Rebecca Miller’s Mr. Scorsese

The stories have been told and retold in magazine profiles, books, audio commentaries, and countless documentaries. But Rebecca Miller (Maggie’s Plan) tells them again in Mr. Scorsese, a portrait in five hour-long episodes now streaming on Apple TV+, with such fresh and engaging originality that several reviewers have commented that, minor quibbles aside, the only serious problem with the series is that it isn’t twice as long.

The backbone of Mr. Scorsese is a string of interviews that Miller began conducting when her subject—one of the greatest living filmmakers—suddenly found himself with too much time on his hands. The pandemic had just locked the world down. Introducing his lively conversation with Miller, Rolling Stone’s David Fear notes that even those well-versed in Scorsesian lore will be “surprised at how candid the eighty-two-year-old director is regarding his childhood, his marriages, his successes and failures and numerous professional resurrections. So many documentaries come off as little more than Wikipedia entries with benefits. This multi-episode profile makes you feel as if you’re eavesdropping on an artist reflecting back on his life and work, while footage of his films attest to five decades worth of spilling his guts on celluloid.”

“Be it the ‘underground man’ of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, the rage-aholic Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, the frazzled office worker of After Hours, the conflicted Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, the mad genius of The Aviator, or the blustery financier of The Wolf of Wall Street, the celebrated director has spent his career telling stories about male resentment, anger, self-loathing, doubt, and loneliness,” writes Nick Schager at the Daily Beast. Mr. Scorsese is “as comprehensive a biodoc as any recent artist has received, and it benefits from the enthusiastic participation of its subject, who revisits his life with warmth, humor, and critical thoughtfulness.”

“One thing that’s really extraordinary is if you look at It’s Not Just You, Murray!, which he made when he was something like twenty-one or twenty-two years old, it has the keys to Goodfellas in it,” Miller tells Katie Kilkenny in the Hollywood Reporter. “I mean, it’s really mirroring Goodfellas in terms of its approach to form, its energy and its relationship to language and voiceover. Not only that, but he had storyboards that he made when he was nine or ten years old that contain a shot that he is still attempting to make. And we actually animated his little storyboards when he was a child and you realize, oh my god, he’s still making [these], and we show the shots. He was, in a way, a complete person as a filmmaker.”

The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg finds that it’s “in moments like Miller’s inquiry about the use of hands as a motif in The Age of Innocence that you can see Scorsese relax and embrace a topic that isn’t the usual gabbing about violence and Catholic guilt and whether or not he can be classified as a gangster filmmaker—not that those topics are excluded.”

“His films have a lot of craft in them,” Miller tells David Fear. “But he’s not really going for perfection as much as truth. That was a big takeaway for me. Plus the fact that I felt like I went to graduate school. I saw so many movies that I hadn’t seen thanks to him while making this.”