Golden Mean

Martin Scorsese's Streets still glitters

by Peter Keough

MEAN STREETS, Directed by Martin Scorsese. Written by Martin Scorsese and Mardik Martin. With Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Amy Robinson, David Carradine, Robert Carradine, David Proval, Richard Romanus, and Cesare Danova. A Warner Bros. release. At the Brattle this Friday and Saturday, April 3 and 4.

"Are you talking to yourself?" So asks Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) near the end of Martin Scorsese's breakthrough masterpiece, Mean Streets. The line doesn't ring with the cultish, apocalyptic resonance of De Niro's "Are you talking to me?" in Scorsese's more famous Taxi Driver, but 25 years later it prefigures the career of a filmmaker whose oeuvre can be seen as a solipsistic pilgrimage through the dreamscape of film -- up to and including his latest works, Kundun and "A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies." Although he's regarded as one of the great realists in American cinema, with the title Mean Streets becoming a buzzword for the styles of imitators like Quentin Tarantino, Scorsese's films can be seen as an ongoing interior dialogue through the collective unconscious of movie images.

Johnny Boy's question is directed at Charlie (Harvey Keitel), the spiritually tormented up-and-coming mafioso whose dialogue with the deity begins with the film's opening black screen. "You don't make up for your sins in church," he tells the darkness in a voiceover. "You do it on the streets." Or, in Scorsese's case, on the screen. Charlie shudders awake not to the urban maelstrom of the title but to an antique movie projector grinding out home-movie images of the film's characters. As compelling as Mean Streets gets in its ability to suspend disbelief, its recurrent references to the medium -- Charlie's quoting John Garfield, the snippets of The Searchers, The Tomb of Ligeia, and The Big Heat that counterpoint the ritual randomness of his and the other characters' experience -- make it hard for us to forget that it's "only" a movie.

Neither does that "real" world of the film's characters seem any less illusory: in an infernal, hallucinatory rehearsal of the famed Copacabana tracking shot of GoodFellas, Charlie floats into the red-lit bar that is the film's central locus, the image reverberating into a slow-motion point-of-view shot of the joint's strippers, barflies, and wanna-be wiseguys. Although its pseudo-vérité techniques of handheld cameras and rapid-fire, slangy, seemingly improvised dialogue snap us into its gritty, atmospheric evocation of Little Italy, Streets is patently an expressionist projection, a turf as fabulous as that of Spenser's The Faery Queene, on which Charlie, and Scorsese, can do battle with their dragons.

And though the setting is a hyper-realistic fantasy, the sins to be expiated are genuine. A small-time loan collector for his Uncle Giovanni (Cesare Danova), Charlie seeks success as much as salvation on the streets, even at the expense of those closest to him. His pal Johnny Boy is a particular liability: a gambler whose thrill is in losing, a loose cannon with the uncanny genius of making a bad situation insanely worse, Johnny Boy, as many have pointed out, is the longhaired, jitterbugging, bomb-throwing id to Charlie's uptight, altar-boy ego. Johnny Boy's cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson), with whom Charlie is having an affair, is another detriment to his soul and career. Like Johnny Boy, she's seen as "sick in the head" (she has epilepsy) and an unsuitable companion for someone advancing in the organization.

More crucial is the insistence of both Teresa and Johnny Boy on drawing Charlie out of his privileged, voyeuristic isolation. In this and all Scorsese's movies, despite his astonishing ability to re-create in his art the immediacy of experience, the dominant mood is alienation. His heroes look on at life at a remove -- from the unconsoling refuge of the church in Mean Streets, the dehumanizing confines of a cab in Taxi Driver, the otherworldly shangri-la of a monastery in Kundun. Even the unreflective brute Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull can connect with the world only by throwing punches. And despite his stature as a filmmaker, when it comes to being acknowledged by his peers, Scorsese does seem to be talking to himself. Mean Streets received no Academy Award nominations in a year when the Best Picture Oscar went to The Sting. This year his Kundun inexcusably lost in the cinematography and score categories to Titanic.

The impact of Mean Streets and the eclectic, obsessive, uneven Scorsese works that would follow transcends any gilded statuette, however. He's the bard of an era whose spirituality and morality is estranged by the very media designed to connect it with the world. In the two and a half decades since his film first posed the possibility of salvation, its realization in the home or in the streets has become increasingly remote. The persistence of such directors as Scorsese keeps alive the hope it might someday be realized on the screen.