#he's one of the most masterfully crafted characters I've ever seen

[martianbugsbunny]

Love that Death is both an inevitable force of nature and a pissy little princess who isn’t above throwing a temper tantrum, iconic

[watching-pictures-move]

Movie Review | The Color of Money (Scorsese, 1986)

I don't believe most people think of Martin Scorsese as an action director, but one can find plenty of examples that suggest his talents in that area. There's the Rube Goldberg machine of violent comeuppance that closes The Departed, the splatterific climax of Taxi Driver, the bruising boxing matches of Raging Bull, the thunderous final moments of Boxcar Bertha. These aren't exactly intended to deliver the thrills we associate with action movies (except maybe Bertha), but they display a sure sense of how to stage and cut action to generate precise effects. In that sense, The Color of Money offers ample more evidence of such abilities in its numerous pool matches. The best thing about these scenes is the way Scorsese captures their sense of geometry, moving his camera in kinetic bursts along angles that evoke the ricocheting of the balls off each other and the edges of the table. The climax of the movie is a tournament match between Paul Newman and his protege Tom Cruise, the camera snapping along, the editing whipping us back and forth, masterfully capturing the energy of not just the match but the sense of personal conflict between the two characters. Scorsese has delivered us so many great sequences that I wouldn't dare rank this near the top, but in that long, long list, I think we can carve out a well deserved spot for this.

The movie is not regarded as one of his best and I understand it was seen as something of a sellout assignment. Now, I have two perhaps contradictory responses to this. One is: so what? Perhaps I've grown weary of our modern studio environment where big money generally gets thrown only at increasingly bland projects and where actual star power seems harder and harder to come by, but going back a few decades and seeing a mass-marketed commercial movie made with this standard of craft and this level of personality and confident execution of tropes, it's easy to find things to enjoy here. The fact is, Scorsese is a master director, and even a more overtly commercial project by him is going to be extremely well made. I happen to think Cape Fear and the aforementioned Boxcar Bertha are both pretty good too. As far as selling out goes, one could do a lot worse.

My other response is that I don't think he's really selling out here. Yes, there are formulas, but Scorsese finds ways to either subvert them or colour them with additional human interest. The fallout from the big match isn't what we expect, and the resonance of these scenes come from how specifically these characters have been developed. The movie is a long gap sequel to Robert Rossen's The Hustler, and while it initially seems to lack the same psychological claustrophobia as the earlier movie, developments later in the movie wring a sense of trauma from our memories of our earlier movie. One of the best scenes in the movie show astutely how deeply shaken Newman's character is after being conned by a pool hall hustler (an electric Forest Whitaker, threatening to run away with the movie). The tension in his voice is palpable when he asks repeatedly, "Are you a hustler, Amos?"

And Scorsese has a deep appreciation for his actors' star qualities, particularly Newman, who combines his classic Hollywood charm with a sense of fallibility and fraught psychological realism. Probably the greatest thing about Newman's performance is its sense of texture, effortlessly evoking a sense of being at this for too long, and having picked up a certain amount of wisdom but maybe not enough. It's a quality that extends to his wardrobe: Newman is one of the most stylish people to ever grace this planet, and in this movie wears one of the greatest collection of sunglasses I've seen in a movie. (In contrast, Cruise gets an amusingly high pompadour that feels like a joke Scorsese played on him, although it works for the character. Just because he's got a story to tell doesn't mean he can't have some fun.) And it's extends even to his voice, simultaneously smooth and gravelly, aged like the whiskey he's been hawking, and Scorsese complements it with the sense of texture he brings to his direction. This doesn't have the intense B&W look of the original, but from the opening shots, a pan across the bar where you can practically feel the wood underneath your hands, smell the cigarettes in the air, taste the booze in those half-empty glasses, it's quite evocative in its own way. This movie is coloured by a deep love of these milieus and the characters who make their way through them.