‘Mr. Scorsese’ Profiles the Good, the Violent and the Saintly of a Great American Director’s Life and Career 

Alci Rengifo

Few film directors achieve the status of a cultural icon. There is no doubt Martin Scorsese is of that stature. One of the best directors of our time, his body of work spans six decades and includes multiple classics, such as “Taxi Driver” and “Goodfellas,” many of which have contributed to our pop culture perceptions. Some of Scorsese’s films work like potent alternate histories of America, looking at our society from its underbelly. Rebecca Miller’s Apple TV+ docuseries, “Mr. Scorsese,” is an immersive five-part portrait of the filmmaker, dissecting how his life is seamlessly merged with the content of his work. What emerges is a Martin Scorsese of complex layers. He can be the nicest guy in the room and a walking powder keg. His religious upbringing has never left him, to which he admittedly sees himself as a complete sinner.

Scorsese is the key narrator, telling Miller his life journey starting with his birth in 1942 in the Queens borough of New York City. His grandparents were Italian immigrants. When his father Charles fell out of favor in the neighborhood, they were basically exiled to Little Italy. Scorsese’s early life was impacted by asthma, which often kept him indoors. His window would provide a view into the outside world where the Italian mafia roamed, street gangs rumbled and working class families tried to make ends meet. His prime escape would be the movies, which was the safest, air-conditioned environment Charles could take little Marty for fun. Hypnotized by cinema, Scorsese began drawing out his own movie scenarios. Catholicism played a major role as well and, at one point, altar boy Scorsese planned to become a priest. It did not pan out, Scorsese being too enthralled by girls and having a natural artistic temperament. Eventually, he would go to NYU where the idea of film school was emerging as a viable career path. It was also the emergence of 1960s counterculture. 

These details have long been part of Scorsese lore for hardcore cinephiles. What Miller does so well is fill in the details, expanding our understanding of the forces that shaped the director. Some feel like destiny, such as that down the street from Scorsese lived a young actor named Robert De Niro. Miller tracks down figures from the old neighborhood that directly inspired characters in Scorsese’s early, notable films and later hits like “Goodfellas.” The erratic gambler John “Johnny Boy” Civello in “Mean Streets,” played so memorably by De Niro, was indeed based on a real person who Miller puts in front of her camera (he is as colorful as his screen avatar). Scorsese had to go back to the idea of “write what you know” after he tried moving to Los Angeles and didn’t fit in with the Hollywood crowd, which included rising young talents like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Brian De Palma and Francis Ford Coppola. These directors would define the groundbreaking, personal cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s. Everyone recognized Scorsese’s talent, but he was still an outsider as a working class kid from New York. Two early films, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door” and “Mean Streets,” remain powerful expressions of growing up in a conservative, misogynist terrain where the idea of free love would take a long time to infiltrate. Guilt, sexual repression and tribal violence dominate these narratives.

It is little wonder that Scorsese’s first true box office hit would be made in collaboration with the writer Paul Schrader, a former film critic raised in a heavily religious Calvinist environment, who was in a rut when he wrote “Taxi Driver.” Scorsese and Schrader, along with De Niro and co-star Jodie Foster, comment on the film’s lasting relevance. Its story of a loner New York taxi driver spiraling and becoming obsessed with a young prostitute could easily be transferred to today’s online incel reality. Equally intriguing is Scorsese admitting how much of himself is present in the story’s loneliness and a psyche going over the edge. “Mr. Scorsese” can become glaringly honest, exploring territory rarely discussed so openly about the director. The 1970s found Scorsese swept into the cocaine scene that was so prevalent in entertainment. He would party hard with Robbie Robertson of the Band, a group that was also the subject of his classic documentary “The Last Waltz.” Cocaine helped fuel a mania during which Scorsese would constantly be wanting to film. As a result the work would suffer, like the musical “New York, New York,” a grand production that was mostly improvised. Its box office failure would only fuel more of Scorsese’s recklessness with drugs. When his body finally gave out and he ended up in the hospital, Robert De Niro offered a chance to recover with the script of “Raging Bull.”

This restless nature to Scorsese is evident in his technique. Miller finds enough space in the docuseries to adequately explore the filmmaking process and how her subject goes about it. There are fascinating details concerning his storyboarding process or how his childhood of staring out a window influenced his constant use of overhead shots. Longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, who first met Scorsese when they were both working on Michael Wadleigh’s “Woodstock” documentary, is allowed to explore certain sequences from classic films in detail. She explains the grueling nature of shooting the boxing sequences in “Raging Bull,” a movie for which she won the Best Editing Oscar in 1980. Such moments are a great lesson in how cinema is a collaborative effort. Figures like Schoonmaker and cinematographers like Michael Ballhause and Rodrigo Prieto have helped shape and define Scorsese’s work. The director was one of the pioneers of using rock n’ roll as a soundtrack, and we learn how gangster movies like “Goodfellas” and “Casino” were virtually designed to  specific songs. Then there are the funnier stories about skirting around censorship, like “Taxi Driver” avoiding an X rating when the redness of the blood in its gruesome climax was simply dialed down. 

Still, the greater value of “Mr. Scorsese” is its personal side. He is open on camera about having bouts of anger that in the old days could include destroying phones or throwing desks around. Scorsese gets honest about constantly seeking companionship, leading to several marriages that fizzled out. Ex-wife Isabella Rossellini appears on camera and speaks about Scorsese with genuine respect and warmth. Clearly this is a man whose sense of faith has also caused fascinating internal struggles. He admits his Catholicism never truly left him. Films like “Raging Bull” deal with envy and sexual repression in ways he confesses say much about him. The drive of a seeker led him to make bold choices like adapting Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel “The Last Temptation of Christ” in 1988, which created a cultural firestorm from the religious right that shocked the director. Even his mafia films are about guilt, sin and morality. It is a sense of spirituality that can lead the director of “Gangs of New York” to also make “Kundun” about the Dalai Lama. 

Where “Mr. Scorsese” rushes is in its final chapter, which explores Scorsese’s recent period marked by his work with Leonardo DiCaprio. There are plenty of great details on the making of “Gangs of New York,” “The Aviator, “The Departed” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” all striking works of cinema. “Wolf of Wall Street” in particular has gained its own cult following after striking a chord in a post-Great Recession landscape. DiCaprio shares endearing praise for the screen veteran. Yet here there are hints of even more powerful material when we learn that Scorsese’s private life has been dominated by caring for his wife, Helen Schermerhorn Morris, a renowned publisher living with Parkinson’s disease. Moments at home reveal an artist who can be so loving and caring with the life partner he thought he would never find. Scorsese’s daughters also appear in this docuseries as pretty cheerful individuals who inherited their fathers’ natural enthusiasm. 

“Mr. Scorsese” is a must for the director’s fans and worth seeing for the casual viewer interested in Scorsese or cinema as an art form. Miller acknowledges Scorsese’s cultural stature yet didn’t made a hagiography. It is a genuine profile. Part of what makes Scorsese a great American director is how he and his work embody key aspects of our country. He is a descendant of immigrants who grew up at the bottom of the social ladder, witnessing the underbelly that operates in a major city like New York. He rose to the top while carrying all of his personal baggage and turning it into stories that continue to influence new generations of filmmakers. Miller’s docuseries doesn’t shy away from the politics of Hollywood, the wheeling and dealing, the frustration when you don’t make the studios money. Scorsese has been through it all and has given us some of our best movies. Getting there has been quite the journey.

“Mr. Scorsese” begins streaming Oct. 17 on Apple TV+.