Martin Scorsese (2010)

Scorsese has made fine documentaries about (non-film) artists he admires – Bob Dylan, George Harrison – but this much shorter and more personal piece, which describes Elia Kazan’s influence on Scorsese as a teenage moviegoer and an aspiring filmmaker in his early twenties, is a disappointing mess.  Scorsese, who worked with Kent Jones on A Letter to Elia, is arbitrary about the information he gives to the audience – in fact he never seems sure or to care who his audience is. He explains, for example, that East of Eden is about two brothers but doesn’t say anything about the scenario of much less well-known Kazan movies.  The way Scorsese tells Kazan’s life story, anyone who didn’t already know something about it would assume his directing career in Hollywood began after he’d directed the original Broadway productions of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Death of a Salesman (1948).  By the time the Miller play opened, Kazan had already won his first directing Oscar for Gentleman’s Agreement, having directed three or four feature films before that.   (One of the best bits of A Letter to Elia is Scorsese’s commentary on a clip from one of these films, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t make the chronology any clearer.)  I don’t doubt the sincerity of Scorsese’s admiration and – once they’d got to know each other after Scorsese’s own career had taken off – affection for Kazan but A Letter to Elia gives the impression that the younger director wants to talk about himself rather than his artistic mentor.

The focus is mainly on three Kazan movies – On the Waterfront, East of Eden and America America – and Scorsese explains at some length (and with a good deal of repetition) what they meant to him.    He doesn’t, though, take the time to describe Kazan’s particular talent for conveying emotional truth through melodrama.  When Scorsese talks about what seemed to him at the time the revelatory realness of On the Waterfront and East of Eden you know what he means if you’ve seen the films in their entirety – and enough of the Hollywood product from which they represented an exciting departure.  But the lack of analysis of the kind of artist that Kazan was means that the clips here from East of Eden in particular (which is a favourite of mine too) make it look overwrought and antique.  There’s some footage of an interview with the elderly Kazan which, it has to be said, isn’t much more illuminating than the narrative.   Late on in the film Scorsese says something like ‘You learn more about a man from his work than from the person he is’.   A Letter to Elia seems to illustrate this but surely not in the way Scorsese intended.

5 October 2012