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In any case, what’s got me going is Andrew Tracy’s take-no-prisoners assault (in the winter issue of Cinema Scope magazine) on what he calls “the mostly uncritical canonization of The Departed” and, more important, of its fulsomely lionized director. “Do we really need Martin Scorsese?” is Tracy’s first shot across the bow: “Good filmmakers naturally inspire proprietary feelings, but Scorsese has become less a going concern than a public trust. … Hyperbolic overpraise can be a valuable weapon, but … the possessive discourse swirling about Scorsese is little more than a many-throated monologue, and one from which the filmmaker himself has been largely excluded.” Still it’s “no more than poetic justice, for with [The Departed] Scorsese has absented his voice altogether. Whatever their individual virtues, flaws, or outright failings, the majority of Scorsese’s films have been about something, even if sometimes no more than their director’s ambition. The crucial defect of The Departed is that it is about nothing … “
Has there ever been an exit from this dilemma, that our scrambling hero might not have to reinvent–or, even worse, remotivate–himself with every new project taken? Arguably yes, and I’m thinking that The Age of Innocence–albeit least characteristic of Scorsese’s major films–holds the key. Consider its effortlessly gliding camera, tracking across lavish expanses of fabric, opulent parties, elegant banquet spreads, registering every fugitive incident–cigars being lit and intimacies exchanged, etc–but only glancingly, never holding dear to any one thing. An exercise in Zen, more or less–let’s call it the bodhi option–which is also more or less transferable to every imaginable theme, like the breakup and entropy of Scott and Mann. Unfortunately, a couple years later came Kundun–though if ever a film cried out for bodhi, you’d swear this was the one. Not nearly the case: only wistful longings for vanished mountainscapes and mandalas, for abandoned destinies across the border, just the opposite of nonattachment, all literal and lachrymose and very much anti-Zen. Which implies, for me anyway, that it’s all just grist for the maestro: not vision but opportunity, just one dispensable damn thing after another.
