Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More was Ellen Burstyn’s baby. Determined to use her clout after The Exorcist to make a film from a woman’s viewpoint, she offered Robert Getchell’s script to a director who confessed he knew nothing about women. “But,” Martin Scorsese told her, “I’d like to know.”
Travis Bickle’s Manhattan is long gone, and except for those nostalgic for its grindhouses and their exploitation fare, few surely regret its passing. It’s been years since any modern-day Travis could cruise in a yellow taxi along the erstwhile “Deuce” - the squalid stretch of porn emporia and strip clubs on West 42nd Street - turn north up Eighth Avenue to the high forties and accurately observe, “All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” The rain - a reference to the Deluge - did come. After a decade of planning, the gentrification of Hell’s Kitchen (and Disneyfication of The Deuce) was effectively completed during Rudolph W Giuliani’s mayoralty in the Nineties, though some of the porn shops and strip clubs simply migrated a few blocks away.
No matter that Taxi Driver (1976, back out as a re-release from Park Circus this week) has the semblance of a dream, much of what Martin Scorsese shot for it was documentary footage. There was misery in its making. “I’m telling you, 42nd Street, Eighth Avenue, that was hell, shooting in those places,” he tells Richard Schickel in the book Conversations with Scorsese. “That was, like, biblical in my mind, Hell and damnation and Jeremiah… I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. The sense of wallowing in it was, for me, always filled with tension and extraordinary depression. And the film is very, very depressing.”
Sociopaths invariably find excuses for their rage, but a cultural artefact cannot be held responsible
To David Thompson and Ian Christie, editors of Scorsese on Scorsese, he said, “We shot the film during a very hot summer and there’s an atmosphere at night that’s like a seeping kind of virus. You can smell it in the air and taste it in your mouth. It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and touches the foot of a first-born son, who falls dead. That’s almost what it’s like: a strange disease creeps along the streets of the city and, while we were shooting the film, we would slide along after it. Many times people threatened us and we had to take off quickly.”
Living in Hell’s Kitchen in the late Eighties, I collected my own set of memories: a waif-like teen prostitute flagging down trucks outside my apartment house on 46th Street each lunchtime for weeks on end; spent condoms in the gutters; being stalked by the six-foot hustler I rebuffed on 42nd the only time I walked down the street at 1am. Hundreds of mentally ill and homeless people lived locally. It wasn’t simply a red-light district; it was a well of illness and pain.
That late-noir miasma lives on indelibly in Scorsese’s masterpiece, though for all its actuality it acquired a mythic aura in a way that other searing films depicting contemporary necropoli have not, among them Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa (1986, London), Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993, London), Wim Wenders’s Land of Plenty (2004, Los Angeles) and Andrea Arnold’s Red Road (2006, Glasgow). Naked is a great film, but it is more ruminatively philosophical than Taxi Driver, which has a unique febrile energy; Scorsese himself couldn’t repeat it in Bringing Out the Dead (1999).
Taxi Driver’s undiminished power owes partially to Scorsese’s harnessing of Michael Johnson’s restless camerawork, with its ominous pans and tracking shots, and Bernard Herrmann’s insinuating sax-and-harp score (his last). Nothing was more important, though, than the jive of Paul Schrader’s voiceover for Robert De Niro as Travis and the kinetic rhythms of the stylised dialogue, some Schrader’s, some improvised, which flowed through the star, Harvey Keitel as the pimp Sport, and Jodie Foster as the 12-and-a-half-year-old Iris (pictured), whom Travis seeks to liberate from prostitution. It guided their body language - Travis is deliberate, Sport has a junkie’s jitters, Foster is a larky kid. (Cybill Shepherd as Betsy, the narcissistic, Beatrice-like campaign worker Travis stalks after she rejects him for taking her to a porno, is pleasing in a wholly different register.)
