They Are All Equal Now
ince cinema is moving toward television, and since the MCU generation is trying to actually tussle with a good fella like Martin Scorsese, and since all of this is wrapped around a cultural moment steeped in glorious contradictions, the timing of couldn’t be more perfect. A movie that embodies classical values of saga storytelling and reflective character study and shatters the frenetic machismo of Scorsese’s previous gangland epics—particularly his marvellous, unruly masterpiece, (1995), and (1990)— is both cinema and television in a fused form that suggests an artistic reconciliation for Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian. Funded by Netflix to the tune of something approaching the thin-air atmosphere of $200 million after all the studios passed (thanks to an expensive digital de-aging process for older actors playing their characters’ younger selves), the project wouldn’t exist without the advent of streaming TV and Netflix’s sprawling presence—and its elastic ability to produce and present longform narratives. And yet doesn’t play by the rules of longform and the conventions of episodic structure, a phenomenon that used to be contained to the network and cable cultural ghetto but is now in the beginning phases of colonizing viewers’ minds in global ways we’ve barely begun to understand. Scorsese’s and Zaillian’s work must be measured by the storytelling form and length of (1963), and of the ’60s (1960) and (1962), but with the intimacy and political acumen of Stroheim, especially what we know of (1924), and most profoundly of all, the overwhelming sadness of the movie’s greatest influence, (1975). The small screen and large screen together, the close-up and the landscape canvas, the montage of the saga and of the continuous sequence of action: represents Scorsese’s, and certainly Zaillian’s, most ambitious and nearly impossible project, appearing just as cinema is about to transform into something entirely different.
