Though I find moments to admire in each of his films, Martin Scorsese's 2000s work has seemed less vital, less strange, less energetic, too big, and too polished, with a wax-museum respectability, a taxidermied Hollywood royalty feel that keeps me at a distance, an odd sensation considering how much I love the thirty years of work preceding it. I'm also not much of a fan of Leonardo DiCaprio's acting, and he's been in every Scorsese film of the 2000s except Hugo, probably not coincidentally my favorite Scorsese film since the unfairly maligned Bringing out the Dead. DiCaprio seems like a guy with tremendous dedication to the craft, someone who lives and breathes acting. He means it. He means it so much. Unfortunately, he's been a professional actor since he was a small child and a huge celebrity since he was 12 or 13, so he has no fucking idea how people from any non-celebrity walk of life actually live. This was especially apparent in that gargantuan piece of shit Revolutionary Road. He always looks like he's acting instead of being, and that blows it for me in any film where realism, or at least movie realism, is required. Until now, the only DiCaprio performance I enjoyed was his cartoonish Mephistophelean Southern dandy slave master in Django Unchained.
The Wolf of Wall Street is different. For the first time, I'm convinced DiCaprio is the guy he's playing, as much as anyone can be convinced by a bona fide movie star. For once, that oily big shot charm and trying-too-hard intensity perfectly fit the guy he's playing. Scorsese attacks the material with a ferocity, energy, and humor I haven't seen in him since the 1990s, and though he's consciously echoing Goodfellas and Casino here (with some After Hours black comedy and screwball drug paranoia) in narrative structure, formal technique, use of voice over, epic length, and main character who is both an unreliable narrator and a criminal, this is not a derivative retread of past glories. There's an unsettling, foreboding strangeness that suits the current era (I'm not really sure how to explain what I mean here), a pinprick sharp leanness (odd for a three-hour movie, his longest), and one of the great virtuosic, desperate, darkly comic Scorsese scenes (the Quaalude overdose scene). He's got the juice back.
A quick word here about the supporting cast. If a DiCaprio lead in a recent Scorsese film is all too expected, the supporting characters are typically atypical. Scorsese's always had a nice eye for offbeat, colorful supporting cast choices, and there's a lot of great, unusual work here from Matthew McConaughey, Joanna Lumley, Spike Jonze, Rob Reiner (who answers the phone in an English accent and becomes enraged if anyone interrupts him while he's watching The Equalizer), Kyle Chandler, Jean Dujardin, and even Jonah Hill. I was surprised how much I liked this movie.
Speaking of Jonze, his science fiction romance about a lonely man's relationship with his operating system in a near-but-not-that-near-future Los Angeles (a composite of filming locations Shanghai and L.A.) is gorgeous, disturbing, sad, funny, a little annoying, and possibly a fuck-you letter and/or public working out of emotions from a divorced man to his ex-wife, if the parodic nods to, critiques of, and quoted shots from Jonze's ex Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation are anything to go by. I like the muted haze of colors and the way cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema caught the light, and Jonze's script is smart about loneliness and the way the everyday nuts and bolts of human communication is headed. Not a big fan of Arcade Fire's score, but I like most everything else, save for some minor nitpicky objections. Real good stuff here from Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Chris Pratt, and the voice of Scarlett Johansson.
I caught a pair of features from writer/director Zvyagintsev at a recent Austin Film Society Russian film series. Zvyagintsev often gets compared to Tarkovsky in the American press, but this probably has more to do with American film critics not knowing many other Russian directors rather than any aesthetic similarity between the two men. Other than leaving plenty of space for thought and building narrative in a slow, detailed, visually distinctive way, I don't see much commonality. I liked both films a great deal. The Return, about two young boys and their long-absent father who mysteriously returns to take them on a trip of equally mysterious purpose, is a tense, slow-burning thriller, full of dread and regret. Elena is a character drama about a late-middle-aged woman from a working-class background whose second marriage to a wealthy older man (also on his second marriage) hits trouble when her son's family experiences a crisis. Like The Return, Elena proceeds by the slow accumulation of details, facial expressions, and some startlingly visual shots, and is about estranged family members, but both films find their own curious worlds to inhabit. Zvyagintsev is as astute an observer of young men, the natural world, and the working class as he is of middle-aged women, indoor living in large cities, and the wealthy, and that makes me excited about what he has yet to accomplish.
An unfortunately mediocre waste of a good cast, Clooney's film about the units tasked with saving European artworks from the Germans plays like an anthology of World War II movie cliches. John Goodman and Jean Dujardin have a nice chemistry in their scenes together, but the film is slackly written, directed, and edited, with lots of big speeches, forced sentiment, and a disconnected structure that doesn't move. This is a fascinating subject that deserves a better film.
