Scorsese’s ‘Saints’ are dramas that show the director’s ongoing search

Episode 4 of the new Fox Nation docuseries Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints opens with a stark black and white closeup of the face of St. Maximillian Kolbe as he lies on the ground coughing up blood. Later, after much abuse, he and his fellow prisoners are led fully naked to their deaths. Obviously, this is not the television show about the saints you will be playing for your children’s religious education classes. However, it is unmistakably what you would expect from a series with Martin Scorsese’s name attached to it.

While the celebrated filmmaker does not direct any of the episodes himself, his penchant for in-your-face realism guides those who do.

This is not to say the show is a bloodbath, only that when the moment calls for it (Joan of Arc’s battles, Sebastian’s arrow-riddled body, John the Baptist’s severed head), the camera does not shy away from the rough stuff. It is not meant as gratuitous, though, but rather an attempt to faithfully communicate the human suffering these saints went through.

This focus on the tangible humanity of his subjects is an overarching theme in Scorsese’s overtly religious-themed works. In The Last Temptation of Christ, the director explored the human nature of Jesus perhaps more than any filmmaker before him. Unfortunately, he focused on it so much that the film ended up by default denying the divine nature of Christ, thereby earning the ire of Christians everywhere. Years later, with the film Silence, he would ponder the overwhelming hardships of maintaining faith when faced with unbearable mental and physical torture. Again, Scorsese would delve so deep into the human condition of his Jesuit protagonists that he all but ignored the mystic side of their calling, leaving the film to seemingly conclude with the question, “Does any of this religious stuff matter in the end?”

This new series follows something of the same path, though not quite to the extremes of Scorsese’s filmography. Each episode focuses on a single saint, with most of the hour devoted to a surprisingly straightforward retelling of the key points in their lives.

Due no doubt to budgetary constraints, the quality of these segments varies, jumping back and forth between competent television craftsmanship to something akin to a college theater production. Scorsese himself narrates to fill in any gaps in the story.

Near the end of each of the first four episodes, Scorsese is joined by a panel consisting of the well-known Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin, Paul Elie, a senior fellow with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and bestselling author and self-described cafeteria Catholic Mary Karr. While this lineup might raise suspicions among the more orthodox minded, the discussion is mercifully limited to how the saints speak to each of the panelists’ personal lives and very little of offense is said.

However, careful viewers will note that the reenactments do subtly adopt Scorsese’s typical approach to religious material. The humanity of the saints is front and center, with all their faults and foibles laid bare. Joan’s petulance, the Baptist’s off-putting manner and appearance, Kolbe’s early antisemitism, it’s all on display. There’s nothing wrong with this. If anything, it makes the saints more relatable as human beings and causes their eventual actions to seem all the more heroic. Through the grace of God, it was regular humans who accomplished what the saints did.

The problem is that when anything with a whiff of the supernatural comes along in their stories it is ignored or glossed over. Joan mentions communing with the saints and the Lord, but we never see it. Sebastian miraculously recovers from arrow wounds that should not have been recoverable from, but the expert panel dismisses it with an, “Eh, it happens sometimes.” Most egregious, John baptizes Jesus in the Jordan, but no voice from Heaven is heard and no dove descends. That’s not really an optional part of the story, is it?

In multiple interviews over the years, Scorsese has called himself a pilgrim. A Catholic altar boy and choir member during his youth, he claims to have had a lifelong compulsion since then to seek meaning in his faith, both for himself personally and for the world as a whole. That he is indeed religion-haunted is believable given that he keeps returning to the subject again and again. One must wonder, though, if Scorsese’s reluctance to engage with the supernatural side of his religion prevents him from ever getting the answers he so doggedly pursues. Time will tell. Until then, Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints is an admirable, if flawed, addition to the filmmaker’s search for meaning.