Martin Scorsese once said, “My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.” As one of America’s most accomplished and celebrated filmmakers, it could be argued that movies are his religion: He has brought an almost religious zeal to his love of the cinema, becoming an ardent advocate for visual literacy education, film preservation and the medium of film as a global art form.
However, a careful viewing of his films shows that Scorsese has never quite left religion behind, either. Themes of faith and spirituality are often present — sometimes obviously in works like “The Last Temptation of Christ” and “Silence,” but also sometimes subtly in films like “Mean Streets” and “Raging Bull.” He has been willing to endure public protest over his film’s religious content and even raise the ire of the Chinese government with his biopic “Kundun” of the current Dalai Lama. He has been in a private audience with Pope Francis and has said he is in the process of making a film about the life of Christ. With Fox Nation, he has produced a streaming series, “The Saints,” which explores the lives of several saints in Roman Catholicism.
Scorsese’s journey in faith and film started where and when he grew up, in the “Little Italy” neighborhood of New York in the 1940s and 50s. Suffering from bad asthma, he couldn’t engage in the typical athletic activities young men his age did, so he often found his way to either church or the movie theater. His working-class Sicilian parents (who are beautifully captured in his short documentary film “Italianamerican”) didn’t have many books around their home, but they did impress the values of Roman Catholicism on Scorsese early. He has said he even thought about becoming a priest as a young man, but his imagination was eventually drawn to the world of cinema. However, his upbringing in and intellectual curiosity about Catholicism are apparent to those collaborating with him.
He also grew up in a world where the mafia was a daily reality. If Scorsese has been pigeonholed as “only making gangster films,” this perhaps reflects his upbringing in a tough neighborhood where violence was always just under the surface; parents in his neighborhood were warned to keep their children indoors when the local mobsters planned street violence. The struggle between good and evil deeply impacted Scorsese; it is one of the constant themes of his work. In his 1973 film “Mean Streets,” Scorsese’s protagonist, Charlie Cappa, struggles between his deep devotion to Roman Catholicism and his increasing involvement in organized crime. His mafiosi Uncle Giovanni urges Charlie into a life of vice and evil. Charlie knows better but cannot escape the draw.
The opening lines of the film, narrated by Scorsese himself, are: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home.” These words capture Charlie’s internal struggle, one he can never quite win or lose. Redemption and true love elude Charlie, and he ends the film broken and bleeding in a car wreck. However, he is alive, and where there is life, there is hope.
That search for love and redemption are central themes in Scorsese’s 1980 film “Raging Bull,” an early major work that would cement his reputation as a filmmaker virtuoso. This movie is based on the real life of boxer Jake LaMotta, a deeply troubled prizefighter. Laced with profanity and violence (both inside and outside the boxing ring), the film may alienate religious people today, as it did critics at its initial release; many found the film too coarse and often vulgar.
Yet, “Raging Bull” has come to be viewed today by many as one of the best films ever made. The portrait of LaMotta, who can never tame his anger and comes to alienate everyone he loves, is a searing portrait of a man who can find no peace throughout much of the film. The vividly choreographed fight scenes depict someone who is driven to give — and receive — punishment. Ultimately, LaMotta is a broken man. Shot mostly in black and white, the film’s cinematography reflects the bleak world of moral transgression that is LaMotta’s life.
The final scene of the film finds LaMotta reciting into a mirror a monologue from the seminal film “On the Waterfront.” This monologue was made famous by Marlon Brando who plays Terry Malloy, a talented boxer who has abandoned his promising career by throwing a fight. Malloy is castigating his brother Charley for allowing him to fall into moral collapse by failing to serve as his brother’s keeper.
LaMotta rehearses the lines to himself, reflecting on his own moral failings. “You should have looked out for me a little bit. … I could have been a contender. … Instead of a bum, which is what I am.” LaMotta is incriminating himself for the lack of moral coherence in how he has lived his own life. This insight is highlighted by the closing images of the film: a quote from chapter nine of the Gospel of John, where the man born blind recounts his healing by Christ. “All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see.” LaMotta had been spiritually blind, but now he can see, albeit through a glass darkly. The audience sees the fruits of his anger — as does LaMotta. But it is all too late.
Christ’s work of earning that redemption for humanity was a theme that Scorsese would return to in his 1988 work “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Scorsese has said he long wanted to make a religious film, given his early exposure to religious epics of the 1950s and the profound impression that was made on him by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s work, “The Gospel According to Saint Matthew.”
Based on the novel of the same name by Nikos Kazantzakis, the film took tremendous tenacity on the part of Scorsese to get made. Paramount first canceled the film in 1983 due to intense public protest, and Scorsese instead went on to make the film “After Hours.” That movie tells the story of a young man lost in a series of challenging and, at times, painful experiences as he simply tries to make his way home across Manhattan one night. “After Hours” might reflect Scorsese’s frustrations with the Hollywood system stymieing his efforts to make his movie about Jesus.
