'Mr. Scorsese' review: Masterful story of a master director

WHAT IT'S ABOUT It's hard to find a consensus on anything these days, but if there's one thing almost anyone could agree on, it's that Martin Scorsese is either the greatest living filmmaker or very close to it.

Well into his seventh decade in the business, the 82-year-old remains as busy as ever, making movies that are not just great but vital, pulsating with life, and imbued with an embrace of all that the cinematic medium has to offer.

The five-part documentary series "Mr. Scorsese" chronicles the life of the "Goodfellas" filmmaker, from his childhood as a shy and asthmatic boy obsessing over the movies while growing up in Little Italy through his rise to fame, collaborations with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and more.

At the center of "Mr. Scorsese," directed by Rebecca Miller ("The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), lies an exploration of the dichotomy that has defined Scorsese's career: a deep religious faith mixed with an awareness of the capacity for violence that lies within us all.

MY SAY "Mr. Scorsese" has a lot going for it at the outset, of course, simply because Miller gets an extensive, life-spanning interview out of her subject. Anyone who loves movies will be riveted by Scorsese's reflections on "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull" and the whole range of his work, including films like "New York, New York" or "The King of Comedy" that did not achieve the same level of success.

Then there's the period footage. Watching De Niro and Joe Pesci crack each other up during a "Raging Bull" outtake makes this worth the watch on its own. The same goes for scenes in the first episode where Scorsese and his childhood friends remember life on a very different Lower East Side than the one that exists today.

But a viewing of the first three episodes shows that Miller is too smart of a filmmaker to make a conventional documentary about this one-of-a-kind subject. Instead, she immerses the audience in Scorsese's work.

She shows us where his affinity for those famous sweeping, steadicam shots and his love for high angles came from.

She gets Scorsese's longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker to spotlight a famous moment in the ring from "Raging Bull," where the crowd fades out and De Niro's Jake LaMotta stands alone — battered, vulnerable, abandoned — as he prepares to take a punch from his opponent Sugar Ray Robinson.

Miller builds her documentary around the ties between these moments on-screen and the story of the artist who created them. Scorsese's movies have resonated for so long not just because they're virtuoso examples of visual storytelling at its finest, but also because they are born out of something deep and fundamental within the essence of their maker.

They're movies about Scorsese and his sense of the rich and strange tapestry of human existence, with all its terrors and joys. And so they are, in a sense, about all of us. 

BOTTOM LINE Miller's series offers a chance to understand Martin Scorsese's movies in a new way. What a gift.