Stream It Or Skip It?

Mr. Scorsese (now streaming on Apple TV+) is a five-part, five-hour documentary series about America’s greatest living filmmaker, Uwe Boll. I’m joking! Martin Scorsese, director of so many great films I don’t even need to mention them – OK, my faves are Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street – gets the retrospective-minutiae treatment via director Rebecca Miller (who has a personal connection to her subject: her husband Daniel Day-Lewis starred in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York). Of course this miniseries is catnip for movie hounds; of course, there will be discussions of gangsters and Catholicism; of course, the luminary stars and technicians he’s worked with will be talking heads praising his genius and influence, rightfully so. The question is whether five hours is enough.

Opening Shot: A quick-cutting montage of film clips from Scorsese’s oeuvre. 

The Gist: “Who are we? What are we, I should say, as human beings? Are we intrinsically good or evil?” Scorsese poses the core curiosity that drives him as a filmmaker and storyteller as we watch a few iconic moments from his filmography. We watch as he cinches a tie around his neck for a photo shoot. The Rolling Stones play in the background (of course). Friends, contemporaries, peers, admirers, scholars, any or all of the above, praise him: He’s a “poet of the contemporary landscape,” he’s “a priest and a gangster.” The guy needs no introduction, but TV miniseries do, so we get one anyway.

The rest of the hour chronicles the early years of the Scorsese saga. He grew up in tenement housing in Queens, New York, with a brief stay in the Corona neighborhood of Queens until his father got in a fistfight with their landlord, prompting Italian crime families to intervene and settle the dispute by sending the Scorsese’s back to the tenement. Scorsese describes the ordeal as “traumatizing” – and anyone who’s seen even a handful of his movies knows this type of experience was highly informative for the stories he’d end up putting on the screen. His uncle was a gangster; every Italian non-crime family was inevitably connected to an Italian crime family in those days. 

At age three, Scorsese was diagnosed with severe asthma, and the only place little Marty could go for relief was air-conditioned movie theaters. Cue Spike Lee: “Thank god for asthma!”, he says, cackling. Scorsese watched Technicolor musicals, he watched shadowy black-and-white noir, Bicycle Thieves was foundational for him. He’d go home and draw storyboards of epic gladiator battles captured with long zooms: “I’m still doing this shot,” he says, holding up a reproduction of his childhood sketches. His condition made him a homebody who often watched the other kids play outside, the windows functioning like film frames, his upper-level vantage point informing his love of high-angle shots. 

Are you quaffing these details like a man lost in the desert coming upon a sparkling oasis? If not, you probably wouldn’t bother to read this. Mr. Scorsese is the origin story of a superhero of cinema, and yes, I’m well aware of the implications of that statement. The rest of the episode – titled Stranger in a Strange Land – documents Scorsese’s early years as a guy caught on the ethical spectrum between the Catholic Church and the organized crime functioning in the streets, as a student filmmaker at NYU, as a budding creative who was inspired by French and Italian movements to grab a camera and shoot out on the streets and break the traditional rules of cinema. 

We learn how he met lifelong film editor and fellow legend Thelma Schoonmaker, how he was nudged out of co-director credit for the documentary Woodstock, how he injected his traditional sense of morality into his work while the rest of 1960s American culture was about progress, how he landed his first real directing gig for Roger Corman and ended up sort of regretting it, how John Cassavetes once physically embraced him and encouraged him to follow his own muse, to tell his own stories. 

We enjoy commentary from people we know via single names: Spielberg, De Palma, DiCaprio, Rossellini – soon to come, I’m sure, will be Schrader, Coppola, Lucas and the guy in the episode’s final shot, and you’ve already guessed who that is (and you’re right on the money). His parents, Charles and Catherine Scorsese, turn up in an archival interview from 1990. Highly enjoyable are bits with Scorsese reminiscing with his old childhood friends from Queens, who worked on or starred in some of his earliest films, and bolster commentary about their rough-and-tumble upbringing – they once found a body, and one of them poked a pencil in the bullet wound in the dead man’s face – on what you might call “mean streets.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The last time I watched five hours of documentary about one subject was, well, last week – Aliens Expanded. But Mr. Scorsese is more in line with docs like 2017’s Spielberg and 2015’s De Palma.

Our Take: Stranger in a Strange Land finds Miller establishing her subject’s personality and thematic touchstones, setting us up for an analytical run through the creamiest of the Scorsese crop: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Departed and all the embarrassment of high-point riches in his filmmaking career. Stories will be told, tragic and triumphant, and right now we run the risk of praising Marty and not how entertaining Mr. Scorsese is, with its murderer’s row of talking heads, reiterations of bits familiar to cinephiles and smart analytical revelations – and inevitably will be in future installments. 

Expect Schoonmaker to be a consistent commentator – she’s edited every Scorsese film since 1980 – and thus far has proved to be insightful and candid in equal measure. There will be drugs (only a brief mention in episode one), there will be Oscars (ridiculously late in his career), there will be well-deserved accolades from a variety of voices. Here, we learn that one of Scorsese’s key mentors was a man named Father Principe, a priest who could throw hands if necessary. If that isn’t a crucial insight into the man and his work, I don’t know what is, and so far Mr. Scorsese is rife with such revelations. More, please.

Sex and Skin: None yet.

Parting Shot: A closeup of… Robert De Niro. With a little half-smile on his face.

Sleeper Star: It’s always been Schoonmaker, so why would it be any different with this series?

Most Pilot-y Line: Goodfellas screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi makes a pithy observation about Scorsese’s time spent soothing his asthma in movie houses “Marty’s life depended on going to movies. It’s where he could breathe.”

Our Call: Probably should be 10 hours. At least. STREAM IT.

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How To Watch Mr. Scorsese

Mr. Scorsese is available to stream for Apple TV+ subscribers.

Apple TV+ comes with a seven-day free trial for new subscribers and has just one ad-free streaming plan available for $13.99/month.

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John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.