—a description that too often also accurately applies to the alternately scintillating, silly, and distended The Departed.”

• Realism
  In an expressionistic film such as this, we may expect some exaggerations beyond authentic realism, but many of the goings-on in this film are highly implausible, from both physical and psychological perspectives.  I won’t itemize them here, but many situations, such as Madolyn Madden’s involvements with both Sullivan and Costigan, seem very much contrived.
  
  
• Profanity
  Although profanity has been alluded to in the above points, its loud, incessant presence in this film almost suggests that it is also a significant theme on its own.  And it’s not just the gangsters.  I would think that criminals and law-enforcement people would be tougher than this and would not be constantly succumbing to adolescent temper tantrums throughout the day.

So although The Departed has some characteristic Scorsese virtues, it has enough deficiencies to bring it down a few notches.  And this means that the film, despite its flamboyant production values, does not quite measure up to its inspiration, Infernal Affairs.
★★½

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Good and evil, in each other's masks”, RogerEbert.com, (5 July 2007). 
   
2. Manohla Dargis, “Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered With Bloody Deceit”, The New York Times, (6 October 2006).  
   
3. “The Departed”, (A Nutshell) Review, (12 October 2006).   
   
4. Colin McCormick, “10 Greatest Quotes From The Departed”, Screen Rant, (30 January 2020).   
   
5. J. Hoberman, “Bait and Switch”, The Village Voice, (26 September 2006).    
   
6. Nick Schager and Ed Gonzalez, “DVD Review: The Departed”, Slant Magazine, (7 February 2007).   
   
7. Brian Koller, “filmsgraded.com: The Departed (2006) Grade: 55/100", filmsgraded.com (4 April 2014).   
   
8. Dennis Schwartz, “Departed, The”, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews, (n.d.).   
   
9. Shane O'Neill, “The ending of The Departed explained”, Looper, (22 June 2020).   
   

“Casino” - Martin Scorsese (1995)

Martin Scorsese has won fame for a variety of films, but his signature productions have been his films about mobster life.  In particular we can point to what is now Scorsese’s tetralogy on the mafia, featuring in each case Robert De Niro in a pivotal role – Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019).  All four of those films are dark, but I would say the darkest one is Casino.

Like Goodfellas, Casino was based on a non-fiction book by Nicholas Pileggi, and both of those films were co-scripted by Scorsese and Pileggi.  In the case of Casino, Pileggi’s book was Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, and it was based on the real-life experiences of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Tony Spilotro, two Chicago Syndicate gangsters who moved to Las Vegas to get involved in casino operations there.  But although Scorsese’s film here may have been inspired by facts, the finished product is so laden with such expressionistic colorings that one feels they can only could have come from a dark imagination.

The story of Casino begins with Sam "Ace" Rothstein (played by Robert De Niro) providing his voiceover-assisted account of events in his past that led to a car-bombing attack on his life in the early 1980s.  We are told that in 1973 Ace, a gambling expert for the Chicago Syndicate gangster organization, was sent to Las Vegas to take over the running of the casino in the Tangiers hotel there.  The casino was owned by the corrupt Teamster’s Union, which was allied with the Chicago Syndicate.  The Chicago Syndicate also sent Ace’s boyhood friend, Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), to Las Vegas to look after shadier aspects of the mob’s activities.  Ace was just supposed to attend to the casino’s gambling operations, while Nicky was expected to employ his customarily brutal strong-arm actions to enforce the mob’s will. 

When Nicky appears in the story, his account of things is covered in voiceover, too, so the film now has two largely parallel voiceover-driven threads – Ace’s account mostly inside the casino and Nicky’s brutal coercion activities outside.  In both of these threads, reports of mob corruption are presented in brutal detail.  So much of the first two-thirds of this nearly three-hours-long film provides almost an instruction manual in how the mob swindled its customers and the government and in so doing made its fortune in Las Vegas.  In this respect critic Roger Ebert has commented [1]:

“Unlike his other Mafia movies ("Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas"), Scorsese's "Casino" is as concerned with history as with plot and character. The city of Las Vegas is his subject, and he shows how it permitted people like Ace, Ginger [I will come to her next], and Nicky to flourish, and then spit them out, because the Vegas machine is too profitable and powerful to allow anyone to slow its operation.”

So what about the personal narratives of Ace and Nicky?  Well, some of that starts to creep into the story.  Nicky’s relentlessly hot-tempered acts of vengeful violence, which even go beyond what the mob has sanctioned him to do, eventually get him banned from all the casino’s in Vegas.  Meanwhile Ace meets beautiful dancer and hustler Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone) and immediately falls madly in love with her.  Although Ginger is not so hot on Ace, Ace has by now built up a fortune from his gambling activities, and he lures her with money and jewels.  Ginger is essentially hedonistic and greedy, and she can’t really resist Ace’s enticements; and so she eventually agrees to marry him.  Although they soon have a child, their marriage begins to fall apart because of Ginger’s self-centeredness and wandering eye.  In particular, Ginger can’t let go of her old boyfriend, Lester Diamond (James Woods), who seems to be nothing but a good-for-nothing lowlife.  Eventually Ace finds out about Ginger’s continued affair with Lester and also discovers that Lester has just swindled Ginger out of $25,000.  So he arranges for Nicky and his thugs to brutally beat up Lester and put him permanently out of the way.  Ginger then sinks into depression and alcoholism.  After some more disputes with Sam, Ginger even starts a sexual affair with Nicky, which after some further machinations eventually leads to their mutual estrangement.

Finally, the FBI begins to get wind of what the viewer has been informed of all along – that the Syndicate’s operation in Las Vegas has been cheating in its business operations and also skimming the casinos’ profits off the top in order to avoid paying taxes.  The FBI begin closing in on the culprits in the late 1970s and discovering more and more details about the illegal operations.  So the mob bosses respond by beginning to kill off any of their underlings whom they fear might make deals with the authorities and squeal on them.  This is what is behind the murderous attacks on both Ace and Nicky late in the story.

In the end what we have is, as Roger Ebert suggested, more of a historical account of the mafia’s pernicious operations in Las Vegas casinos and not so much of a narrative concerning interesting characters.  After all, the principal characters in Casino – Ace Rothstein, Nicky Santoro, and Ginger McKenna – are all greedy and seem to be only interested in money.  Actually, there are some other personality traits associated to varying degrees with these characters, such as egotistical pride, personal dominance, and revenge.  But these are all of the same narcissistic stripe.

