Mean Streets

It’s like it’s a crime movie about Catholic guilt. That’s what I’m hearing. There’s literally little to no crime until the end. It’s just a rough neighborhood, so I get why this feels like Scorsese himself understanding how he was raised in Little Italy, but it just feels like Little Italy is the hood and Charlie is trying to save Johnny Boy’s ass all the time until he realizes, yo, this guy doesn’t even want to save himself, so he has to force saving himself. But you can’t force salvation. It’s religious because faith is a choice in Catholicism. You have to have faith to be saved; you have to make that choice. And Johnny Boy could’ve, in a way. Charlie was sacrificing himself for Johnny Boy to do his penance, aka pay up, but he didn’t, and that had to be paid in blood sacrifice at the end of the movie. And it’s like, you could read into the elements, but I have to try a lot and stretch a lot for the themes that I want, and I don’t know if I want that. The crime is just, let’s beat each other up for a bit, then at the end, let’s shoot and kill somebody. The Catholic guilt is just the fire, and that’s really it. Like, we know Charlie is kind of a hypocrite, but it’s like in the loser-bum way, not in an introspective way. I think it’s a fine character-analysis film about Italian Americans. It’s the debut of that Scorsese trilogy that gets followed up by arguably his best movies in Raging Bull and Goodfellas. So yeah, this film is disappointing, but it’s oddly human, and it has its own charm. It’s a charming movie that’s just weaker than I was hoping.