Is it time ... finally? That's the question for the great Martin Scorsese, who has been five times nominated for a Best Directing Oscar and has never won.
Now, his film "The Departed" will almost certainly be nominated Tuesday in a number of categories, directing among them, and the question is: Will he at last get to make the speech with the golden statuette in his hand?
Scorsese, 64, is recognized as one of America's finest directors — if not the finest — a consummately engaged member of the film community, active in film restoration and other initiatives. He's kept his hand in the documentary world, and often segued from big-budget Hollywood pictures to small, hard looks at issues and artists.
So it's his due. It's his time.
But ... Does Scorsese care? Does "The Departed" deserve to earn him the award? Why hasn't he won? And should we care?
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But an Oscar signifies something that's important to the New York filmmaker, and that is acceptance in the far glades of Los Angeles filmmaking.
You would think it meaningless after all the success he's had, and that if the work isn't its own reward, then the rewards were their own rewards.
But an Oscar, particularly for a sickly kid who grew up thinking he'd be a priest? Especially someone so sunk in film history and culture? John Ford won Oscars, and Billy Wilder, and Steven Spielberg, and he'd want to be a part of that set.
If he wins, it'll be for one of his least Scorsesesque films. It even could be argued that "The Departed" is an imitation Scorsese film. It seems to be made by a graduate student who has studied the great Marty, and now has some money to play around with and has decided upon a tribute to the master.
The film isn't set in New York, where all of Scorsese's great films were set, and it's not set among the Italian American Mafia subculture, and its characters seem by far a cooler lot than Scorsese's typical crew of hotheads and sociopath outsiders who yearn to belong and start killing when they don't. Nor does it have the hypnotic intensity that Scorsese brings to his typical film, that sense of hyper-realism that takes on a nightmarish clarity.
It doesn't have Scorsese's old friend and collaborator Robert De Niro (who was off making his own film, "The Good Shepherd"), thus vacating a fat old-guy role for Jack Nicholson, who brought a different and distinctly non-Scorsese tone to the piece. Where De Niro would have been manic, obsessed, riveting as the gang lord Frank Costello, Nicholson plays the old guy in an almost comic tone. He's in the game still, after all these years, because he loves the game.
De Niro's Costello would have still been in the game all these years because he loves to win. De Niro would have driven the movie faster, his pathology would have made it hang together more.
This latest film from Scorsese represents a kind of professional directors' conceit. All these guys — Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, the generation that broke through in the '70s — seem to be hitting a similar stage in life. They understand they are not wunderkinder anymore; they don't want all the Sturm und Drang on the set. Somehow, they became the establishment and decided they'd rather do 10 more films that are pretty good than one more that's a difficult work of genius.
Scorsese seems to have drawn a lesson from "Gangs of New York." That was his baby and getting it made, with budget overruns and editing problems and fights with management, must have nearly killed him. Even when he did succeed, he was a full year behind schedule.
When the film earned mediocre reviews and did mediocre business he must have wondered: Why did I put myself through that?
His two films since then — "The Aviator," his highly praised bio of Howard Hughes' struggles to make "Hell's Angels" (which perhaps reminded him of his own struggle on "Gangs") and now "The Departed" — both have been mainstream entertainment and star-driven, both have been made quietly, competently, professionally, and neither has really expressed the Scorsese personality in the way that the earlier, better movies did.
The filmmaker was a Little Italy kid through and through, but a childhood of ill health reportedly kept him sealed off from the normalcy of boyhood culture. After high school, he went to seminary; the passion of commitment to a higher order burned within him. But after a year, he quit, and went to New York University's film school. His devotion to the art was almost as pure as the ideal priest's and he seethed with the need to save the movies from themselves.
His breakthrough film, "Mean Streets," in 1973, jangled with this energy. It was the story of a young Mafioso torn between his ambitions to be a good hood but also to save his less stable friend, whose survival he sees as a kind of religious salvation. That part — Charlie — was played by Harvey Keitel, but the role that was to provide the basis for most of Scorsese's later work was Johnny Boy, played by Robert De Niro. Johnny was angry, volatile, spilling toward self-destruction at every turn, unwilling to pay back his debts or show respect to his elders. He's on a one-way ride to hell and we know that he will bring everybody along for the ride.
With rare exceptions ("Taxi Driver"), that became the ur-tale for Scorsese: A responsible male tries to keep an irresponsible male from destroying himself.