So there are no sympathetic characters here to draw the viewer’s interest into a compelling narrative journey [2].  This is not atypical of a Scorsese film, as I remarked in connection with my review of Goodfellas [3]:      

Actually, narrative structure is not one of Scorsese’s strongest points.  He is something of a master in creating a social milieu, often employing improvisational, ensemble acting that captures the spontaneity of a group situation.  But many times the engaging social environment never encompasses any real narrative goals, and the episodic story just seems to tail off at the end of the film, without achieving any closure.

So does that mean that Casino has nothing of interest for the viewer?  I would say that there is something of interest here, and that is due to Scorsese’s compelling, expressionistic cinematography.  What Scorsese, together with cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Thelma Schoonmaker, have given us is a cinematic depiction of Hell.  The film features an incessant stream of winding tracking shots that endlessly pull the viewer down through disturbing, confined spaces that evoke a vague psychological feeling of entrapment.  These tracking shots are embellished with countless sweeping swish pans that also contribute to the viewer’s sense of disorientation.  In this way the viewer is drawn into a labyrinthine nightmare that was paradoxically created by man for man.  The patrons of the casino, who are suckers drawn into this serpentine inferno, are fecklessly looking for good luck.  But the notions of honesty and fair play are nonexistent there, and there is no chance that good fortune will befall them.  In fact even the vendors in this hell – Ace, Ginger, and Nicky – are unknowingly and hopelessly trapped in it, too. 

So it is Scorsese’s vivid, expressionistic presentation of a nightmarish setting that may ultimately appeal to some viewers of Casino.
★★★

Notes:

1. Roger Ebert, “Casino”, RogerEbert.com, (22 November 1995).    
2. Marjorie Baumgarten, “Casino”, Austin Chronicle, (22 November 1995).   
3. The Film Sufi, “‘Goodfellas’ - Martin Scorsese”, The Film Sufi, (7 March 2013).   

“The Irishman” - Martin Scorsese (2019)

Martin Scorsese’s latest epic about gangland violence in America, The Irishman (2019), is one of his most ambitious works and has attracted widespread praise [1,2,3,].  With a massive production budget of $159 million and a running time of about 3½ hours, the film is seen by some as the capstone to Scorsese’s career, and a fitting final work that reflects on his famous earlier mobster masterpieces – Mean Streets (1973), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995).  Indeed, viewers familiar with Scorsese will see more than just a thematic connection spanning those works, because The Irishman features two iconic Scorsese actors from those earlier films: Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.

The story of this film concerns the real-life experiences of a gangster hitman, Frank Sheeran (he is "The Irishman”), and it is based on the nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses (2004) by Charles Brandt, which is based on Sheeran’s account of his life.  Steven Zaillian adapted Brandt’s’ book for the screen, and the film features superb production values, notably the  cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto and the film editing by Thelma Schoonmaker.  I also liked the moody background music, which featured many hit songs from the eras depicted.

However, a production technique used in the film that has particularly fascinated critics is Scorsese’s use of digital technology to touch-up the faces of some of his actors.  All three of Scorsese’s lead actors – the already-mentioned Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as well as Al Pacino – were over 75 years of age at the time of the making of this film, but the characters they had to portray in some flashback sequences (the bulk of the film) were much younger.  In fact in the case of Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro), some scenes even show him in his 20s and 30s.  So Scorsese employed digital technology to “de-age” some of his actors.  In my opinion, this doesn’t work very well, but you can decide for yourself, and in any case this is not a major drawback of the film.

The story of The Irishman is told by switching back and forth across three narrative threads. 

1. The film begins in the outer thread showing Frank Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro) about eighty years of age in a nursing home (Sheeran died in 2003 at the age of 83).  Sheeran directly addresses the viewer and commences giving his account of his life.
    
2. The second narrative thread covers a long car trip that Sheeran took in 1975 from Philadelphia to Detroit with his Mafia “boss” and friend, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), along with their two wives.  The ostensible reason for their trip is so that they can attend the wedding ceremony of  the daughter of Russell’s cousin, union lawyer Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano).  However, Frank and the viewer will learn that there is also another reason for making this drive and that a major event takes place at the end of the trip.
    
3. The third narrative thread, and the one that constitutes the bulk of the film material, covers the events surrounding Frank’s life from sometime in the 1950s up to that fateful 1975 road trip, at which point threads 2 and 3 are merged. 

All of this material comes from the real Frank Sheeran’s first-hand testimony and will naturally be assumed by the viewer to be true.  However, since the publication of Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses, there have been a number of revelations indicating that Sheeran fabricated key elements of this story [4].  So it is best for us to take this material as an interesting story, but one that does not necessarily constitute documentary truth.

The film begins in the first narrative thread with the elderly Frank Sheeran in a rest home and launching into the telling of his story.  He starts off by recalling his 1975 road trip to Detroit to attend the wedding of Bill Bufalino’s daughter, and the presentation of the beginning of this trip moves us into the second narrative thread.  Then, presumably in order to provide background on how Frank met Russell Bufalino, we move quickly into the third narrative thread.

Frank was a truck driver in Philadelphia in the 1950s, and he began illegally selling his loads to a local crime family.  He was eventually charged with criminal activity, but union lawyer Bill Bufalino manages to get him off.  Bill Bufalino then introduces Frank to local crime boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel, now aged 80 and also de-aged) and to his cousin Russell Bufalino, who is the Mafia head of Northeastern Pennsylvania region.  Soon Frank starts working for Russell.  In a discussion with Russell, Frank affirms his commitment to always following orders by recalling how he ruthlessly shot surrendered prisoners in World War II when  he was ordered to do so.  Gradually, Russell and Frank become friends.

There follows a series of episodes detailing how Frank served as a hitman for the Mob.  Although these tales don’t seem to advance the storyline much, they provide some of the essential atmosphere and color for the film.  All along the way, we see that Frank is a ruthless killer who will murder anyone, even acquaintances, who he has been told the Mob wants erased.  There are a lot of different characters introduced here, and the viewer almost needs a background document to keep track of them all [5].

