no, actually, *this* is how life is

I know nothing about fine art. But I did once have the opportunity to visit the Uffizi, in Florence, about 25 years ago.

There was one enormous central room dedicated to the Italian Renaissance. The work of the masters formed a chronological perimeter around the room, from left to right, starting with Giotto (1300s) and progressing through Caravaggio and Michelangelo (1500s) and so on through time.

Taking in the whole sweep, it struck me as a steady march toward realism, plain and simple. (If you're looking for a deeper artistic analysis, you've come to the wrong blog.) To my eye, each generation of Italian masters seemed to be saying to the ones before: no, actually, *this* is how life is.

I'm not saying the paintings got better over time. But they became more unsparing; less varnished; bolder. Standing on the shoulders of those who came before them, newer artists dared to illustrate what they saw as the heretofore undepicted whole of the human condition, flaws and warts and wounds and all, instead of the more sanctified depictions of holy figures with halos that they grew up with. Look at the jump from Giotto to Caravaggio, and you’ll see what I mean.

I say all this to say, the new Martin Scorsese five-part documentary comes out today. I believe that this same Italian-masters ambition - nice try, old man, now check THIS out - animates Scorsese’s work.

The greatness of Goodfellas — which, at the end of the day, might be my pick for the greatest movie ever made — is a direct response to his friend Francis Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II. Both films were rightly acclaimed. Both were films that Scorsese loved.

But they stirred in him a response: the same exact response that Caravaggio made to Giotto. No, actually, Francis - with respect - *this* is how life is.

Goodfellas is deeply in conversation with The Godfather. Scorsese is saying of mob life (and life in general), "There's no symphony orchestra scoring our saga, Francis. In fact, there's no "saga" at all. There are no gracefully curved storylines, no poetically-served endings for our treasonous brothers. And maybe - this is Scorsese's central preoccupation - I wonder if maybe, given all this carnage, shapelessness, and injustice, I wonder if there can possibly be a God.

That courage-to-ask-the-great-questions is why Goodfellas represents such a significant leap forward. Even ten years later, with The Sopranos, we can feel David Chase shrugging to Goodfellas, more or less, “I actually can’t do any better than that.” The Sopranos is more or less Goodfellas fanfic. Chase transplants Goodfellas to New Jersey; he adds a shrink, a bit of surrealism. But the step from Goodfellas to The Sopranos is nowhere near as seismic as the leap from The Godfather to Goodfellas.

I don’t say any of this to diminish The Sopranos. At all. I love The Sopranos. It's the only mob story since Goodfellas worthy of comparison to Goodfellas.

But Marty is the one who clapped back at his forebears the most stunningly, shockingly, profanely and existentially. Scorsese gave the art of film portraiture the most bracing update anyone had ever seen, to date. I don't believe it’s been topped since.

The new Scorsese doc series premieres today, on AppleTV. I'd imagine a few of you will feel a similar excitement that I will when I press play.