The Departed is a terrific movie, but it really doesn't feel as personal as his other crime films. Goodfellas is easily the most entertaining one, but all of them are, in the end, pretty sad movies about lost friends and ruined lives.
I think Goodfellas greatness sometimes is overlooked (despite its great reviews at the time and the Oscar nominations) because of The Sopranos and a bunch of movies that came after Goodfellas, like Casino and A Bronx Tale. He starts out so wild and edgy with Mean Streets, and ends up so serene and refined with The Irishman. But Goodfellas is a classic, Casino is Scorsese doing something he could do in his sleep. And they all have DeNiro, Scorsese's most iconic collaborator, which adds a layer of meta-ness to the theme of friendship through the ages.Īlso, personally speaking, I think watching those movies in sequence really shows how he has improved as a filmmaker over the years. If there is a unifying theme that I see, it's maybe 'toxic friendship'. like in the movies, one of us might have ended up dead.
With the exception of The Departed, his crime movies seem to have lead characters whose age at the end of the film roughly corresponds with Scorsese's age when he made it: GoodFellas, Casino, and The Departed (which won the Best Picture Oscar in. I don't know if they really qualify is a coherent series of films.īut I do think it's that it's a really fascinating way to track the evolution of Scorsese as a filmmaker, and a human being, by watching his crime movies.
