New York, New York

Martin Scorsese – 1977 – USA

New York, New York means a lot to Martin Scorsese, for reasons – unusually for him – that didn’t find their way into the film itself.  Despite its nostalgic view of his native city in the 40s and 50s, the presence of Robert De Niro, and a small handful of striking shots, there is very little of Scorsese’s style on display.  Granted, wedged in between masterpieces like Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980), hardly anything by anyone would compare favorably, but it’s a considerable struggle to see this film as something more than a bloated exercise in indulgence.  While marijuana and heroin would have been the drugs of choice in the jazz world inhabited by De Niro’s character in the story, it’s really mounds of cocaine that appear to be driving the conception and execution of the inescapably 70s film.  It’s an experiment on Scorsese’s part, which is admirable in and of itself, but we can’t escape the fact that it simply doesn’t work.  During the ecstatic partying in the city following the end of World War II, capricious saxophonist De Niro courts and woos spunky WAC and aspiring singer Liza Minnelli.  One protracted sequence of courtship follows another for seemingly the whole first half of this two-hour-forty-minute film, most of them written as comedy but which fall flat in a really desperate and embarrassing way.  This intentional, surreal incongruity – 40s MGM Judy Garland musical and 70s-era John Cassavetes domestic drama – was the locus of Scorsese’s experiment, and it might have worked if he’d really blended them together, which could have resulted in some genuinely funny black humor.  Instead, it’s more like a half-hour of one genre, then a half-hour of another, until the film ends.  Each time the film shifts gears, its’s jarring in a manner that’s aggravating instead of delightful.  Like Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), it has moments of brilliance, but seems somehow flippant, as if merely evoking the likes of Michael Powell and Vincent Minnelli are enough to actually be as great as they were at what they did, without having to make a whole career of it; it’s slightly arrogant, even if we can honor the ambition to do something so daring.  Liza Minnelli spends the film straining to break out into full-on Broadway histrionics, while De Niro and Scorsese never fully buy in and seem to be tolerating the affair with bitten tongues until they can get back to the edgy work they were about in Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver.  In the end, neither of the leads come off as believable, compatible or even likeable; their relationship is as implausible as the jumble of genres that surround them.  Worst of all, the film lacks almost any signature by Scorsese, who was perfectly capable of applying it when he wanted to in other seemingly unlikely projects like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and After Hours (1986).