Shine a Light (2008)
Martin Scorsese has directed pictures-for-hire throughout his career, but most of those past films (such as After Hours and his remake of Cape Fear) had a bit of him in them, or at least an engaging sense of play. Scorsese’s most recent pictures, and some of his most financially successful, have been more dispiriting. Gangs of New York, which Scorsese had been off-and-on trying to produce for decades, is probably the most continually interesting of his recent fiction pictures, precisely because it’s so screwed up in places (you felt, within the frames, the war between the old and new Scorsese). The Aviator and The Departed play smashingly the first time you watch them, but that electricity fades, revealing those pictures to essentially be bubble-gum pulp dressed as something else; more closely resembling the work of a Scorsese imitator than the man himself. Those pictures reflect the annoying tendency (particularly of my generation) to idolize Scorsese’s kinetic, druggy, speed-freakster’s mise en scène over everything else.
Scorsese imitators “do Scorsese” (remember that run of Mean Streets rip-offs?) because the visual style is appealing to them, and because it can very obviously be pinpointed as “direction”, we can see the director taking over the story, and that very clear ownership has an obvious appeal for a fledgling, insecure filmmaker. What these filmmakers normally miss is the obsession that drives the blasts of violence and color, and the supernaturally untethered camera and the slow-motion and the freeze frames. Scorsese’s visual style is informed by his desperate urge to get it all out, to purge, to somehow eliminate, or push through, the art that separates Scorsese’s movie-fueled id from the public. In The Departed, Scorsese’s direction was sound and fury, a depressing form of desperation (to be relevant and to make a story, which was better as Infernal Affairs, his own).
Music has always brought something out in Scorsese though (his best picture in years is No Direction Home) and his camera dances again in Shine a Light. I can’t imagine, beyond the challenge of reaching a larger audience; that Scorsese gave much of a damn about The Departed, but, now capturing his favorite band, the beyond-iconic The Rolling Stones, Scorsese’s pulse has quickened again, and you can tell because his camera (operated by nearly every soon-to-be legendary cinematographer working, including Robert Richardson, John Toll, Emmanuel Lubezki, and Robert Elswit) has gone instinctive again. There’s no shallow, trumped up pyrotechnics in place of emotion here, because Scorsese doesn’t have to talk himself and his audience into his subject’s importance. Shine a Light, on purely surface terms, is one of the most beautiful pictures I’ve seen so far this year. The vibrant, painterly image has returned to Scorsese’s work, but painterly in an intuitive catch-as-catch-can way.
Shine a Light captures a two-day pair of concerts that The Rolling Stones performed as a benefit at the Beacon Theater in New York City in 2006. The picture opens with a sly making-of prologue that is meant to demonstrate that Scorsese isn’t taking any of this any more seriously than he should. Scorsese, for better and worse (those credit card ads), understands by now how the audience reacts to “Martin Scorsese” and he tweaks that here; particularly as Scorsese shows himself, with typical urgent nonchalance (that reads like an oxymoron, but anyone who’s seen Scorsese speak knows), informing a technician that he can’t burn Mick Jagger.
Then the show properly begins, and things are shaky, at first, opening with “Jumping Jack Flash” and “Shattered” (not one of my favorites), and these stand-bys are as tired and obligatory as you expect and fear for them to be, with Jagger’s famed herky-jerky physical explosions serving as the literal embodiment of Scorsese’s approach to The Departed. The Stones loosen up for “She Was Hot” though, and they maintain that momentum for much of the film, which refreshingly, surprisingly, includes wonderful, underplayed pieces such as “Far Away Eyes” and “As Tears Go By” (this one captures the punctured soul of The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s treatment of The Band); with a high point being their “Champagne and Reefer” cover with Buddy Guy. Guy, one of the Stones’ musical forefathers, gets the stubbornly indefatigable Jagger’s game up, and a momentary fever infects the music; for a few minutes, there’s more to the show than Jagger’s own legend - he has something to prove again.
Before Shine a Light was released, it was assumed by some that the only way the picture could dodge self-parody would be to embrace a mournful tone that recalled The Last Waltz; to acknowledge that both the filmmaker and the band had become franchises, and were battling for vitality again. Scorsese and Jagger have pointedly avoided this route, and, having now seen Shine a Light, it’s safe to say that that probably wouldn’t have been appropriate for the subject; or for our society as it is today, anyway. Many films of the 1970s embraced an indulgent doom-chic; a we’re-all-screwed-to-lose-to-the-man-and-there’s-nothing-we-can-do-about-it song. The Last Waltz reveled in the self-glorification of fading away. Our current society buys a different, opposing, delusion - an obsession for self-actualization, to be all you can be, eat your vegetables, follow your dream, and live to be 125.
Shine a Light reflects this, but manages to be a spiritual sequel to The Last Waltz anyway, one that happily confounds our expectations – the new Scorsese picture is a bookend to the old Scorsese picture, the other side of the coin, a portrait of older men finding a grace and self-fulfillment and ease that they thought, in their youth, to probably be elusive. Shine a Light is both braver and more hypocritical than The Last Waltz. It’s easy to look cool dying; it’s harder to look cool living. Shine a Light is about, regardless of ridicule, regardless of age, regardless of any other hindrance you can dream up, doing whatever you damn well please. The Rolling Stones: Keith Richards, Charlies Watts, Ronnie Wood, and Jagger, have become the Star Child of 2001, they’ve gone round and round so long that they’ve grown infinite and beyond themselves. Scorsese underlines this subtext with, perhaps too-cutely ironic, interview inserts largely taken from much earlier in The Stones’ career. Most of these snippets drive the same point – that Jagger’s legend isn’t a surprise to him. Say what you want of many of the Stones’ late albums (their most recent, A Bigger Bang, is underrated) but Jagger’s indomitable will and energy are truly, endlessly startling (recalling The Portrait of Dorian Gray). The key to Jagger and the Stones has something to do with Jagger and Richards’ guarded eyes, which never quite reveal the level of satire, of knowingness, to the rock-star clichés and “attitude” that they sell.
There is the Dorian Gray side though, the hypocrisy, the uglier side to the film: it’s undeniably dictated by commerce, by bad boys (both Scorsese and the Stones) going main-stream and taming their instincts for a wider audience. Some of the lyrics (”Some Girls” particularly) have been softened, profanity bleeped, and there’s no valid reason for a Scorsese-Stones collaboration to be a PG-13. The picture celebrates the courage and strength of the Stones’ longevity, but it also, perhaps hopelessly, points toward the fact that that longevity, in this business, can only come with dressing up and playing nice, taming what initially drove you. Stephen King once wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that his generation could’ve changed the world but opted to build Wal-Mart instead (King, of course, writes for EW now), and, as we watch one of the Easy Riders hawk insurance on television, it’s difficult to dispute that, or, at least the anger that fuels the generalization. Some folks, somewhat understandably, won’t be able to accept the plastic dimension of Shine a Light, and they’ll reject or avoid it. I couldn’t shake the energy and the rapture that fuels Shine a Light at its best. Amidst the commerce, amidst the brands, amidst the self-censoring, there’s something unavoidably poignant and alive: a bunch of legends, on both sides of the camera, who’ve done much more than most of us ever will, just having fucking fun.
★★★½