Eventually, Russell introduces Frank to Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the important Teamsters Union and a person with close ties to the Mafia and Russell.  Hoffa takes a liking to Frank, and he ultimately hires Frank as his personal bodyguard.  This now sets up a potential conflict that will eventually prove crucial in this film.  Loyalty is a fundamental trait and posture in Frank’s world, and he now must be loyal to two different masters: Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa.  What will happen if those two masters come into conflict?

The film now traces some historical events likely to be familiar to many viewers.  After the election of John F. Kennedy as U. S. President, his younger brother Robert Kennedy, serving as U. S. Attorney General, carried out a campaign to root out corruption in labor unions and specifically targeted Jimmy Hoffa.  Hoffa is finally convicted of criminal activity and sent to prison in 1964.  

During the time Hoffa is in prison, other personages take over running the Teamsters Union, and the Mob families come to terms with the new union leaders.  However, in 1971 President Richard Nixon pardons Hoffa, and when he is released, Hoffa sets out to reclaim ownership of his union.  This makes the crime bosses unhappy, and Russell Bufalino urges Frank, who he knows is close to Hoffa, to get Hoffa to back off from reclaiming his union.  This Frank tries to do, but the headstrong Hoffa scoffs at such a suggestion and says he knows so much about his enemies’ nefarious activities that they will be afraid to touch him.

This brings the story to join up with the second narrative thread – the trip to Detroit, where, it is revealed, Hoffa happens to be.  On the way, Russell gives Frank instructions from the Mafia to kill Hoffa.  Why Sheeran was chosen for this job has been questioned by some, but perhaps the Mafia felt that Hoffa’s friendship with Sheeran would allow his assailant more freedom to carry out his attack surreptitiously. 

In any case, we are now confronted with the fundamental narrative conflict/issue in the film.  Frank Sheeran, for whom loyalty is his ultimate badge of honor, must choose between loyalty to Russell Bufalino and loyalty to Jimmy Hoffa.  They are each not only his direct superiors but also his two closest friends.  Oddly, Scorsese doesn’t spend much time showing Frank wrestling with this conflict.  Frank just goes ahead and follows Russell’s orders.  The sequence showing Sheeran’s murder of Jimmy Hoffa is abrupt and brutal.  And it shows to the viewer once more just how cold-hearted Frank Sheeran really is.

Hoffa’s corpse is quickly cremated, and the police never do determine who committed the murder.  However, Sheeran, Russell Bufalino, and various other gangsters shown in the film are later convicted of unrelated crimes and sent to prison to serve long sentences.  In the end Sheeran is released from prison and winds up in a nursing home.  The final sequences show Frank alone and seeking release from the final “legal case” against him – absolution from a Catholic priest for all the sins he has committed.  But even here, Frank admits that he feels no real remorse for what he has done.

This ending points to a fundamental problem with this story.  Our main character, Frank Shearen, on whom almost all of the focalization is devoted, is a cold and opaque black box.  He seems to lack any kind of compassion, and we never get much of a handle on what he may be feeling.  The other two principal characters, Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, are selfish, it is true; but they are sensitive, they have passions, and they reach out to other people.  Of those two characters, we are more likely to prefer the Hoffa character, who is more straightforward and authentic than the more manipulative Russell Bufalino.  Both Joe Pesci and Al Pacino give outstandingly fervent performances in these respective roles of Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, and they are the ones we want to see more of, not Shearen.  Instead, we are left for much of the film to dwell on De Niro’s uncharacteristically wooden personality as Shearen.

Another weakness is the absence of women in this tale.  Even though mafia types are mostly male chauvinists, they still usually have passions for women.  Here the women companions are  barely seen.  The one woman we do see, Frank’s daughter Peggy Sheeran (played by Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin at different stages in the girl’s life) is given almost no words to speak in the film, but we do at least see from her usually frowning glances that she is persistently put off by her father’s thuggish behavior.

Some people have seen The Irishman as a comedy [3].  Others have seen it as a further pursuance of the American fascination with Mafiosi family life [6].  But I would say the presence of either of these themes is very limited.  Instead, in my opinion, the predominant themes in the film are loneliness and emptiness.  If this is Scorsese’s swan song, it’s an incredibly bleak and sad one.  The whole tenor of this film is one of hopelessness and of the ultimate futility of life.

★★★

Notes:

1. Richard Brody, "Watching "The Irishman" on Netflix Is the Best Way to See It", The New Yorker, (2 December 2019).   
2. A.O. Scott, “The Irishman’ Review: The Mob’s Greatest Hits, in a Somber Key”, The New York Times, (27 September 2019; updated 30 October 2019).   
3. Matt Zoller Seitz, “The Irishman”, RogerEbert.com(1 November 2019).   
4. Jack Goldsmith, "Jimmy Hoffa and The Irishman: A True Story?", The New York Review of Books, (26 September 2019).    
5. Nick Allen, “Who’s Who in The Irishman: A Character Guide”, Vulture, (27 November 2019).   
6. Richard Whittaker, “The Irishman”, The Austin Chronicle, (8 November 2019).   

“The Wolf of Wall Street” - Martin Scorsese (2013)

Marti Scorsese’s black comedy The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) relates the hectic experiences of a Wall Street financial trader whose life story serves as a metaphor for the out-of-control world of today’s market trading.  The film was an immediate success (in fact Scorsese’s highest grossing film), and perhaps one of the reasons why the public was so fascinated with the story is that the outlandish, hard-to-believe events presented are based on the true-life account of the main character, Jordan Belfort [1].  In any case the film was popular with the critics, too, and garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. 

The narrative of The Wolf of Wall Street has affinities with one of Scorsese’s best films, Goodfellas (1990) – both films describe something of a netherworld of vice and recklessness, and they try to capture the seductive tempos of those worlds and what they lead to. But in my view, The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t measure up to Goodfellas, and I will try to explain why.

One of the differences between the two films is that the characters in The Wolf of Wall Street, despite their sex-and-drugs lifestyles, are not very interesting, even though they presumably are more educated and sophisticated than the “wiseguys” of Goodfellas.  This reduces most of the personal interactions depicted to mere silliness.  I did find two of the interactions interesting, however, and the film’s tale revolves around them.  If there had been more such interactions, the film might have had a more sustained narrative.

