Martin Scorsese is one of cinema’s great talkers. He has achieved this status without steady acting gigs; interviews, documentaries and cameos have been more than enough. So it’s a little jarring to watch his latest, sorta-nonfiction project and hear him speaking slowly and less frequently than you might hope. Plenty of fans might well tune in to something called Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints just to hear the famed film-maker and Catholic monologue for 30 or 40 minutes about any subject that happens to interest him. Instead, he’s uncharacteristically reserved, if still energetic for a busy octogenarian.
The project is an odd one, even by Scorsese’s prolific standards: an eight-part series on saints for Fox Nation, a streaming service affiliated with the conservative talking-point haven Fox News. Apparently the idea has been rattling around in the film-maker’s head since the early 1980s, when he wondered if he might quit making traditional narrative films all together, only to be eventually supplanted by his more spiritual fiction films like The Last Temptation of Christ and Silence. Now Fox Nation – a seemingly unlikely venue; try to picture Fox News reacting to Scorsese’s Jesus movie had it been around for the film’s 1988 release – has revived the project.
Scorsese has not written or directed The Saints; those duties fall to the indie director Elizabeth Chomko and Scorsese’s longtime documentary collaborator Kent Jones, respectively, with Matti Leshem credited as the show’s creator. Scorsese’s actual credit is executive producer – first-billed in the credits, but one of many with that title. He also hosts each installment, providing narration for the sometimes awkward mixture of dramatization, historical footage or artifacts, and exposition. The saint story typically runs a trim 35 minutes or so, followed by a brief Scorsese-led discussion with religious scholars (and some slow-marched credits).
The two episodes made available for review focus on Joan of Arc and Maximilian Kolbe. The Joan of Arc story has a compelling performance from Liah O’Prey in the title role – particularly impressive given the stop-start nature of the History Channel-ish mix of dramatic scenes and historical context that must be piped in to move the story along and hit the high points. Interestingly, it’s the less immediately familiar story of Maximilian Kolbe that gets the more cinematic treatment, with less narration placing greater focus on evocative black-and-white photography (as well as some archive footage). Kolbe was a Polish priest and radio host who remained in his monastery during the second world war, and was eventually arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where he volunteered to switch places with a man randomly selected in a group of 10 to die of starvation.
Kolbe had also spouted antisemitic views on his radio show, which provides material for the post-story discussion: how to square his enormous act of sacrifice with the prejudices he seemed to hold for much of his life? Someone asks a similar question in the Joan of Arc episode, regarding her military role in the defense of France at the behest of her visions: “How do we reconcile this carnage with faith?”
That’s really where The Saints feels like a bit of a letdown; these contradictions are, if not exactly waved away, also never questioned with much conviction. The participants tend to agree with each other, holding the subjects in relative awe – and fair enough that their stories are extraordinary outliers regardless of personal beliefs. The turmoil that powers Scorsese’s fiction films about faith, though, is ultimately only hinted at. Perhaps it’s not fair to expect a streaming docuseries to have anywhere near the power, fire or emotional impact of a proper Scorsese feature, but the show has very much been sold on his image. Maybe that’s the idea: to entice some Scorsese fans into a sober-minded historical primer. If nothing else, The Saints provide additional (if unneeded) evidence that there’s more to this man than his most famous crime stories.
Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is available on Fox Nation from 17 November in the US with a UK date to be announced
