Why Martin Scorsese’s most “cold-blooded” movie doesn’t have a gun or gangster in sight
When are unspoken words more devastating than any gunshot or mob hit? When those unspoken words are uttered in Martin Scorsese‘s interpretation of New York high society, of course.
Throughout his career, despite making movies from a wide variety of genres and being one of Hollywood’s most evangelical voices on cinema of all kinds, Scorsese will always be primarily associated with the gangster genre. It’s understandable for, after all, he had his first hit with Mean Streets in 1973, a movie that invited audiences into the scuzzy world of small-time crooks in Mafia-controlled Little Italy. Then, 17 years later, he returned to the genre to make Goodfellas, arguably the greatest gangster picture of all time.
Now, in a career that has encompassed 26 feature films, making five gangster movies doesn’t really seem excessive. However, I’d argue Scorsese has always been a victim of his own success as he makes the best gangster movies that live long in people’s memories, and Goodfellas, in particular, looms so large over the cultural conversation that it’s difficult to separate him from the world, even if you wanted to.
Naturally, because he is a filmmaker of the highest order, his gangster movies all have different flavours, from the virtuoso excess of Casino to the macho Bostonian posturing of The Departed to the elegiac, melancholy tone of The Irishman. However, they all have one thing in common: they’re populated by the most cold-blooded characters you could ever imagine.
Think of some of his gangster films’ enduring scenes: Joe Pesci walking straight into his own assassination in Goodfellas; Jack Nicholson executing a bound and gagged woman on the beach in The Departed; a man’s eye popping out of its head as it is squeezed in a vice-like grip in Casino. There’s barely a sympathetic character in any of these films, and they all live and die by the gun.
If you ask Scorsese, though, he once made a movie which was infinitely more cold-blooded than any of his features of gun-toting mafiosos and corrupt cops, and it was all because of the film’s use of language. With 1993’s The Age of Innocence, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder, the man immersed himself in the world of costume dramas for the one and only time, delivering a nuanced tale of unconsummated love in 1870s New York City high society.
In this world of the wealthy elite, appearances were everything, and social standing was king, so if anything threatened that social fabric, it would be dealt with in an aloof, faux polite manner, instead of being faced head-on. In practice, a woman like Pfeiffer’s Countess Ellen Olenska would be ostracised by the very people she grew up with for the supposed crime of bringing shame on her family with a failed marriage. Yet, no one would ever come right out and say that was why she had been exiled.
This manner of speaking, which Scorsese dubbed “drawing room language”, always seemed considerably crueller to him than the more upfront nature of the modern world. “What has always stuck in my head is the brutality under the manners,” Scorsese told Roger Ebert in ’93, “People hide what they mean under the surface of language.”
Having the context of his growing-up years in Little Italy, where organised crime was so prevalent in his neighbourhood, sometimes the repercussions of stepping out of line involved murder, “usually done by the hands of a friend”. As the unspoken freezing-out that would have taken place in the 1870s was therefore alien to him, he noted, “It was so cold-blooded. I don’t know which is preferable.”