Haunted by John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and the tormented racist Ethan Edwards’s redemptive quest to rescue his teenage niece from miscegenation with a Comanche chief, Schrader first updated it in Hardcore (1978), about a Dutch Calvinist furniture manufacturer wresting his daughter from LA pornographers, then used it as the basis for Taxi Driver. The latter film is more psychologically and socially complex. Traumatised by what he’s seen and done in Vietnam (though it’s not mentioned), paranoid and puritanical, Travis wills himself to take murderous Oedipal revenge on Betsy’s and Iris’s father figures: first, he escapes, unidentified, his attempted assassination of the presidential candidate who’s Betsy’s boss; then goes after Sport (Keitel, pictured below) and his cohorts, resulting in one of the bloodiest götterdämmerungs in Hollywood cinema up to that point. He thus becomes the tabloid hero who earns Betsy’s respect - or is that the dying fantasy of the wounded vigilante who sits on the whorehouse couch? - and the madman who should be treated in a high-security hospital. He is a purger who requires something more than purgation: how shocking it still is to see him pulling the trigger of the gun he has pressed to his head.
In 1981, Travis inspired John Hinckley Jr, who wanted to impress Foster, to try to assassinate President Reagan. Taxi Driver thus acquired an undeserved notoriety. Blaming the film as the root cause of Hinckley’s act is akin to blaming it for Arthur Bremer’s 1972 shooting of George Wallace (Schrader read Bremer’s diaries before writing the script) or for Samuel Byck’s assassination attempt on President Nixon in 1974 (Schrader says he based “Bickle” on a radio show called The Bickersons, not “Byck”), which generated the 2004 Sean Penn film The Assassination of Richard Nixon.
You could equally blame Travis for the shooting that killed six and left Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords severely wounded this past January. It makes no sense; sociopaths invariably find excuses for their rage, but a cultural artefact cannot be held responsible. More pertinently, Travis, as a metaphor, was a caustic agent poured not just on rampant vice, and a society that sanctions it as a corrupt form of business, but on a political culture founded on empty rhetoric and the crime of sending men to die in capitalist wars of ideology. Assuming Travis didn’t die from his neck wound, I like to think he’s still hacking it on the New York streets, without the guns.
MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
Hugo (2011). Scorsese does a Spielberg in sumptuous look at the origins of cinema
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). Con brio: Scorsese and DiCaprio tell of the rise and fall of a broker
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: watch the new trailer to Taxi Driver
Audiences cannot fail to register the enormity of Martin Scorsese’s achievement in Silence. At 160 minutes, it hangs heavy over the film: adapted from the 1966 novel by Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, Silence has been close on three decades in the director’s preparation. It raises questions that are usually approached with Capital Letters. There are moments that are visually enthralling, landscapes of nature that dwarf the sufferings – visceral, in the literal sense, since they involve damage to the human body – inflicted on many of its characters. We’ll leave the “and yets” to later…
The opening scene is paradigmatic: a wide landscape of torture, crucifixes placed by steaming pools which provide boiling water to agonise both the Christian believers of Japan and the western missionaries who came to convert them. It is 1633, and the Japanese authorities, perceiving Christianity as a threatening adjunct of colonialism, force their captives to deny their religion – to commit apostasy, the issue and the act which sears the very gut of Scorsese’s film.
You may be reminded of Christoph Waltz, or alternatively of Ken Dodd’s false teeth gags
Its usual form involved trampling on the fumi-e, an image of Christ or Mary; when proof of more extreme rejection was demanded, it involved spitting on the cross. Such were the dilemmas confronting Japan's hidden Christians, the Kakure Kirishitan, who attempted to worship in secret. But this opening scene forces a more extreme choice on the missionaries – to embrace their extreme suffering, in the manner of Christ, or to make an exemplary repudiation of belief. Under such circumstances, that denial can never be treated – let alone interpreted – as following God’s will. Or can it?
The Jesuit priest at the centre of Silence is Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson, pictured below), although we encounter him only in its last scenes. When reports of Ferreira denying his faith eventually reach his order back in Lisbon, two of his incredulous disciples – Fathers Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garrupe (Adam Driver) – volunteer to travel to Japan to prove his innocence. They seem far from heroic figures, although they undertake such a journey at obvious risk to their own lives.
Their quest may have earned comparison to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and along with that Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but it’s a pale equation. Neeson’s Ferreira has wrought not physical horror, rather – if anything – a cerebral one (while the charge that Silence aims for the brain, rather than the heart, is a real one). The two priests’ journey to the shores of Japan is easy enough; in Macau they acquire a guide, the eccentric Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), whose lapses go beyond religion, and for whom denial and seeking forgiveness follow a practically cyclical basis, to occasionally comic effect.
