I have to say, this Martin Scorsese series is not going well.
After being underwhelmed, to put it kindly, by Who's That Knocking at My Door in February and New York, New York in April, June made it 3-for-3 with The Color of Money. I think I liked it better than those two, but the margin is pretty narrow.
In order to prepare for this, I watched The Hustler in late May. I didn't love The Hustler either, but I got what it was going for. I'm not sure if if it's the intention of these movies to make our skin crawl from spending so much time stuck in smoky pool halls. If so, good job, you succeeded.
Knowing what Paul Newman's Eddie Felson went through in that movie -- including the suicide of his girlfriend, played by Piper Laurie, ex-wife of the man I wrote about yesterday, Joe Morgenstern -- I feel like I want to shake him for continuing to live his life in these slums infested with degenerate gamblers.
Maybe it is a failure of having the right expectations coming in. I didn't of course see The Color of Money in 1986, but I had friends who did, and I got the idea it was supposed to be really cool. At age 13, we didn't like movies because they probed the tortured souls of desperate people. We liked them because they were cool. We liked them because Tom Cruise looked awesome making trick shots and whooping people at billiards.
I guess that happens here, but it never felt thrilling to me. It never gave me the sense of something to aspire to. Even if you are ultimately going to demonstrate the hollowness of a particular pursuit, because it's a movie, first you have to make it look sort of cool, right? Maybe the 48-year-old me just doesn't see it that way.
It occurs to me that there's an interesting parallel here with Lightyear, which I saw on Sunday, about five days after I saw Money. If you'd like my Lightyear review, it's here, but I'll give you a taste of the relevant part right now. If you know the premise of Lightyear, you know it's supposed to be the movie Andy and in his friends saw that all made them want a Buzz Lightyear toy in the original Toy Story. Having seen the movie, I have no idea how they'd think a kid who aspired to see brave and uncomplicated heroes on screen would have liked this movie at all, much less immediately demanded an action figure of the same character.
I similarly don't get what drew the 12- and 13-year-olds who were my peers to this movie. (I was 12 for three more days when it was released on October 17th of 1986.) Yeah it starred Cruise, but it was not as easy as I expected it would be to wish ourselves away into his shoes, the way we did for movies like Top Gun, and if we had seen them by this point, Risky Business. The fact that pre-teen boys seem to develop a fascination with pool, independent of films like this, surely helped. (Don't know if they do anymore nowadays -- I'm not even sure if my 11-year-old knows what a pool table is.)
Don't get me wrong, Scorsese does try to make it look cool, at least on the level of interesting camera angles capturing balls scattered all over tables, or resoundingly chunking home into the nearest pocket. Thelma Schoonmaker's editing shines in these scenes, and Newman and Cruise certainly picked up enough skill at pool to make some good shots and make it all look very believable. Knowing what we know now about Cruise, he wouldn't have had it any other way.
But the scenes between the pool games don't offer us a life I want to live, or would have wanted to live even in 1986. There's a lot of fighting and anguish, some of which I didn't fully comprehend even though I was paying attention and only nodding off a little bit. I thought this movie reached some weird, sudden emotional crescendos that had nothing preceding them in the dialogue, at least that I could figure out. Suddenly people were mad about something and quitting on each other and, well, I guess I must have been nodding off more than I thought I was.
And like I said earlier, I wanted to shake Newman. Maybe I expected him to resemble a more stereotypical, probably lazier version of this character, where he'd be three steps ahead of everyone, winking slyly and staying above the fray. But Eddie Felson is right smack dab in the middle of the fray, no better off now than he was 25 years earlier, no wiser for all the miles he's put on that pool cue. Perhaps the disappointment of that, even if it was the point, was something I never got over.
As for how this fits into Scorsese's career? Well I suppose it contains the criminal element Scorsese always flirts with, though I couldn't see his obsession with Catholicism rearing its head. Maybe I just wasn't looking for it. I'm sure there were crucifix shapes embedded in the mis en scene had I been more observant.
But the Scorsese I've seen so far in 2022 has not really whet my appetite to be more observant, even though the director's undeniable mastery of cinematic language should invite that. The Scorsese movies I've missed to this point in my life, I appear to have missed for a reason.
In August I'll be watching New York Stories, only one-third of which Scorsese directed. I'll watch all the segments, not just his, though it helps to have a little less to talk about, seeing as how I will be off to America for the first 20 days of the month and squeezing this in to the last 11.
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