The story begins with Jordan Belfort (exuberantly played by Leonardo DiCaprio) facing the camera and beginning to tell the viewer about his roller-coaster life as a financial analyst.  Then we move to flashback scenes of the various stages of his career.

1.  Early Days on Wall Street

Belfort starts out in his mid-twenties trying to enter the financial marketing world and manages to join a Wall Street firm as a trader.  On his first day at the firm, he is taken out to lunch by a senior trader, Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), who clues the young Belfort in on how to make it on Wall Street.

Now we have been told that financial markets are designed to make it easy to move resources over to organizations and operations that are comparatively more productive. Thus by this means new ideas can be given resources to implement them, and this should make the world richer.  But Hanna, in this 4½-minute lunch scene, which is a tour-de-force for McConaughey, articulates in capsule form the narcissistic philosophy of how financial trading really works, and that is an underlying theme of the film.  He tells Belfort that his only professional goal should be to “move money from your client’s pocket into your pocket.”  And he crucially reminds Belfort:

“We don’t create [anything] . . . . we don’t build anything”

The only thing to do, he is told, is to get the client to keep reinvesting whatever he or she has earned in new stocks, so that he can thereby collect more commissions for himself.  “Keep the client on the Ferris wheel,” he tells Belfort.  And to stay energized at this constant task, he tells the young man, he needs to indulge in as much sex and cocaine consumption as possible.

Though the investment company Belfort joined soon folds as a result of a stock market crash, he learns about penny stocks and quickly assembles a collection of misfits to help staff his own company in this area. 

2. Making it Big
Not only does Belfort make relatively high commissions with his penny stocks, he learns how to employ shady “pump and dump” tactics to artificially inflate stock prices of his own stocks and then dump them at a profit.  Soon he is filthy rich, and he continues to employ the ideas he learned from Mark Hanna, including encouraging heavy doses of sex and drugs at his company, which he has named Stratton Oakmont to make it sound like it has a suitable pedigree.

This section of the film is mostly an account of how Belfort indulges himself in connection with various after-hour orgies that he sponsors at his company. He meets a gorgeous blonde, Naomi (Margot Robbie),  and though married to an attractive woman, he cannot suppress his appetites there, either. In short order he gets a divorce and marries Naomi.

3.  The FBI Enters the Picture
Stratton Oakmont’s nefarious swindles come to the attention not only of the SEC, but also the FBI, which is concerned not with financial irregularities but with criminal activities.  Belfort receives a visit on his luxurious yacht from FBI officer, Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who wants to learn more about the company’s operations.  This conversation, a 7-minute  sequence, is the second interesting personal interaction in the film and Scorsese’s high point, as Belfort and Denham politely try to avoid revealing what is truly on each of their minds.

This doesn’t stop Belfort from continuing his hedonistic ways, and there are more sex orgies and drug-imbibing scenes presented. There is a scene showing Belfort and his sidekick Donnie Azoff  (Jonah Hill) staggering and struggling under an overdose of quaaludes that some people find side-splittingly funny.   I found this kind of slapstick stuff just sophomoric and only a distraction.

Now with the FBI on his back and watching his transactions, Belfort seeks to sequester his ill-gotten gains into a Swiss bank account, and he figures out a way to sneak his cash over there by hiding it on a woman accomplice’s body.

4.  Downfall
Belfort almost gets away with everything, but eventually the law catches up with him.  Even though he has given up some of his worst practices, the FBI charges him with crimes associated with his past activities, and he faces the prospects of a long prison sentence unless he “cooperates”.  This he willingly does, and he agrees to wear a “wire” and incriminate all his past business associates.  In appreciation for his double-crossing his former compatriots, the US government gives him a 3-year sentence (he served 22 months) and fines him $110 million.  But he doesn’t lose heart or his belief in his own abilities to effectively swindle people.  At the end of the film, we see Belfort visiting Auckland, New Zealand, and selling his new package of persuasive techniques.  Incidentally the unnamed actor in the film who introduces him (DiCaprio) to the Auckland audience is the real Jordan Belfort.

So the narrative arc seems basically similar to that of Goodfellas. Again we have a protagonist getting more irretrievably immersed in out-of-control illegal activities and finally saving himself by ratting on his colleagues. But to me Wolf on Wall Street doesn’t deliver the goods that Goodfellas did.

For one thing, the adolescent, frat-boy humor in Wolf on Wall Street wears thin pretty quickly.  For much of the film’s near three-hour running time, the audience is treated to one ridiculous drunken binge after another.  This is evidently intended to be funny, because we are watching supposedly well-educated, sophisticated financiers engaged in these silly shenanigans.  The only thing missing is the skateboards.

Another problem is that most of the characters are not well developed and are largely uninteresting.  In Goodfellas, there was a steadily intensifying degree of the protagonist, Henry Hill, being out of control as the story progressed.  This gave the entire narrative of that film a sense of progression towards disaster and a sense of movement in Hill’s character. But with The Wolf of Wall Street, there isn’t this movement.  It’s just one dang thing after another. At least Jonah Hill, in the role of Belfort’s sidekick, is goofy enough to serve as a foil to enhance DiCaprio’s charisma. But much of his screen time is devoted to showing him doing something outrageously gross or weird that is presumably not in keeping with what would appear to be his nerdy character.

Another distinction between this film and Goodfellas is that in that earlier film there were more two-way interactions involving principal characters – sometimes they do things, other times things happen to them.  But in The Wolf of Wall Street, the interactions are mainly one-way – the principal characters, Belfort and Donnie, are primarily only perpetrators and wreak havoc on others.  There was one interesting interaction scene – the one between Belfort and FBI agent Patrick Denham conducted on Belfort’s yacht.  If there had been more scenes like that, then we would have had a more interesting story.

Scorsese was limited, of course, by having to stick to what is thought to be a true story, Belfort’s own published account. But there are suspicions that Belfort embellished his own story, anyway, so sticking closely to that account may not have been the best strategy.

OK, if The Wolf of Wall Street is lacking in the degree to which it portrays interesting characters and how they develop, perhaps we should look at the film as a broad social satire in the fashion of Dr. Strangelove (1964).  From this perspective we might consider that this film is satirically depicting a crazy, out-of-control aspect of our increasingly interconnected financial market system, much as Dr. Strangelove depicted an out-of-control military-industrial complex. 

