The first hour of Martin Scorsese's New York, New York

Continuing my occasional visits to the films of my youth -- my movie-soaked college and post-college years -- I watched, or tried to watch, New York, New York (NYT review, free reg. req.).

Nearly thirty years after the film's release, it looks like a near-masterpiece, a stunning exercise in filmmaking, with genuinely funny moments between Robert DeNiro and Liza Minnelli during the first forty minutes, an amazing mise-en-scene*, and a terrific amount of heart -- no matter how difficult and echt-1970s the shooting itself was. (That's the great thing about looking back at the 70s -- for all its excesses, what we're left with are these great films.)

And it's great to see adult material that didn't make sense to me back when I was 20 or 25 years old and understand it better now -- just the whole adult give-and-take that seemed alien when I was still an adolescent.

But the same thing that almost ruined the picture for me back then truly ruined it for me today: the DeNiro character is such an asshole. He is bullying, passive-aggressive, dismissive, at times positively abusive. He's genuinely mean to the Minnelli character, even when he's doing something like proposing marriage. While I respect the depth and well-roundedness of this characterization and the brilliance of DeNiro in embodying him, I dislike the character so much that I can't watch the movie. I literally had to turn it off after a little more than an hour.

This is my familiar problem of cringing at characters, especially male characters, who are negative in certain bullying ways. Maybe it's that I have never resolved the bullying I endured as a child, or maybe it's that I have a hard time facing and resolving the bullying, mean aspects of my own character. But after a certain point, I can't watch it on the screen. I cringe and turn it off.

* That's a fancy film crit term meaning, roughly, the (ideally) wholly realized world created by the director, cast and crew within the bounds of the frame.

Martin Scorsese, New York, New York (film), Robert DeNiro, film