Impressions Of The 52nd New York Film Festival – Part 2

While often overshadowed by his far more popular and influential fiction films, Martin Scorsese has been directing non-fiction shorts and features since the earliest days of his career. Several documentary efforts made during Scorsese’s 1970s heyday have been described by the director as resonating with key feature films of the period, ITALIANAMERICAN with MEAN STREETS, AMERICAN BOY with TAXI DRIVER, even THE LAST WALTZ with NEW YORK, NEW YORK. Often including Scorsese himself as an on-camera participant in the action, the films are refreshingly unpolished and full of character. But that informal fiction/non-fiction dialogue within Scorsese’s filmography unfortunately dried up by the end of the 1970s, and there is a decade-plus stretch where it may have appeared that he had given up the non-fiction form for good.

When Scorsese did return to documentary features with 1995’s made-for-television epic A PERSONAL JOURNEY WITH MARTIN SCORSESE THROUGH AMERICAN FILM (co-directed with Michael Henry Wilson), he did so as a celebrity, a cinematic legend, bringing the attendant level of prestige to the projects he took on. The low-budget intimacy of something like a portrait of Scorsese’s parents, ITALIANAMERICAN, gave way to the scope and access of productions like his examination of Bob Dylan’s early years, NO DIRECTION HOME.  A comparison between, say, MEAN STREETS and CASINO, illustrates the same divide in terms of feel.  

For the most part, Martin Scorsese’s documentaries now focus on the arts: on music, films, and individual artists in both mediums. Scorsese’s professional schedule is that of an in-demand icon, his time booked out years in advance. As a result, the type of documentary he produces now is able to secure interviews with celebrities and amass hours of relevant archival footage and clips, but can’t offer the fly-on-the-wall revelations or “down in the trenches” feeling of films like Terry Zwigoff’s CRUMB, Les Blank’s BURDEN OF DREAMS, Don Argott and Demian Fenton’s LAST DAYS HERE or Scorsese’s own protest-era STREET SCENES 1970. And they sometimes appear to lean heavier on the efforts of collaborators like Kent Jones, co-writer/director of the Elia Kazan tribute film A LETTER TO ELIA and the sole director of VAL LEWTON: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS (the promotion of which emphasizes presenter/narrator Scorsese’s participation), which may lead a viewer to question the degree of Scorsese’s involvement (if not his interest in the subject matter).

Co-directed by Scorsese and David Tedeschi (an editor on several earlier Scorsese documentaries, among other credits), THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT is a made-for HBO production exploring the history and influence of The New York Times Review Of Books, loosely positioning it around recent coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The structure reminded me a little of Xan Cassavetes’ Z CHANNEL: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION in that it has a relatively dry, straightforward feel when covering the larger story of the subject, but leaps to life whenever the focus shifts to some colorful, controversial character that played a part in said subject’s glorious past. Employing clips both present-day and archival, we have extended segments on literary figures like Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, and James Baldwin, and these supply the film with energy and interest.

Scorsese enthusiasts looking for evidence of hand in all of this won’t find any identifiable stylistic flourishes beyond some KOYANNISTATSI-style timelapse photography early on. This is an attractively photographed, but conventionally rendered, documentary. Of everything the Scorsese cannon, the 2010 Fran Lebowitz profile PUBLIC SPEAKING (also made for HBO) would be the most closely connected to it. 

 THE 50 YEAR ARGUMENT played as part of a documentary series programmed outside of the Main Slate, and I saw it with sold-out crowd populated almost entirely by elderly New Yorkers that, I’m generalizing, appeared to be the target readership for the The New York Times Review Of Books. While public intellectuals still emerge every so often, like the late Christopher Hitchens, their influence isn’t really felt by the public at large. It feels hyperbolic to suggest that they're an endangered species, but I couldn't help thinking the film played almost like an ethnographic study of the culture existing completely outside the mainstream American experience. It may prove to be a more valuable cultural document than most of Scorsese's other non-fiction work in this respect.

I first became aware of Damien Chazelle’s WHIPLASH when Chazelle’s 2013 short film of the same name was discussed on an episode of the Director’s Club podcast, and the trailer for this full-length feature version appeared before a few films I’d seen over the summer. This is an acclaimed drama concerning the near-sadomasochistic dynamic between an ambitious young jazz drummer (Miles Teller) and his bullying music instructor (J.K. Simmons) at a prestigious music conservatory. 

I will confess that I didn’t feel excited to see WHIPLASH going into it. I correctly guessed the beginning, middle, and end from the trailer alone. That aside, it’s still a very engaging movie, with solid lead performances from Teller and Simmons, and it contains a number of well-observed quieter scenes (in particular, an awkward first date) amid the big dramatic setpieces. While it makes a few missteps into hackneyed and even illogical directions, WHIPLASH concludes with its strongest sequence, which plays like the happy ending of a sports movie even if the message it communicates is ambiguous. It’s by far the easiest film to recommend to the casual moviegoer of what I saw here, and I can understand when friends have raved to me that it’s one of their favorites of the year. WHIPLASH had a run at a multiplex near where I live, although it only managed to play a single week before half of a new HUNGER GAMES sequel crowded it out.

As with LA SAPIENZA, Martín Rejtman’s TWO SHOTS FIRED is another low-key comedy-drama that I went into with no advance knowledge of. It opens as if it will be a grim Haneke-style study of senseless violence, with a teenage boy shooting himself twice after mowing the grass. But that potentially tragic situation is quickly subverted, and things quickly take a turn towards the absurd.  TWO SHOTS FIRED is that type of deadpan arthouse comedy where the characters never smile, as unlikely scenarios are played straight. The arbitrary way events unfold can be interpreted as commentary on the randomness of existence, a storytelling trope that can make some viewers insane when they attempt to add the whole thing up afterwards.  While it has some funny moments and has an unpredictability that's easy to admire, this was one of the films here that made the weakest first impression on me.