Scorsese/DiCaprio/Ziegfeld

On Thursday and Friday of this week, February 13 and 14, the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan hosts a unique event: a mini-retrospective of the work of dir­ect­or Martin Scorsese and act­or (and some­time co-producer) Leonardo DiCaprio. Thursday’s screen­ings will be The Aviator, The Departed, and the new The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf screen­ing will be pre­ceded by a con­ver­sa­tion, mod­er­ated by Kent Jones, with DiCaprio, edit­or Thelma Schoonmaker, and screen­writer Terence Winter. On Friday the films are Shutter Island, Gangs of New York, and again, Wolf. Information and tick­et pur­chase options can be found here. 

I recently com­pleted a book on Robert De Niro that treats his career via ten dis­crete essays on ten movies; four of the essays are on De Niro/Scorsese col­lab­or­a­tions. Certainly were Cahiers du Cinema, my pub­lish­ers, to com­mis­sion a sim­il­ar book on DiCaprio, well, I can­’t think of one of the five above that I’d leave off of a list of ten. Alfred Hitchcock hit sev­er­al career highs with Cary Grant and James Stewart, and vice versa, but what’s unique about the Scorsese col­lab­or­a­tions has some­thing to do with the sequence. De Niro did not begin his work with Scorsese in the pos­i­tion of the dir­ect­or’s sur­rog­ate: In Mean Streets that role went to Harvey Keitel, as Charlie. Johnny Boy, the De Niro char­ac­ter, was of course Charlie’s secret sharer in a sense. With Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull the sense of De Niro speak­ing through and as Scorsese, or par­tic­u­lar aspects of Scorsese, could be palp­able; with King of Comedy, Scorsese’s most intel­lec­tu­al film up to that point, a mode of detachment/examination sets in. It’s only in the got-what-he-wanted-but-lost-what-he-had register of Casino that Scorsese and De Niro found that par­tic­u­lar kind of tandem. 

With DiCaprio the syn­ergy can be equally strong but it’s used for dif­fer­ent ends, and it func­tions dif­fer­ently. DiCaprio is not Scorsese’s sur­rog­ate but his instru­ment. In a sense the char­ac­ter of Amsterdam (as in “new”) in Gangs of New York is almost a “My Back Pages” rumin­a­tion for Scorsese, a young per­spect­ive on the old prob­lems he’s ever grappled with as an artist. One of the great mis­un­der­stand­ings of Shutter Island is the insist­ence on read­ing it as a (failed or suc­cess­ful) puzzle movie, when it’s really an emo­tion­al explor­a­tion as acute and hor­rif­ic and effect­ive as Raging Bull or the short The Big Shave. If you’re lucky enough to be able to see all five of the movies over the two days, what I think will be revealed about Wolf of Wall Street is its semi-perverse expans­ive­ness; the tra­gic anti-heroes DiCaprio plays in The Aviator and Shutter Island replaced here by an unre­li­able nar­rat­or of  boda­cious brag­gado­cio and decidedly shal­low emo­tion­al affect. It’s a vir­tu­oso per­form­ance from DiCaprio that’s also argu­ably a mine­field of ali­en­a­tion effects.