But the priests’ first encounters with the hidden believers of Japan (Taiwan provided most locations for the film) are deadly serious, not least because of the mortal threat of discovery. The celebration of sacrament (pictured below) in secret has the urgency of the early Roman catacomb believers, and is received with a joy that seems greater than in more secure environments (though whether that is actually the case is another question, raised later). Their ministry continues, but the two priests can only escape capture for so long, at which point Scorsese narrows the perspective of his film to concentrate on Garfield’s character.
There’s a change of register, too. Rodrigues faces expert opponents, in the figure of the local inquisitor Inoue (Issey Ogata) particularly, as well as the latter's interpreter (Tadanobu Asano). It's a sometimes unsettling balance: Ogata is something of a Japanese thespian legend – he played Emperor Hirohito in Alexander Sokurov's The Sun, too– who’s as much famed as a comedian, and he manages occasionally disarming comic effects here. (You may be reminded either of Christoph Waltz, or alternatively of Ken Dodd’s false teeth gags.)
Inoue’s tactics are deadly, however. He forces his captive to witness cruelty wrought on others – burning and blood-draining are mild when set against crucifixion-drowning – all the time reminding Rodrigues that he only has to perform a single gesture to stop such torture. Intellectually too, he articulates the view later espoused by Ferreira himself when the two priests eventually meet, that the Japanese believers had never followed true Christianity, rather a mixed-up belief system that overlapped with their pantheism; and that Japan is a "swamp" where Christianity “does not take root”. To all of Garfield’s prayers, his God remains silent.
That final meeting with Ferreira is anticlimactic – worse, it lacks the intensity of communication that might provide dramatic conviction. The older westerner now lives with a Japanese wife, as in due course will Rodrigues (echoes of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ). What we witness of their closing years is treated with a rapidity that at this stage comes as considerable relief. These are actors expiring with a whimper, and not making us believe in the significance of that last gasp, although how you interpret the film’s final scene will certainly affect your final judgment of it (as, inescapably, will your own religious convictions, or lack thereof).
Scorsese regulars Dante Ferretti and Rodrigo Prieto make stand-out contributions in production design and cinematography respectively, as was to be expected. Three years after the drastically different The Wolf of Wall Street – that contrast is so huge – it’s hard to say just what we might have expected from Silence. We can’t judge the director for the range of his intentions, however, but rather on the integrality of his execution. On that basis Scorsese’s new film falls short: being ponderous does not equate with achieving gravity.
MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Taxi Driver (1976). Talking to me? Scorsese's classic starring Robert De Niro (pictured) is restored and re-released on its 35th anniversary
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
Hugo (2011). Scorsese does a Spielberg in sumptuous look at the origins of cinema
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). Con brio: Scorsese and DiCaprio tell of the rise and fall of a broker
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Silence
You can almost hear the words ringing out in the dramatic pauses. “We should call it Vinyl. Like, y’know... when you could hold music in your hand... touch it... FEEL it. When it was really WORTH something.
Well, I’ll be damned if subscriptions don’t shoot up this summer. This lovingly made paean to the New York Review of Books, directed by Martin Scorsese and his long-time documentary collaborator David Tedeschi, was better than any advert, though I’d hesitate – but only briefly – to say that it was one long advert. 95 minutes probably makes it an advertorial feature, like those misleading pages you see in magazines and increasingly newspapers.
It’s stockbroker Goodfellas, basically. If you enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s pacey, flashy, beautifully shot ensemble gangster flicks, Goodfellas and Casino, there’s little doubt you’ll enjoy this. Here the master director, absolutely on fire, has his cake and eats it with the “based-on-a-true-story” saga of corrupt stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall. The central character, played with audacious, astounding flare by Leonardo DiCaprio, exudes charisma from every pore and guzzles pleasure by the raw ton, taking no prisoners. While Belfort is a ruthless, unpleasant protagonist, the sort of man who causes utter misery through his selfishness, the viewer cannot help but clamber aboard Scorsese and DiCaprio’s demented rollercoaster and root for his sheer lust for life.
