Mean Streets elicits a mixed reaction from viewers. I first saw it in film school back in the early 80's. I loved it, and I've seen it many times. I would drag some of my college friends, who were film majors, to see Mean Streets at revival theaters in Los Angeles. Some of them absolutely hated the film, finding it incoherent and hard to follow, and cheaply made and slow-moving. My response was always this -- you need to see it more than once. The milieu is very specific -- a small, insular Italian-American neighborhood in New York, with specific types of characters. Scorsese doesn't try to give an opening to viewers unfamiliar with the environment -- he just plunges us into the urban jungle. There are also some niceties of Catholic doctrine that are discussed around the pool table, and if you are unfamiliar with the theological basis for these principles, you will be lost -- and Scorsese doesn't dumb anything down. If you don't get it, too bad, he's not waiting for anyone to catch up.
This is Scorsese's most personal film, and he makes no attempts to make it palatable to mainstream viewers. He just presents the environment he knows, and you can take it or leave it.
There is also a non-stop grim and seamy quality to this film, despite the touches of oddball humor. The viewer feels stuck in this urban environment, which is exactly the emotional and physical state of the characters -- they can't escape their neighborhood, their identity, their destiny.
Scorsese's turns his budgetary and technical limitations to his advantage -- the movies is about rough, harsh people living in an intense urban environment, so the verite, on the fly, low-budget quality of the film suits the story, milieu and characters perfectly. A big-budget Ridley Scott approach would fail. This isn't about pretty pictures but about appropriate style suited to content. And anyway, the visual style is dazzling in this film -- some great hand held camera work. If you freeze a lot of shots on DVD, you will see some excellent compositions.
The use of rock and opera, the excellent performances, the great editing, the expressionistic photography, the great sense of color, atmosphere and all-enveloping gloom -- these elements make Mean Streets a great film. I urge anyone who didn't love this film on first viewing to give it another chance. There are a great many stylstic subtleties that aren't apparent on the first go-around.
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