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.
