I had a great time at Martin Scorsese’s new film The Departed, which is easily one of the year’s most satisfying and well-crafted mainstream entertainments. And yet, at the same time, there seems something strenuously willed about all the rave reviews celebrating it as a glorious return to form for “America’s greatest living director.” The only way that statement could be true, it seems to me, is if the only thing you ever want to see Scorsese do is make movies about violence erupting among greasy-haired neighbourhood mooks while 30-year-old Rolling Stones songs play on the soundtrack.
Unlike Infernal Affairs, the crackerjack Hong Kong thriller it’s a remake of (and which Scorsese, shamefully, barely even acknowledges in the credits), The Departed is more interested in profane Irish-cop banter than in probing the inner existential crises of its mirror-image antagonists. Instead, the film is dominated by an entertaining but distractingly self-aware turn by Jack Nicholson as a flamboyant Boston crime boss. (Just compare Nicholson’s acting in this film to the superb work of Ray Winstone as his psychopathic henchman—Nicholson is always “on,” a movie star performing for the camera, while Winstone simply is his character.)
The day before I went to see The Departed, I found myself thinking about a different Martin Scorsese film—one that never got made. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but when I first read about it back in the mid-’80s—in Premiere magazine, if my memory serves—it was like a current of electricity went through my body. Could Martin Scorsese really be planning to make a movie out of Mark Helprin’s novel Winter’s Tale?
Never before or since have I been so excited by a prospective film project. Winter’s Tale probably remains my all-time favourite book. (I may read better books as I grow older, but Winter’s Tale, with its beautiful, tattered blue-and-white paperback cover, will always remain my favourite.) The first half of the story takes place in New York City in 1899 and revolves around a thief named Peter Lake, the beautiful but sickly heiress he falls in love with, the ruthless gangleader who becomes his enemy and the magical white horse that mysteriously comes into his possession. The action in the second half unexpectedly, disorientingly, leaps forward to 1999 (which, when the book was written, was still 16 years in the future)—but many of the same characters are still around, never having aged, still trying to fulfill their cosmic destinies.
The immediate pleasures of the book mostly have to do with Helprin’s shimmering language, especially his loving descriptions of 19th-century mansions, snow-covered landscapes and bustling newspaper offices. (A review on the back of the book said, “Helprin writes like an angel,” and years later when someone coincidentally paid me the exact same compliment, I was so thrilled I thought my heart would burst.)
But as I reread and reread it, I grew more and more to appreciate the big-heartedness of Helprin’s vision, especially the optimism with which he views both humble characters and large, grimy cities as being capable of miraculous transformations. And as a writer, I loved the eccentric cast of characters, the superabundance of subplots and especially Helprin’s unapologetic embrace of fantasy: time travel, resurrections, a magical flying horse. Like Steven Millhauser in Martin Dressler and Kevin Baker in Dreamland, Helprin is entranced by the glamour of those lonely, half-mad turn-of-the-century billionaires and their insanely ambitious engineering projects, which seem less about making profits than using glass and steel and steam to express the deepest longings of their soul. In Martin Dressler, an entrepreneur builds a department store so huge that it nearly qualifies as an alternate universe; in Dreamland, it’s a miraculous amusement park; in Winter’s Tale, it’s a river-spanning bridge made entirely of light.
I imagine Scorsese was drawn to Winter’s Tale less by the fantasy elements than by the opportunity to tell a story set in the same 19th-century criminal milieu as his then-stalled Gangs of New York project. But I can’t help but dream of how the man who showed us the scuzzy side of New York in Mean Streets and Taxi Driver might have handled some of Helprin’s more whimsical setpieces—like the newspaper building modelled after a whaling ship or Peter Lake’s secret lair in the ceiling high above Grand Central Station or the mayoral election won by a promise to make it snow for Christmas.
At the end of Winter’s Tale, that wondrous bridge of light sadly fails to become a reality. I like to think of unmade movies like Scorsese’s Winter’s Tale as unbuilt bridges of light as well. The only advantage that a movie like The Departed has over it is that it actually exists. (October 12, 2006)
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