The Essentials: Martin Scorsese’s Best Films

“Bringing Out the Dead” (1999)
One of the director’s more bafflingly overlooked movies, “Bringing Out the Dead” reteamed Scorsese with “Taxi Driver” scribe Paul Schrader and stars Nicolas Cage as a strung-out EMT worker battling, amongst other things, a deadly strain of heroin called “Red Death” and a succession of criminally insane coworkers (among them John Goodman and the probably-actually-insane Tom Sizemore). Many of the same themes Schrader and Scorsese explored in “Taxi Driver” are echoed here, and while Cage’s obsessive, debilitated antihero is somewhat less engaging than De Niro’s psychotic cabbie, he still makes for compelling, nearly compulsive watching. And the film is hampered somewhat by the episodic nature of the storytelling and a slightly wooden performance by Cage’s then-wife Patricia Arquette (she’s about the slowest thing in a movie that seems to cannonball forward) there are still a number of memorable set pieces, including a haunting sequence where Cage approaches an apartment following a gang shooting, while “Red Red Wine” by UB40 plays ominously in the background, and an extended flashback that Scorsese edits backwards so that the snow appears to be drifting upwards. It’s a Scorsese movie that seems bound for rediscovery, a furious, sometimes ghostly rumination on how close we come to death, and the strain that’s placed on those that bring us back from it. [B]

“Gangs of New York” (2002)
Structurally, “Gangs of New York” is a mess—Scorsese’s action-heavy narrative of the conflicts that set aflame Five Points in lower Manhattan circa the 1860’s tries to bite off far more than it can chew. The tales of the New York Draft Riots, the underworld run by crooked Boss Tweed (Jim Broadbent) and the strife between Americans and foreigners all feel like separate movies jammed together for the sake of a wide-ranging epic about a rich time in American history. And at this point, Leonardo DiCaprio had the intensity but not the necessary charisma or depth to make protagonist Amsterdam Vallon as magnetic as he’s supposed to be (and he’s a sharp downgrade from his father, played by a cameo-ing Liam Neeson). But then you get to Daniel Day-Lewis’ improbably electric Bill “The Butcher” Cutting and the film’s shortcomings fall by the wayside. Maybe our greatest actor, Day-Lewis is absolutely terrifying as the picture’s muscle-bound villain, twirling his mustache as he postures and pontificates as though he were Uncle Sam himself. Even with Scorsese’s extravagant budget, which allows for widescale sequences of disaster and spectacle in the film’s final third, Day-Lewis towers over the material, a twinkly-eyed predator who makes looking away feel like reconstructive surgery. [B]

“The Aviator” (2004)
Latter-day Scorsese is sometimes knee-jerkingly treated as “awards bait” “prestige pictures” but there’s never been a doubt that if he needed to, Marty can just bring it. Case in point: this 2004 biopic of Howard Hughes as Scorsese saw him: a shut-in delusionist in his later years, but also a rock star, a man with mommy issues who truly almost took over the world. Compare the film’s high-energy aesthetic with peer Francis Ford Coppola’s similar “Tucker: A Man And His Dreams” and you see the difference between a man who has far too much reverence for his topic, and another who wants to use a legend as a vessel for cinephilia (Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow could only come from the mind of a genius or a prankster). Though baby-faced to a certain point in his adult years, Leonardo DiCaprio finally grows into his legacy with this performance, cementing his status as a go-to guy for outsized personalities with intensely repressed emotions. But Scorsese benefits from a superb supporting cast that includes a perfectly campy, Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett as Katharine Hepburn, Alan Alda as a ballbreaking senator, and Alec Baldwin as embittered Pan Am head Juan Trippe. Ultimately, Scorsese’s take on Hughes feels incomplete, as it seems to check-off several biopic boxes with manic glee without expanding on it, and it allows one of cinema’s greatest lovers of the medium to indulge a bit too much. But when one of the world’s greatest filmmakers is having this much fun, we can’t judge too harshly. [B]

“No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” (2005)
Trying to crystallize the iconic music, life and times of Bob Dylan in one movie is a fool’s errand and Scorsese wisely doesn’t try. Instead, the sprawling, two-part, three-and-a-half hour documentary chronicles the seminal 1961-66 period, from the songwriter’s arrival in the coffee shops of New York (hello and goodbye, Llewyn Davis!), to his ascension to seminal civil rights-focused folk hero, to his controversial “going electric” period leading up to the “Don’t Look Back” event where Dylan suffered a near-fatal motorcycle accident, and up to his return to the public eye a year later, forevermore an even more inscrutable figure (and he would “retire” from touring for eight years after). Those who know Dylan’s work, know the singer as an enigma, and while not its chief aim, “No Direction Home” in many ways illuminates the road to how Dylan became this riddle and refused to be pinned down or owned by any one establishment—political, musical or otherwise. Ironically, as interviewed by longtime manager Jeff Rosen, Dylan is at his most relaxed, effusive and straightforward in the talking head conversations shot in 2001. But a portrait is drawn; a young man who quickly bristled against the trap of expectations, disavowing “the songwriter of his generation” albatross, ditching the protest folk songs and becoming smeared as a “Judas” on camera by his own audience for going electric with The Hawks (a backing band who would later go on to become The Band, a group Scorsese would obviously come to know well). The notion held by many over the years was that Dylan turned his back on them, but the reality was a hungering restlessness to venture out on a journey into the unknown. Employing hours of unearthed archival footage (including D. A. Pennebaker‘s seminal Dylan doc “Don’t Look Back“), never-before-seen performance footage and interviews with artists and musicians whose lives interconnected with Dylan’s during that time (Dave Van Ronk, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Dylan’s old girlfriend Suze Rotolo, and many more), the documentary fittingly peels back layers, while letting the mystery remain; never solving the alluring enigma that is one of the 20th century’s great artists. “No Direction Home” is a definitive, engrossing and must-see portrait of an artist whose oxygen was reinvention and evolution. As Dylan sang himself, “he not busy being born is busy dying.” [A-]