None of the new filmmakers has created as strong a public persona as Martin Scorsese. Hunted, haunted, asthmatic, diminutive, darkly bearded, a victim of religious nightmares, a mass of raging anxieties, Scorsese as we know him from interviews and photographs makes Paul Schrader, his only rival in film-noir paranoia, look by comparison like a happily adjusted Midwestern businessman. In fact, Scorsese's real success is to have made films at all. Each new project brings with it a baggage of stories about the director's agonies. The movies—even the ones with relatively pleasant atmospheres—seem rooted in this pain.

Perhaps this suffering need not be in vain: within Scorsese there may lie an Italian-American Bergman waiting for the right moment to show himself. Bergman himself made a dozen unremarkable films before he found the necessary key of objectivity to turn his own nightmares into art. Scorsese may, too. He's...