In the US there has emerged a paradoxical political coalition of convenience that links the opportunist banking and financial sectors with the conservative right-wing portion of society – the top and the bottom in terms of wealth.  These groupings are joined, because they both claim that US society success should be based on limiting the involvement of the federal government in their lives.  But what the conservatives fail to see is that the government does have a legitimate role to play in protecting the commons, human rights, and maintaining a stable and open market environment.  So we might think that The Wolf of Wall Street exposes the financial sector for what it really is: an extractive and exploitative collection of manipulators primarily devoted to fleecing the public with their various types of pump-and-dump tactics. This perspective could have been adopted and presented in the film – indeed the conversation with Mark Hanna in the early stages appears to head the film in this direction. But the viewer is never given any coverage or analysis, even in simplified form, of the financial operations that are thought to have been harmful or criminal. And so this potentially compelling satirical perspective is more or less dropped as the film progresses in favor of showing more meaningless gross-outs and over-indulgences.

So as I mentioned above, there are two interesting conversations in The Wolf of Wall Street that could have taken the film in interesting directions: (1) the conversation with investor Mark Hanna (in the direction of social satire) and (2) the conversation with FBI agent Patrick Denham (in the direction of a character-oriented narrative).  But neither of these directions were taken, and so the opportunity for having a truly interesting and entertaining narrative was lost.
★★½

Notes:

1. Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street (2007), Bantam.

“Goodfellas” - Martin Scorsese (1990)

Martin Scorsese’s best films were those that featured performances of Robert De Niro, including his breakthrough with Mean Streets (1973) and his greatest work, Taxi Driver (1976). Their working together seemed to bring out the soul of New York City – it’s 24-hour intensity, angst, and nervous vulnerability.  So when they teamed up again with Goodfellas (1990), it was no surprise that the result was another landmark in Scorsese’s celebrated oeuvre. In fact more than a few people say that Goodfellas is the greatest gangster film ever.  I am not sure if I would go that far, but the film does go a long way towards capturing the unique feeling of what it is like to be a New York gangster.  And in doing so, it featured a narrative scheme that was perhaps Scorsese’s best.

Actually, narrative structure is not one of Scorsese’s strongest points.  He is something of a master in creating a social milieu, often employing improvisational, ensemble acting that captures the spontaneity of a group situation.  But many times the engaging social environment never encompasses any real narrative goals, and the episodic story just seems to tail off at the end of the film, without achieving any closure.  In Goodfellas, though, Scorsese weaves a tale that makes that weakness into a feature of the film.  That is, the story is about people who cannot live their lives in accordance with the usual goals that most people set for themselves.  For such people (the gangsters presented in Goodfellas) ordinary life is too boring; they need to feel the rush that comes from drugs, sex, gambling, and crime.  And if they keep going at it, their lives will progressively spin out of control, as it does for the principal character in Goodfellas.  The great strength of the film is that it gives a viewer a feeling for this psychological sense of progressive desperation.

The story covers the experiences of Henry Hill, who as a teenager joins the Lucchese crime family, one of the five mafia families (the “Five Families”) dominating organized crime in New York.  In this underworld milieu, set mostly in Brooklyn, there are five principal characters:

• Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta), an Irish-born Brooklyn boy who gains entry into the Italian-dominated crime scene.  
• Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco), a Jewish girl that Henry courts and marries.
• Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro), another Irishman in the Italian mob scene and Henry’s hero.  Conway is a high roller who continually pulls off high-payoff crimes and buys off the police at the same time.
• Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), a reckless, hot-tempered young gangster who often works with Conway and Hill.
• Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), a local “capo” (mid-level mafia captain) who runs the show in the Brooklyn neighborhood.

The narrative focalization is almost exclusively on Henry, but sometimes it includes that of his wife, Karen. 

The film’s story is an adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s 1986 nonfiction book Wiseguy, which is evidently based on real people and events in the New York crime scene.  Scorsese and Pileggi  coauthored the screenplay, and what they achieved was something that depicts a life progressively spiraling out of control.  By the end of the film, the viewer is fully immersed in Hill’s self-induced maelstrom.  Along the way, the narrative passes through about eight levels of turmoil, from “out-of control level 1" to 8 (OOC-1 to OOC-8).

1.   Teenage Henry
The first stage is set in 1955, and Henry is a boy of about thirteen who dreams of being a gangster.  He detects that a neighborhood taxistand is a local outlet for the mafia, and worms his way into the confidence of the local operators by doing odd jobs for them.  Soon he is defying his parents’s strict rules and  playing hooky from school. 

2.  Young Mobster
By 1963, Henry is a full-fledged young mobster, and we see how the economic world of the mob works.  They don’t use traceable bank accounts, so money is exchanged in wads of high-denomination bills.  The economic life of the mob is purely extractive.  They don’t produce anything useful, they simply extract and squeeze money out of the existing population.  For example, there is a sequence where the proprietor of a  local nightclub hangout, who has been hassled by local toughs, seeks protection from Paulie.  Paulie agrees to become a partner of the club, but purely in order to liquidate it.  The local gang gradually sells off all the movable goods of the place, collecting cash in exchange for debt.  When the nightclub is finally hopelessly in debt, they have their boys set a fire to burn it down so they can collect the insurance. 

This kind of extractive economy is not unusual – in fact it is generally the way much of the world operates, as outlined in the book Why Nations Fail (2012) [1].  Large-scale organisations around the globe in the 20th and 21st centuries have operated according to such extractive principles, including (a) Kemal Ataturk’s Republican People’s Party in Turkey, (b) the Soviet Union’s Communist Party, (c) the North Korean Communist Party, and (d) the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East.  The main operating principles of these organisations dedicated to extraction is absolute loyalty to the team of insiders and bribery or bullying for outsiders.  They may advertise an ideology for propaganda purposes, but their main goal is prosperity for the elite at the expense of others. To become a member of the gang, you just have to be useful and loyal.  As Henry Hill says, he early on learned two important lessons: “never rat on your friends and always keep your mouth shut.” 