The comic actor Jonah Hill also outdoes himself as Belfort’s sidekick Donnie Azoff. Where Belfort is messianic and mesmeric, Azoff is a slobby, venal loser riding the gravy train. Their story takes Belfort from his start at high class brokers LF Rothschild, through the crash of 1987 and onto his own outfit Stratton Oakmont, with their wildly successful “pump and dump” securities fraud schemes, eventually reaching an inevitable and unhappy unravelling. The details paint a picture of a warped, morally corrupt, male culture but the film is primarily a monstrous tale of hubris, played out at maximum extravagance, often for great big roaring laughs, and is utterly gripping for its entire three hours, a visual cacophony of cocaine, sex, money and excess. The sequence where Belmont come unstuck taking ancient Quaaludes he mistakenly presumed had lost their potency, before driving his Porsche and having a wasted ruck with Azoff, is as shocking, entertaining and riveting as anything I’ve seen in any film for a long time.
There are other great performances too, of course, notably Australian actress Margot Robbie as Belfort’s wife Naomi and a scenery-annihilating cameo by Matthew McConaughey as the Rothschild broker who shows Belmont the ropes. The restaurant scene alone, where DiCaprio takes advice from McConaughey, is more fun than most films manage end-to-end. This is hyperactive, over-the-top film-making constructed with the smash’n’grab zest of a true cinematic genius. I can’t recommend it enough.
There are no extras on the DVD but the Blu-ray edition comes with a “making of” documentary, The Wolf Pack, a featurette called Running Wild about the pre-production process, and a round-table featuring DiCaprio, Scorsese, Hill, etc, discussing the movie.
Overleaf: Watch the trailer
It was Benjamin Franklin who said "money has never made man happy...the more of it one has the more one wants," and there is no shortage of examples of boundless greed and how an abundance of cash can upturn and empty lives. Based on the memoir of Jordan Belfort, a former stockbroker convicted of fraud, The Wolf of Wall Street gives us one such example. This is Martin Scorsese's 23rd narrative feature and with it he proves that, at 71, he's inarguably still got it, with a flamboyantly immoral tale very much for and of our age, which is apparently the most effing foul-mouthed film in the history of cinema.
Scripted by Terence Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street sees Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) enter the weird world of Wall Street as an ambitious young pup with a devoted, darling hairdresser wife (Cristin Milioti). He's taken under the wing of a cawing, coked-up eagle played by (a show-stealing) Matthew McConaughey, who gives him some chest-beating musical mentorship over lunch in a scene to treasure. Unfortunately Belfort's timing couldn't be worse as he secures his broker's licence on 1987's Black Monday, and is immediately hoofed out of the firm.
Showing that you just can't keep a greedy prick down, and with opportunities in the big league non-existent, Belfort turns his attention to penny stocks - applying his city slicker's nous to ruthlessly rinse those who can't afford to lose even small amounts, whilst teaching his "knucklehead" friends how to do the same. One of those, Donnie (Jonah Hill, pictured above), becomes his partner in crime; he's an obese lad with "phosphorescent" teeth, married to his first cousin ("if anyone's gonna fuck my cousin that's gonna be me"), who readily admits that it's likely that his kids will be retarded. Together they turn Stratton Oakmont into a billion-dollar brokerage firm - a law unto itself, staffed by barbarians - before the FBI come a-sniffing.
Scorsese has long dealt in anti-heroes, making great use of DiCaprio over the years, and there's an obvious comparison in the similarly biographical, comparably conveyed Goodfellas. But it's interesting to note the career of the film's screenwriter Terence Winter, who rose to prominence as writer / executive producer of The Sopranos and more recently as the creator of the marvellous Boardwalk Empire (there are cameos from several Boardwalk stalwarts). They are shows that lionise criminals but simultaneously show them as greatly troubled men, who suffer the consequences of their actions in terms of their business and in the damage that's inflicted on their psyche. Both make formidable use of the lengthier, more searching character development facilitated by TV as a medium.
