Review: Mean Streets (5/5*)



How have I never seen this before?

That's the shortest sentence I can form to describe how I feel about this film. It happens occasionally that I finally watch a supposed "classic" that I've been avoiding for years, Mean Streets is one of them.



 



 There isn't really much of a story as much as there is character development. In a little neighborhood of New York, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) contemplates his identity as a moral man who means well but also as lowly mobster trying to climb up the ladder. In the meantime, he takes on the responsibility of watching over his reckless friend Johnnie Boy (Robert De Niro) who is in debt to a loanshark. Although they come from the same neighborhood, they couldn't be more different - we first see Charlie praying and contemplating morals in a church, while Johnnie Boy sets off a cherry bomb in a mail box. Even more telling of their relationship is when Charlie watches Johnnie coming into a bar with a girl in each arm and the Rolling Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" on the soundtrack - he is reckless and indifferent and all Charlie can do is watch him.

There's probably nothing I can say about this film that someone else hasn't already said. When it was first released, Mean Streets was hailed for being a truly personal and original work, an independent one at that made by a young NYU Film grad with barely 2 films under his belt. If it seems at all familiar and standard now, it goes to show that this is not only a definitive Scorsese film but also a benchmark for modern film and tv making - from the gritty, realistic illustration of a working-class urban neighborhood, to the use of pop song clips as a soundtrack.

But even for being almost 40 years old, the film is still excellent and mesmerizing. As he is now well-known for doing, Scorsese and his actors cultivate these complicated yet intriguing male characters and their relationships so well that they seem real. It doesn't hurt that then-unknowns Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro play the lead roles, embodying the personalities of these young men. And it is a gritty, enclosed, violent world and life that we as an audience get a brief window into. But while we get to leave once the credits end, these characters seem trapped in that insular little world, a disturbing notion for someone like Charlie who sees and maybe even wants more.