However, Scorsese did indeed return to the project, asking his collaborator Paul Schrader to write an adaptation that emphasized Christ’s humanity. Scorsese worked with a pared-down budget and shot exclusively in Morocco. He warns his audience, “This film is not based on the Gospels but upon the fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict.” A long and demanding film of nuance and subtlety, “The Last Temptation of Christ” created a firestorm of controversy upon its release. But the brave theatergoers who did watch the film saw a different kind of portrayal of Jesus: a person, both God and man, struggling with human temptation but ultimately not succumbing to it.
Many key scenes are from Scriptures, but many are not. The opening epigraph of the film quotes Kazantzakis: “The dual substance of Christ — the yearning, so human, so superhuman of man to attain God … has always been a deep, inscrutable mystery to me. My principal anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh … and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.”
One of the most powerful scenes in the film comes towards the end. A fictional creation, the scene reverses the dynamic of the conversion of St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Jesus imagines his life as though he had never been crucified, simply going about his daily affairs as a married man with children. In this alternative life, he one day encounters St. Paul preaching about his own conversion after encountering Jesus. Jesus confronts Paul, denying Paul’s account. Paul in turn tells Jesus, “Look around you. … Do you see how much they’re suffering? Their only hope is the resurrected Jesus. … The resurrected Jesus will save the world, and that is what matters. … You don’t see how much people need God.”
Eventually, Jesus realizes there can be no Resurrected Christ without a crucified Jesus. The final image is Jesus dying on the cross, crying out, “It is accomplished.” It is a searing image inviting the audience into dialogue with and about Christ. In Jesus’s pain, in his suffering and his sacrifice, we see his love and his humanity. The film shows us a creative vision of the life of Christ that emphasizes Jesus’s humanity and his struggles; we see more clearly the Word made flesh.
Scorsese would not return to an explicitly religious film on Christianity until 2016 with “Silence.” The project had long been a passion project for Scorsese. Again, this work is an adaptation of a novel, this time by Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō, and it is perhaps Scorsese’s work most influenced by Ignatian and Jesuit values.
Fr. James Martin, SJ, was an advisor to the film. He notes that even though the early script was quite well written, Scorsese and his early co-writer, Jay Cocks, were open to input. “Early on, during the planning for ‘Silence,’ there were a few parts in the script which didn’t sound like something a Jesuit would do or say,” Fr. Martin recalls. “So Marty would say, ‘Well, okay, what would they say?’ And I’d tell him and his co-screenwriter, and then it would appear in the script.”
Although the 1966 novel is fiction, it is based on actual events in Japan during the 17th century. Endo was a Catholic Christian whose novel recounts a fictional tale of two Portuguese Jesuits, Sebastião Rodrigues and Francisco Garupe, who sneak into Japan to find their mentor, Fr. Ferreira, who had apostasized as a result of the crackdown by Japanese officials in the wake of a rebellion. In Japan, the two Jesuit priests discover Kakure Kirishitan, a hidden and persecuted Catholic Church surviving in the shadows.
All the Christian characters — European and Japanese, lay and clergy — suffer immensely as Japanese officials discover them, enduring torture aimed at breaking them and making them give up their faith. Some do this, while others die as martyrs. All seek help from God, who seems silent and unresponsive though still spiritually present (hence the film’s title, “Silence”). The film is deeply moving and touches on the theme of the mystery of God in the face of suffering and the courage and determination of the Christians who refuse to give up their faith.
Reflecting on the film, Fr. Martin notes, “Certainly ‘Silence’ is a kind of extended meditation on many themes of Ignatian spirituality: finding God in all things, to begin with, even in suffering. And more fundamentally, identifying deeply with the person of Jesus Christ. Finally, there is the focus on what we Jesuits call the ‘Third Degree of Humility,’ a concept from the Spiritual Exercises that is almost always misunderstood. It is doing something that seems contemptible to the world — in this case, when [Andrew] Garfield’s character steps on an image of Jesus — because it seems that this is what God is asking of us. In this way, it’s an identification with Christ in his humiliation.”
“Silence” was not a financial or popular success, although it was well received critically, and Scorsese’s future work sees a return to the influence of Shūsaku Endō. Scorsese’s next project is based on Endō’s book “A Life of Jesus.” He hopes to create a short and challenging film that presents Jesus in a new and fresh way that shatters the presumptions of those jaded or alienated by organized religion.
Scorsese’s work encompasses all of what it means to be human, both the sacred and the profane. From the toughest gangster to the bravest Jesuit priest, from the saintly to the hopelessly ill, from the past to the present, he shows us the full wonder of the world that God has created. There is unspeakable violence next to breathless beauty. He often shows the manifest love God has for his creatures, both the broken and the redeemed. One may go into a Scorsese film looking to escape from the world, only to unexpectedly find it again on screen. Rarely has the medium of film been put to better use to convey the spiritual journey in all its dimensions. One can only wait to buy a ticket to the next adventure he offers.
Top image: Photo by Elena Ternovaja; Martin Scorsese at Berlinale 2024; used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
