WOW, THIS MOVIE IS A DISASTER.
When I watch Scorsese movies, usually, I feel utterly seduced. I feel like I'm doing a thing I want to be doing more than anything else in the world. Only a few times has this feeling failed me: Mean Streets, in which I felt like the characters were saying nothing and never ever ever going to stop talking; After Hours, in which I had no idea where we were going or why; and The King of Comedy, which I eventually had to admit to myself I hated. And now this.
There are some fine moments in this film, but few of them seem to belong to Scorsese. The giant musical medley at the end is so imitative of classical musicals that it's a ventriloquist act. Liza sparkles, but I've seen her do virtually the same work for other directors. The moments when the lighting changes radically to zoom in or out of a subjective emotional experience are great, as is the moment when De Niro catches a sailor and a blonde dancing under an artificial spotlight, but all the good is surrounded with swampy ad-libbing and miserable characterization.
A book I badly need to read for this project is Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and after I started watching this film and being a bit stunned by how flabby and joyless it is, I skimmed some of the pages that mention it. Scorsese was in a bad way on this picture, and tried to exorcise his personal unhappiness with De Niro's character. Plainly this was unwise, because De Niro comes off as a one-dimensional louse.
The technical experiment Scorsese tried to do, according to his filmed introduction on the NY, NY DVD, was perfectly sound: create something artificial in the classical Hollywood sense. In order to really perform artificiality, though, he needed to tighten his control on actors, script, editing, everything, more so than on any film he'd done before. The film's a mess because it's indulgent, and multiple departments bear responsibility for that, but Scorsese bears the most.
I thought of The Aviator a lot during this movie, even though on the surface they're not a lot alike. The V-J day set piece seems like an elaborate, inadequate rehearsal for the tense, over-the-top sequences in the Cocoanut Grove. He did learn between the one and the other that if you're going to create an artificial period environment, you need to go a lot further over the top than you think, because otherwise it's just going to look like a series of errors. But The Aviator is also a tightly controlled movie (despite its overall commitment to maximalism) and that characteristic, in comparison, makes it clear just how sloppy NY, NY is.
Among its one hundred and sixty-four minutes, I enjoyed approximately forty-five. I never liked De Niro, who was no longer hungry at the time, having just come off Taxi Driver. I often loved Liza, although her capacity as a comedienne and her inherent nerviness are running circles around the entire production. In the final number, she looked less like a woman absorbed in her art than a coked-up mess, and I feel bad for saying that but I suspect it's true. The editing put me to sleep. A profound artistic failure.
As for the 70s strains: it's a period piece, but what 50s nostalgia appears is for big band music & fashions, not teenybopper rock 'n' roll a la Grease. Casual sex and infrastructure anxiety don't figure in. There might be an argument in there about the only New York anyone's capable of loving in 1977 is a noncontemporary one, but it's weak. In all, not a very timely film. Scorsese was one of the five or six most important American filmmakers of the decade, and possibly my favorite filmmaker of all, and it's a shame that his entry for this year is of so little use to me.
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