Martin Scorsese’s late-stage career has proved Quentin Tarantino wrong
26.10.2023 - 14:49
/ polygon.com
/ Quentin Tarantino
/ Martin Scorsese
/ Robert De-Niro
/ Flower Moon
In 2021, Quentin Tarantino defended his intention to make “just” 10 movies and retire, saying, “I know film history, and from here on in, directors do not get better.” That view of both artistry and film is squarely at odds with Martin Scorsese’s historic body of work. Scorsese had already made his 10th feature-length narrative film by 1986. He is now 80 years old, and his 27th, Killers of the Flower Moon, is a strong argument that directors are still capable of groundbreaking greatness late in life — and in Scorsese’s case, continued exhilarating experimentation and discovery.
Since the year 2000, Scorsese has curated a 23-year career within a career, and the quality and variety of his films have come not in spite of his age and experience, but because of it. His movies have never been more relevant than they became during the past two decades. With each subsequent release, as his career winds down, critical appreciation for him grows. Scorsese worship is the one remaining form of gerontocracy America is perfectly content with, and with good reason.
In the 21st century alone, Scorsese has made nine feature-length narrative films: Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman, and now, Killers of the Flower Moon. His stretch from 1976’s Taxi Driver through 1990’s Goodfellas is still his peak run, the films that defined his style and his perspective. But decades from now, the nine features he’s made since 2000 won’t be looked back on as half-baked, indulgent afterthoughts from a diminished artist who lost his fastball, a fate some great auteurs suffer in old age. Instead, it’s a fertile, vital body of work, virtuosic in entirely new ways, and as important in contextualizing his greatness as all the incredible work that preceded it.
Some of those nine movies are long-gestating bucket-list triumphs revisiting the pet subjects that defined Scorsese’s oeuvre in the 20th century, often directly commenting on work from the front half of his career. 2002’s Gangs of New York, about how organized crime was woven into the operation of Scorsese’s native city from its inception, is a prequel (or ancestor) to his classics Goodfellas and Casino. 2019’s The Irishman, about a man aging and dying with his guilt and sins unresolved at the end of a life of crime, is intended as a bookend to his crime trilogy with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. 2016’s Silence is in conversation with, if not a synthesis of, the ideas explored in The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun; all three are searching, anti-commercial religious films Scorsese struggled for years to get made.
In all Scorsese’s late-period films (along with the passel of rock documentaries he’s