As with Winter's previous work, the crooks take centre stage in The Wolf of Wall Street. However, rather than ramming home a moral, or painting a conflicting picture, the film instead drills home the screw-tomorrow excess, ultimately proving itself exhaustingly brash. It's told by a man living large, conscience-free, and who is thus obnoxious, unapologetic and chaotic. For instance, the untimely deaths of friends and colleagues are skirted over - Belfort doesn't want to dwell on that - and one marriage is quickly dealt a death blow (only vaguely felt) in order to usher another sucker in (Margot Robbie's glamorous Naomi, pictured below).
The Wolf of Wall Street is said to have outraged and appalled senior Academy members at recent awards screenings and it's a film which screams in your face that it's having fun, almost as if the filmmakers themselves are on something: Scorsese's pumped-up orchestration, Rodrigo Prieto's carnival-like visuals, Thelma Schoonmaker's energetic editing and Winter's potty-mouthed poetry fuse to form an appropriate evocation of a life cranked up to 11.
It's a film that's huge amounts of fun, but there is a message in there: in the very hollowness, cruelty and precariousness of Belfort's existence, he's living a twisted version of the American dream, presenting a middle finger to both its people and the system, and it's just up to you whether to choose to see it. As the laughs and inebriated antics get wearing - and they do - you might notice that the lines on DiCaprio's baby face mirror the cracks in his marriage. Yet just one sequence bears the hallmarks of anything resembling conventional filmic morality - it's a punch in the gut, quite literally, wiping the smile off our faces and making clear our complicity in this act and all that's gone before. It comes as a shock and is almost more powerful for its isolation.
The film's portrayal of women is, to be honest, pretty troubling. No doubt Scorsese and co are making a point about a world where women are routinely demeaned, or expected to accept the objectification of their gender (and by such mediocre men!) Despite this, it remains dispiriting that the film chooses to channel Belfort in this particular respect, reducing its most prominent female Naomi to nowt but a sex-pot, gold-digger, and reckless mother. Belfort might be no better than a reptile himself but, as played by an on-fire DiCaprio, he can at least be horribly charming and hilarious - a scene where he suffers the delayed effects of some very old prescription medication is likely to see off all-comers for the most hysterical sequence of 2014.
With appearances from Joanna Lumley and The Artist's Jean Dujardin providing the cherries on an already very overloaded knickerbocker glory, it's a feast of sorts. Scorsese and Winter have, quite deliberately, made a movie that for a long time is easy to chuckle at and guzzle down but, like its protagonist, is ultimately hard to like. But whether it's a begrudging or emphatic embrace, you just can't deny their chutzpah.
MORE MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Taxi Driver (1976). Talking to me? Scorsese's classic starring Robert De Niro (pictured) is restored and re-released on its 35th anniversary
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
Hugo (2011). Scorsese does a Spielberg in sumptuous look at the origins of cinema
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Wolf of Wall Street
It’s not hugely to the advantage of Hugo that its release on disc opens with a trailer for The Artist. The two homages to cinema’s silent age slugged it out for supremacy at this year’s Academy Awards. Where Martin Scorsese’s first foray into both 3D and children’s narrative justly cleaned up in all the technical categories, on the small screen there is less disguising the frailties of a redemptive story adapted from Brian Selznick’s breezeblock novel.
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time towards the very origins of the art form he so reveres. Kids may love the sweep and scope of the visuals, many of them involving timepieces that whir and tick and hum, but Hugo at heart is an extended act of homage toward the miracle that is celluloid itself. Those on Scorsese's palpably appreciative wavelength are sure to return his affection in kind.
For much of its first hour or so, some may wonder whether this is a Scorsese film at all, given the absence of the raw aggression and rage that have marked out so many of his best films. As the camera of the great cinematographer Robert Richardson swoops around and about a Parisian railway station some 70 years ago, an extravagant landscape emerges packed with mechanised instruments, gears and watch faces of all shapes and sizes. The human element includes Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour as putative lovers along with a maniacal station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen, pictured below with the film's two young leads) whose black Doberman keeps shooting out of the screen toward us as befits a film shot, rapturously, in 3D: all more Spielberg, surely, than Scorsese?