That's true in "Raging Bull," where De Niro's Jake LaMotta makes war on the world while his brother, played by Joe Pesci, tries to rein him in. It's certainly true in "GoodFellas," where Pesci plays the bullgoose crazy one, and it's Ray Liotta who is the ameliorating factor. In "Casino," again Pesci gets the crazed, depraved role, probably the most violent punk Scorsese has ever put on screen; it's his pal, De Niro, who talks him down, tries to rescue him.
That's another reason "The Departed" seems to have been made by a Scorsese imitator, not Scorsese himself. There's almost no sense of comradeship in the movie. It's totally each man for himself and the most shocking moment comes when expectations of loyalty are dashed.
The film, based on a Hong Kong movie of surprising restraint and complexity called "Infernal Affairs," tracks the progress of two moles — one in the police department (Matt Damon) and the other in the mob (Leonardo DiCaprio), who learn about the existence, but not the identity, of the other. Each is assigned to locate the other.
The situation itself is nothing like Scorsese. It lacks his signature obsessions and it's so intricate that it requires a felicity for detailed storytelling that he's never shown before (which is why it occasionally loses its way). His movies have never been overplotted; they're so obsessed with the moment and the psychological state of the protagonist that they instead discover and stick to very basic situations.
It's also guilt-free. The truth is, these are probably the least interesting characters Scorsese has ever covered. None of them seems haunted or torn, no one has issues. Instead, they're so consumed with the nuts-and-bolts of complex professional obligations, that's all there is to them.
Then there's milieu. Boston? Boston Irish?
Scorsese doesn't have the feel for the Irish he seems to have for those New York Italians, even if so much of his cast (like Damon and Mark Wahlberg) can claim a Boston heritage.
A deeper issue is the relative mental health of everybody. Most of Scorsese's great films depict men in the grip of an obsession that completely defines their personalities and their actions. He's not Howard Hawks or John Ford, who preferred to study cool professionals in action, he's more like the great film noir directors — Rudolph Mati in "D.O.A." comes to mind or Raoul Walsh in "White Heat" — who showed men in extreme states. Thus all the intricate plotting in "The Departed" and the lack of deep psychological states make the film feel weirdly apart from the classic Scorsese canon.
Which brings us to this: Is the argument that he will win the Oscar for "The Departed" but doesn't deserve it? Hardly. The truth is, as anyone who's ever won a major national award can attest, whimsy often has more to do with the results than justice. The people who give awards give them for their own reasons, not the recipient's: to look good, to make up for past failures, to make a comment, to feel virtuous.
The award that Scorsese may get in February will be savored but doubted; it will feel more like a career salute (Scorsese has already won an AFI Life Achievement Award) than a particular embrace of a particular film. And so what? That's the way awards work, and who else are they going to give it to — a third one for Clint Eastwood?
According to my own personal Oscar calculator, Scorsese should be winning not his first but his third Best Director award next month.
He should have won in 1980 for the extraordinary "Raging Bull." The award instead went to the very ordinary "Ordinary People," directed by Robert Redford. That would have been his first Oscar and it would have been richly deserved.
His second nomination came eight years later, and it's difficult to find fault with the outcome that year. The movie that won was Barry Levinson's best picture, "Rain Man," not merely a hit but a weirdly moving, human story, driven by great performances. Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ" was a cause celebre that year, not a movie; because some fundamentalist groups tried to have it banned, its mediocrity was overlooked for its courage.
The one that hurts so bad was 1990, when his great "GoodFellas" lost to Kevin Costner's zany "Dances With Wolves." That should have been Oscar No. 2.
In 2002, it's hard to fault the academy for giving the award to Roman Polanski for the high-minded "The Pianist" rather than Scorsese's "Gangs of New York." In fact the "Gangs" nomination seemed more of a courtesy to salute the director's stamina in finishing the troubled project after overruns and missed deadlines threw the whole thing in doubt.
Then in 2004, Scorsese came up short with "The Aviator" in favor of sentimental favorite Clint Eastwood and his old-school "Million Dollar Baby." The race was a clash of titans and it's hard to fault the Eastwood choice.
Yet one can't help but think that Hollywood has waited until it was comfortable with Martin Scorsese before conferring the gold statuette upon him, waited until he morphed into something more bourgeois, more system-oriented, mellower, more professional. His earlier films — his great films — were savage examinations of hearts of darkness, of deviant behaviors, of misanthropic loners. They asked, defiantly: You talkin' to me?
