How Mar­tin Scorsese’s faith informed his most icon­ic characters

Mar­tin Scors­ese is not only one of the great­est liv­ing film­mak­ers but one of the most reli­gious­ly astute sto­ry­tellers work­ing today. His lat­est, Silence, sees the 74-year-old direc­tor recon­nect with his reli­gious roots fol­low­ing the greed-fuelled rever­ies of The Wolf of Wall Street. Before choos­ing the cin­e­ma, Scors­ese gave seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion to the path of priest­hood, which explains the unashamed ref­er­ences to Catholi­cism in his films. In the open­ing scene of Mean Streets, Char­lie (Har­vey Kei­t­el) says, ​“You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bull­shit and you know it.”

Like Char­lie, Scors­ese steps out­side of the church, yet unlike his hero-in-cri­sis, the cin­e­ma becomes the place where he inter­acts with and makes peace with his faith. In the ear­ly part of his career, specif­i­cal­ly Mean Streets, Taxi Dri­ver, Rag­ing Bull and The King of Com­e­dy, Scors­ese forged a direct link between art and reli­gion by refram­ing cer­tain holy arche­types. And just as in the Bible, this act of reimag­in­ing is filled with blood­shed and violence…

This sto­ry of a small-time grifter striv­ing to climb the mob lad­der – fuelled by Scorsese’s dis­like of The Godfather’s sup­posed lack of authen­tic­i­ty – becomes a New York-set retelling of Christ’s temp­ta­tion in the desert. Here the streets are Charlie’s (Har­vey Kei­t­el) desert where he must resist his own urges, with the wild­ly ener­getic John­ny Boy (Robert De Niro) play­ing the part of Satan tempt­ing Char­lie to stay by his side on a doomed path. Char­lie is depict­ed as a dis­ci­ple of God, unable to resist either Tere­sa (Amy Robin­son) or his sto­ic loy­al­ty to John­ny Boy. Both Christ and Char­lie must make dif­fi­cult choic­es on their respec­tive jour­neys, yet in Charlie’s case temp­ta­tion – in the form of Teresa’s affec­tions to his uncle’s advice to dis­own John­ny Boy – is even hard­er to ignore.

If John­ny Boy was the tempt­ing dev­il in Mean Streets, Scors­ese flips the anti­hero arche­type on its head in his Palme d’Or win­ning dra­ma, Taxi Dri­ver. The reck­less­ness of John­ny Boy, becom­ing in the dev­il who is an agent for destruc­tion and chaos, is dis­tinct to Travis Bickle’s method­i­cal vig­i­lan­tism against the sin­ners of New York – politi­cians and crim­i­nals alike. But Travis echoes the Old Tes­ta­ment tem­pera­ment of God, purg­ing through fire and with the wrath of the sword. The sto­ry of Noah’s Ark and the vio­lent cleans­ing of the world is mir­rored in Travis’ quest to save Iris (Jodie Fos­ter), spar­ing an exploit­ed inno­cent amidst dis­crim­i­na­tive car­nage. And Travis’ vio­lent vig­i­lan­tism that pre­cedes the final scenes of a calm and well mean­ing hero echoes the trans­for­ma­tion of God in The New Tes­ta­ment from war­rior to paci­fist God.

Jake LaM­ot­ta (Robert De Niro) as imag­ined in Rag­ing Bull can be read a more ambigu­ous ver­sion of Saul, the first king of a unit­ed King­dom of Israel and Judah, who expe­ri­enced a spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing on the road to Dam­as­cus. The less than moral upstand­ing lives led by Saul and Jake can be seen to con­nect the two men – Saul’s per­se­cu­tion of fol­low­ers of Christ mir­rored in Jake’s vio­lent and para­noid nature which frac­tures his fam­i­ly and ulti­mate­ly destroys his career. But where­as Saul is con­vert­ed via an encounter with God, the tam­ing of Jake takes place in a prison cell. The Bib­li­cal quote para­phrased in the film’s final lines reads sim­ply, ​“All I know is this: once I was blind and now I can see.”

A film ahead of its time in the way it fore­shad­owed the rise of celebri­ty cul­ture, The King of Com­e­dy harks back to warn­ings preached in the Bible about not wor­ship­ping false idols. Rupert Pup­kin (Robert De Niro) is among Scorsese’s most intrigu­ing char­ac­ters – he is the bridge between the more tra­di­tion­al reli­gious school of thought and the mod­ern celebri­ty age that has seem­ing­ly sur­passed reli­gion. Whether or not Pup­kin is ulti­mate­ly made a vic­tim from wor­ship­ping leg­endary come­di­an Jer­ry Lang­ford (Jer­ry Lewis) is left for the audi­ence to decid­ed. Is Pup­kin king for a night or sim­ply a man lost in his own grand delusions?

Now read the LWLies Rec­om­mends review of Silence.