There's a whiff of Spielberg, too, in the presence of an orphaned boy driving the narrative, and not only because Hugo star Asa Butterfield at times looks disconcertingly like the hero, Tintin, at the heart of that other 3D venture of late (well, minus the quiff). With the height and breadth of the Gare Montparnasse as his playground, Butterfield's shining-eyed Hugo sets about on a mission to put right a broken automaton that was a favourite object of the boy's late father - that role played in a notably warm cameo by Jude Law, who brings real feeling to scant amounts of screen time.
Hugo's quest involves locating the key to a heart-shaped lock, a task that leads him to a bookish girl called Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz, giving the only stiff performance of the film) who uses Cyrano-ish words like "panache" and has a crank of a guardian (Ben Kingsley), a toy store proprietor whose apparent identity gives no sense of his one-time renown. At snarling odds with humankind (and, we discover, with his own past), Isabelle's Pappa Georges needs nothing more than to have his own heart reopened, which Hugo and Isabelle are eventually able to do. Who, in fact, is this ageing scold? No less a legendary figure than Georges Méliès, the celluloid visionary (1861-1938) without whose genius such devoted practitioners and scholars of the form as Scorsese would have had no career.
It's at this point that Hugo goes its own singular way, Scorsese increasingly limiting the comic freneticism of an eyebrow-heavy Baron Cohen in hot pursuit of his pre-teen prey so as to give time to an extended history lesson about the movies, complete with a recreation of the Lumière brothers' 1897 Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat that is seen to inform both Hugo's sleeping and waking selves. Effecting his own rehabilitation of the life and work of Méliès, the latter now largely lost to us, Scorsese moves beyond the academicism embodied on screen by Broadway actor Michael Stuhlbarg's professorial Tabard to proffer a story of rebirth and renewal that works on multiple levels. Even better, the emotions are informed at every turn by visuals that suggest a dizzying hybrid of Harold Lloyd (whose silent 1923 classic Safety Last is specifically referenced), Chaplin's Modern Times and the Sophie Treadwell play Machinal.
The scenes devoted to Méliès's artistry further the screenwriter John Logan's interest in the artistic process as evidenced previously in his London and Broadway hit play, Red, while at the same time reminding us of Scorsese's championing over time of the work of Pressburger and Powell and of his crusading work as a film preservationist - which is to say that Hugo ricochets well beyond the parameters of its narrative, as one might expect from the talents involved. The automaton (pictured above, as Butterfield looks up in awe) is a red herring given a venture that is deeply humane.
You could argue that the film sometimes gets a bit gushy ("come and dream with me" goes an exhortation revisited in varying soundbites during the last reel or two), rather in the manner of those sonorous voiceovers we hear at places like the Oscars, at which point the tuxedoed assemblage turns all dewy-eyed. But there's nothing remotely faux about a movie that eats, sleeps and breathes the cinema and invites viewers to do the same. How will such passions square with a filmgoing community today that is more acclimatised to the likes of (God forbid) rival 3D entry Immortals? Well, Scorsese was eight when he saw The Red Shoes, and look what happened there. Or, to co-opt the language of Hugo, when it comes to this film's possible imprint upon its audience, one can only dream.
MORE MARTIN SCORSESE ON THEARTSDESK
Taxi Driver (1976). Talking to me? Scorsese's classic starring Robert De Niro (pictured) is restored and re-released on its 35th anniversary
Shutter Island (2010). Not a blinder: Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese's feverish paranoid thriller
George Harrison - Living in the Material World (2011). Martin Scorsese's epic documentary of the Quiet One
The Wolf of Wall Street (2014). Con brio: Scorsese and DiCaprio tell of the rise and fall of a broker
Arena: The 50 Year Argument (2014). A warmly engaging film about the 'New York Review of Books' might have been more than a birthday love-in
Vinyl (2016). Scorsese and Jagger's series is prone to warping, skipping and scratches
Silence (2016). Scorsese's latest is a mammoth, more ponderous than profound
Overleaf: Watch the trailer for Hugo
Martin Scorsese’s mammoth, authorised survey of the life of George Harrison is a strange old thing. Deeply moving, poetic, full of love, wit and warmth, it's also at times oddly assembled and, at a shade over three and a half hours, runs wide but not always terribly deep.