Henry now regularly works with Tommy DeVito under the command of Jimmy Conway in the course of hijacking trucks.  He also begins dating Karen.  When he learns that she has been groped by a neighborhood boy, he goes over to his house and brutally pistol-whips him.  He is now at OOC-2.  Karen is attracted to the flashy lifestyle, too, and soon she and Henry are married.

3.  The Murder of a "made" Gangster
The next sequences introduce the viewer to just how violent Henry’s associates can be.  Henry’s hotheaded colleague, Tommy DeVito, is obsessed about threat to his ego, and he goes ballistic when he feels slighted by remarks from another gangster, Billy Batts.  So together with Jimmy Conway, they brutally murder Batts in revenge. But even in the violent gangster world, this was a serious mistake, because Batts belonged to a different crime “family”, the Gambino Family. In addition, Batts was a “made” member of that family. Once a person is “made”, he cannot be harmed without bringing on the vengeful wrath of the crime family to which he belongs.  Anyway, Henry loyally stands by Tommy, and together with Conway they bury Batts in a secret location so that the Gambino family will not find out (OOC-3).

4.  Affairs with Janice and Sandy
On the personal relationship plane, Henry’s life also begins to unravel (OOC-4).  He starts an adulterous affair with another woman, Janice, and later has relations with her friend, Sandy.  Meanwhile he witnesses Tommy murder an innocent busboy who insulted him, but Henry stays loyal to his mates. 

5.  Drugs
Eventually Henry’s criminal activities get him sent to prison, and while serving his four-year sentence inside, he begins to make money selling cocaine.  Upon his release in 1978, Henry continues his criminal hijacks with Tommy and Jimmy, but he keeps going with his drug dealing on the side.  The drug racket was something that Paulie and his crew wouldn’t touch, so this is a further step towards chaos for Henry (OOC-5).

6. The Lufthansa Gig
Jimmy Conway now engineers his biggest ever operation, an intricate heist of a Lufthansa shipment that nets six million dollars.  But Conway is paranoid and even more out of control than Henry Hill is.  He begins killing off his criminal partners for fear that their indiscretions will lead to his own arrest.  Also Tommy DeVito is murdered by the Gambino family in revenge for the murder of Billy Batts.  So now there’s noone left that Henry can trust in a pinch (OOC-6).

7.  Penultimate Day 
The downward narrative spiral now settles on a single day in 1980, homing in on the deterioration of Henry’s control of what’s going on around him.  Addicted to, and insomnia ridden from, his own cocaine, Henry is nervously trying to maintain both his family and his illicit affair with Sandy, as well as trying to run his drug dealing operation.  It’s just too much for him; at the end of that very day he gets ambushed and arrested by the narcotics police (OOC-7).

8.  Selling Out
On his release, Henry realizes that he is out of options. Paulie has abandoned him for doing drugs, and Jimmy looks set to have him whacked. So he rats on his friends and joins the Witness Protection Program. At the end of the film, he has disappeared into anonymity and is ruing the demise of his thrill-studded existence. But although his life appears to be finally settled down and back in control, his ultimate act of gang betrayal means that the Lucchese family will forever be out to get him (OOC-8).

Scorsese effectively sets the tone in Goodfellas in a number of ways.  The use of contemporary pop music on the soundtrack establishes the social context, as it similarly did in Meanstreets, but it also conveys the general superficiality of the wiseguy social scene.  This lightweight, “cruising” mood is punctuated by the emphatic brutality of the beatings and killings that sometimes take place – evidence that savage hatred is just below the surface and can erupt at any time.  

The overall nervous tone is supported by the acting performances. Lorraine Bracco adds a memorable feminine component to the generally male-dominated scene (although I’m not sure why her role is given some narrative focalization and voiceover – she mostly disappears from our attention in the latter stages).  Robert De Niro is, as usual, intense; and he adds a crucial edge to the social climate.  But it is Joe Pesci’s performance as the loose cannon Tommy DeVito that puts the real stamp on the film.  His role personifies the reckless and combustible lifestyle of the mafia wiseguys. 

Scorsese’s cinematography is also integral to the storytelling.  There are many sinuous pans and tracking shots that conjure up the delirium in Henry’s agitated psyche, and they all fit into the expressionistic mood. In particular, there are two memorable long tracking shots that follow Henry into the interior of a wiseguy meeting venue and which stand out in my memory.  The second of these is about three minutes in duration and starts at the curbside outside of the Copacabana nightclub and then follows Henry and Karen down the stairs through the service quarters and finally into the main serving room, where a table is prepared for the couple in the company of their wiseguy companions.

All of this contributes to the principal evocation of how temporality operates for the wiseguys in Goodfellas.  For these people, life constantly needs the stimulation that comes from crime and violence, which becomes an addiction, just like heroin. These stimulating events provide the temporal order to their lives. William S. Burroughs long ago pointed out that heroin addiction is not just an addition to a chemical – the real reason why heroin addicts go back to their addictive behaviour, even after supposedly being “cured” of their chemical addiction, is because they want to live on “junk time” [2].  Junk time is how temporality is realigned when you are on junk (heroin). The ups and downs that come from craving for and finally getting a junk dosage is what provides the temporal movement in their lives.  When they are on “non junk time”, everything is flat and pointless – life has no meaning for them. The junkie then feels he has to go back to the junk. So, too, is the case for the thrill-addicted wiseguys, whose short-term cravings are for the thrill of being treated by their peers as “somebody”. 

To overcome this obsession with the staccato-patterned blasting of short-term events, we all need to think in terms of longer narratives and longer-term goals.  When we look over and recall things that happened over the entire course of our own experience, we sometimes realize that seemingly trivial long-ago moments of loving compassion for another person were profoundly eventful and meaningful.  We didn’t realize it at the time, but those quiet moments fit into a larger pattern of significance to our lives. Recognizing this bigger picture, we need to go out and help other people, other potential wiseguys, realize the importance of those longer-term narratives and how they are put together via small but meaningful interactions.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), Crown Business.  See also their weblog: http://whynationsfail.com/.
2. William S. Burroughs, Junkie (1953), Ace Books.

