Martin Scorsese’s movies have been called a lot of things, but small isn’t often one of them. Even his most intimate non-fiction work – like the family portrait Italianamerican or his storytime sit-downs with raconteurs Steven Prince and Fran Lebowitz – thrum with a certain path-breaking restlessness, challenging and skewing structure while retaining all the usual earmarks of the genre. Meanwhile, documentaries that fall squarely within the standard template, including most of his long-form music material, still manage to push those boundaries by virtue of sheer magnitude and detail. This grants a certain exclusive quality to The Lady by the Sea, a short work holding the distinction of being perhaps the most resolutely ordinary Scorsese project. It finds the director in perhaps his oddest form yet, squeezed within the confines of a 45-minute History Channel special, a box whose sides he doesn’t do much to bump against.
It’s a testament to Scorsese that he shines even within these tight stylistic limitations, although definitely not so brightly as elsewhere. Shot as a piece of advocacy for reopening the still-shuttered hometown monument, the 2004 special mostly functions as a compact piece of history, not surprising given the network on which it originally ran. What’s provided is less a fully shaped overview than a concept work focusing on shifting societal views of what constitutes liberty, stretching from the Enlightenment through New York in its shaky post-9/11 days. It’s a brisk, entertaining run-through, padded out with some well-selected period footage and archival material, although most would never guess that Scorsese himself was behind it. American history is prioritized, which is not surprising, and like many TV specials of this type, there’s the nagging sense that a huge amount of information is being glossed over to keep things zipping from point A to point B.
As might also be expected, the most time is devoted to the statue itself, a gift from France put together piecemeal by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi. Several new techniques had to be pioneered to complete a construction of its size, while also assuring the mammoth hunk of metal would hold up against the strong winds of the New York harbor. Analyzing these structural innovations, a winsome Scorsese might be imagined as drawing comparisons to filmmaking itself, a similarly fragmentary undertaking in which a wide variety of moving parts must be consolidated in order to form one unified whole, fitted together so that the internal seams don’t show.
The same could also be said for America itself, although the purported success of such an endeavor is looked upon with far greater circumspection. As the movie envisions, this gift of Liberty has also functioned as a sort of burden, manifesting the high standard to which the country was supposed to be maintaining. As Scorsese sees it, these values of openness and acceptance have served as more of a distant goal than an achieved aim. In typically concise form, the film catalogs incident after incident of the country falling short, failing its citizens or keeping its borders shut to those in need. Yet the belief that we can do better is still retained, the statue’s light guiding us on, operating as a model for each new generation of immigrants integrated into the system.
In the wrong hands this might come off as clunky, cloying stuff, and The Lady by the Sea admittedly does pass into that territory at points. Yet as with many Scorsese documentary projects, the director’s narration is key, the propulsive, rat-a-tat flow of his voice creating a rhythm that helps elide the more questionable passages, while also serving as a perfect embodiment of the vintage New York ethos being invoked. It seems fitting that this film came so soon after Gangs of New York, an anti-classical historical epic which dramatized the frothing sludge of a primordial Manhattan, its currents of graft and theft yet to be concealed beneath the surface. Here we get a sort of cleaned-up companion piece, prioritizing the country’s potential over its gross, gory underside, yet one that still doesn’t give in to the easy out of sanitizing history. While minimal in scope and conventional in structure, Lady by the Sea still manages to achieve something interesting within its short running time.
The post Oeuvre: Scorsese: The Lady by the Sea appeared first on Spectrum Culture.