“Taxi Driver” - Martin Scorsese (1976)

Taxi Driver (1976) was a landmark film in many ways.  Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or in 1976, the film represents the peak and signature performances of director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro. But beyond those specific individual achievements, what singles the film out and marks it for greatness is its uniquely powerful expressionistic presentation [1]. By “expressionism” I mean here that the mode of artistic presentation entails depicting the entire external world as a manifestation of the inner feelings (the psychological interior) of the narrator (usually the author and/or principal character). The German Expressionistic films of the Weimar Republic period, reflecting the general Expressionistic art movement in painting and architecture at the time, presented expressionism at its most explicit, with severe and artificial distortions of the depicted physical world that depicted a disturbed state of mind.  Since then expressionistic film expression has been more modulated, but there are still exemplar filmmakers in that mode today, including Zhang Yimou and Werner Herzog.  However, Taxi Driver probably tops them all in terms of the urban expressionistic nightmare it depicts in an ostensibly realistic setting.

Taxi Driver also carries with it Existentialistic overtones, a not uncommon artistic companion of expressionism, since this film portrays the sense of deep-seated anxiety that is characteristic of the existentialist sensibility.  Modern exemplary filmmakers that tend to focus on the existentialist mode include Michelangelo Antonioni,Wong Kar Wai, and Majid Majidi, but there are many films that conform to this genre.  As I have discussed at greater length in "Existentialism in Film 1" [2] and "Phenomenology and Red Desert" [3], existentialist films involve a profound sense of both alienation and transcendence.  Alienation here is general: it involves a fundamental sense of separation and isolation on the part of the protagonist from his or her social environment and entire world of involvements. The reason for this sense of separation can be found in the manner in which Existentialism contrasts with Essentialism.  Essentialism, which we could also call Objectivism, applies the principles of objective, natural science to everything and is the conventional means by which our modern Western culture characterizes the world.  According to this mode of thinking, everything in the world can be understood  in terms of its essence, which is what distinguishes it from other things.  We can then understand the entire world (from the Essentialist perspective) in terms of the state-based relationships connecting these essences. Existentialism, however, has a perspective that contrasts with Essentialism by emphasizing not essence but existence – something more primordial and beyond the relationship-based notion of essence.  The Existentialist position argues that there is something fundamentally missing about Essentialism – we feel that we are more than just the essences that are said to describe us, and we feel alienated from such a diminished view of our existence.  Existence entails contingency and possibility.  There is something we feel that must transcend the essentialist depiction of reality.  The Existentialist viewpoint is concerned with more than a description of what is.  It senses transcendent contingency and possibility – that eery awareness that unforeseeable and unfathomable events, even our own deaths, may be imminent.

Early definitive portraits of Existentialistic unease appeared years ago in two groundbreaking novels: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (aka The Outsider, 1942/1946)  and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938/1949), in both of which the respective protagonists famously felt separated from everything around them.  But these works convey their message by means of written words, which are inherently grounded in Essentialism.  And as I remarked in those two earlier film essays, the film medium is probably an even better vehicle than the written word for the conveyance of existentialist and expressionist feelings. In fact, the direct transcription of outstanding expressionistic/existentialist written works onto the screen is often not as successful as other works that are similar, but have been more specifically sculpted for the cinematic medium.  Thus Brazil (1986) was a more effective expression of its artistic inspiration, Orwell’s novel 1984, than the explicit film adaptation of that novel (1984, 1984).  So, too, Taxi Driver is a more effective cinematic presentation of Existentialist alienation than Luchino Viconti’s The Stranger (1967), the film adaptation of Camus’s novel.  This was no accidental side effect of the filmmakers’ cinematic stylistics: Taxi Driver’s scriptwriter, Paul Schrader, had earlier written a book on film aesthetics, Transcendental Style In Film [4], which  explicitly examines how alienation and transcendence have been presented on film by some earlier masters.

Note that when Existentialistic stories are presented, the narrative structures are rather different from more conventional stories.  In most typical narratives, there is a metaphorical journey undertaken by the protagonist(s), who identify and seek a remote target that must be reached for fulfilment or salvation. Thus these protagonists generally know where they initially are and where they must go.  But in Existentialistic stories the protagonist is intrinsically lost from the outset.  There is a deep sense that something is wrong, but also a fundamental bewilderment in terms of where to go or what to do.  This sense of aimlessness and incapacitation in Existentialist works can frustrate some viewers and critics, who are waiting for the narrative journey to take shape and set forth [5]. The narrative structure of Taxi Driver struggles with this problem of aimlessness, and in the end Scorsese and Schrader manage to fashion a narrative scheme founded on this desperate search for a meaningful goal.  Anyway, what matters in this film is not so much its narrative structure as its expressionistic depiction of a dark, disturbing mood.

The story of Taxi Driver concerns a young ex-US Marine and Vietnam War veteran, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who gets a job as a taxicab driver for a New York City cab fleet.  Bickle is a loner who lives in a spare, one-room flat, with only a diary for expressing his thoughts.  He drives all night, usually from 6pm to 6am, through the bizarre Manhattan underworld peopled by social outliers, such as prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts, and various underworld types.  Everything is seen from his point of view, with occasional voiceovers recording his diary notes or letters that he sends to his parents, who are far removed from his existence.

Travis is cut off from everything and everyone, with no meaningful relationships in his life.  As the story unfolds, he will encounter two different women with whom he briefly attempts to strike up relationships.  These are overlaid on top of his fundamental problem of alienation: his dysfunctional relationship with the world.  So over the course of the film, there are three concurrent narrative threads to follow along, all of which are his attempts to come to terms with his sense of alienation:

• the relationship with Betsy
• the relationship with Iris
• the relationship with the world.  Admittedly this one is rather general, but it makes sense to characterize it as problematic relationship in this context.

With respect to all three relationships, Travis tries to overcome his sense of powerlessness and futility with respect to having an authentic impact on his surroundings.  The story breaks down into roughly four sections that relate the frustrating evolution of these relationships.

1.  Hopeful Engagement
The early scenes show Travis cruising through the New York City night scene and delivering his fares.  Despite his worldly experience as a US Marine, Travis is fundamentally an innocent, almost naive, individual, who is disturbed by the corrupt world of New York City night people.  At the close of every workday, he has to clean out the semen, filth, and blood that is left in the back seat of his taxi by his degenerate passengers.  Travis’s sense of alienation and unrelenting distress is reflected in the insomnia he suffers, which further deadens him to his surroundings.  One day, however, he spies a beautiful girl on the street, Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), who is a volunteer campaign worker for a US Presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine.  In all the filth and grime of the city environment, here is a beautiful flower of perfection. Immediately Travis feels that he and Betsy must share some intrinsic inner connection – she must be his destined soul-mate.  How many of us have sometimes felt this way?  We encounter a person of the opposite gender who is just so perfectly suited to our inner nature, that there must have been some destiny behind our meeting. 

Despite obvious differences in class and breeding, Travis is boundlessly confident that he and Betsy were meant for each other, and he boldly approaches her directly.  For her part, Betsy is guardedly charmed by Travis’s effervescent innocence.  So Travis now has a hopeful goal and a route to fulfilment.

When Senator Palantine hires his taxi one time, Travis’s romantic enthusiasm for Betsy spills over to embrace the senator’s candidacy.  Palantine, himself, is an unbelievably empty-headed political hypocrite who merely repeats the mindless mantra, “we are the people”, throughout the film.  His character is something of a master stroke on Scorsese’s part, because Palantine’s platitudes effectively represent the dead-end emptiness of essentialism.  Unconsciously, Travis will come to sense that Palantine is the embodiment of his own frustrations with the world as the film wears on.

2.  Powerlessness and Frustration
Travis’s optimism proves transient.  Despite his innocence, Betsy soon recoils from Travis’s lack of polish and dumps him.  Innocence has been rebuked and rejected.  Then a 12-year-old street girl, Iris (Jodie Foster), jumps into Travis’s cab and urges him to get her away from some imminent danger.  But Travis hesitates, and the girl is wrestled out of his cab by her drug-dealing pimp, Matthew (Harvey Keitel), aka “Sport”, while Travis simply watches helplessly from the front seat of his cab.  Here is the city’s corruption of innocence at its most extreme: a pretty, underage girl coerced into prostitution.

The solution to life’s problems seems invariably to be violence.  One of Travis’s passengers (played by Scorsese, himself), tells him that he will kill his unfaithful wife by blowing her to pieces with a 44 Magnum pistol.  This seems to be the only path to take for Travis, too.  He buys an armory of guns from an illegal weapons merchant and starts preparing for some unspecified mission of violence.

In the meantime, Travis meets Iris again and arranges to become of her “clients”.  His goal is to rescue her from her degenerate life, but he doesn’t know how.  He does manage to make some sort of connection with her, though, and though transient, this turns out to be his only meaningful relationship in the film.

3.  Self Destruction
Existentialist rejection of the Essentialist-modelled world can lead to a rejection of one’s own essence-derived self conception.  This is clearly happening to Travis, as the viewer sees him heading down the path of self-destruction.  Travis evidently wants to strike out at the indifferent world and do something that has an impact on it.  His symbolic target becomes Charles Palantine, whose inauthentic disconnection from true human engagement somehow must unconsciously make him the ultimate target of Travis’s wrath. 

Travis prepares a letter to be sent to Iris with some money and a message that says, “at the time you read this, I will be dead.”  Travis’s voiceover reflection sums up his current state of mind: 

“Now I see it clearly.  My whole life has pointed in one direction.  I see that now.  There never has been any choice for me.”

Fully armed and now sporting a bizarre Mohawk haircut, Travis goes to a Palantine political rally to carry out his assassination.  But before he can act, he is recognized by guards and flees the scene. That night, and now even more mentally deranged, he pursues an alternative path by heading down to the Lower East Side to engage in a violent, shoot-first rescue of Iris.  A bloody shootout ensues, with Travis killing Matthew and two others while getting critically shot in the neck, himself.  At the end of the devastation, Travis tries to shoot himself, but he out of bullets. The police arrive, and Travis is taken away.

4.  Aftermath
It is now a few months later, and the viewer learns that Travis, after being in a coma, has survived and recovered from his wounds.  Despite his murderous killing-spree, Travis has been hailed by the press as a hero, since he killed low-life drug dealers.  Iris is back safe with her parents, far from New York.  Travis is back on the same taxi night shift and living as before.  One of his fares turns out to be Betsy, and they engage in cautious, impersonal small talk during the ride, after which Travis refuses payment and silently pulls away from the curb.

The ending of the film is one of pure irony. Travis has finally been returned to normalcy, at least outwardly. But that last shot of Travis slowly, reluctantly pulling away from Betsy is an indication of his continued isolation and tacit desire to make connection. He is now mentally confined by even bigger walls, but perhaps he has abandoned his struggle to overcome them.

As I mentioned earlier, the expressionistic presentation of a mood is what makes this film outstanding.  Scorsese’s picture of the ominous and threatening New York City night scene is undoubtedly aided by his being a native of the city.  The focalization of the film remains almost exclusively on Travis Bickle, except for short moments with Betsy and Iris.  Why were these two singled out in this fashion?  Perhaps the moments showing those girls' personal connections with other men highlights Travis's nightmares concerning aspects of their lives outside the scope of his influence. So these sequences, too, add to the film’s atmosphere of anxiety and separation.  Another particularly memorable scene is when Travis, alone in his apartment, slowly and knowingly tips his portable television off its stand and wrecks it.  The drift towards self-destruction is captured perfectly without words.

The film’s overall mood of threatening alienation is immeasurably enhanced by the film score written by Bernard Herrmann, who was perhaps the consummate film music composer and whose music for films of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma provided indelible signatures for those specific works. In this case here in Taxi Driver, the mood of the film is so linked to Herrmann that I feel he is almost a co-author of the film.

Some people simply dismiss Travis Bickle as someone who just went crazy and who at the end remains a loaded time-bomb who might erupt again in the future.  Perhaps so, but the power of this film is its ability to give us some understanding of Travis. We can empathize with his agony and lost innocence.  We know him as we know ourselves.  At the film's end, meaningful connection possibilities with Betsy, Iris, and the city at large seem to be gone forever.  There is only the dark urban nightmare around him, and that still remains a threat, as shown in the last frames of the film.

★★★★

Notes:

1. “Expressionism in Film", The Film Sufi (2008).
2. "Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi (2008).
3. "Phenomenology and Red Desert", The Film Sufi (2010).
4. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style In Film (1972/1988), Da Capo Press.
5. This has been a criticism of some of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, such as Red Desert (1964).