Last week I scored two free passes to an advanced screening of Martin Scorsese’s latest, Shutter Island, through the one Chicago connection I’ve managed to make since I’ve been here. My girlfriend and I went to the brand spanking new ICON Showplace at 150 W. Roosevelt, enjoyed a glass of wine, and got preferred seating in the huge two-tiered and magnificent Theatre 1. The movie was engrossing from the first frame, a brooding score and a living (not necessarily bright, but alive) color scheme marauding about this psychological thriller in which Leo DiCaprio plays a U.S. Marshal investigating an escape from an institute for the criminally insane.

It certainly wasn’t the greatest film in the history of movies, but it delivered the goods, avoided paint-by-numbers screenplay tricks and clichés, this a film obviously made by a skilled hand having a great time. I won’t say anything about the plot because it delivers more than one Sixth Sense-level twist, but I will say that it was a most enjoyable movie-going experience, one that promises, as the evening’s emcee said beforehand, to be a completely different film on repeated viewings.

So imagine my surprise to wake up this morning and find on Slate not one but two front-page articles bashing both Scorsese and his new film. I no longer take it as a sign of pride when my opinions perfectly coincide with those of prominent critics (that’s pretty much the first rule, actually, not to do that), but the tone of these articles is kind of insane.

In the first, a feature titled “Aging Bull*” (clever), Elbert Ventura laments that Scorsese is no longer the Young Turk he once was, that the days of Taxi Driver or Mean Streets or Goodfellas are long since past and our Greatest Living Director (because let’s be honest, that’s what Scorsese is) has become a piece of the Hollywood machine. Instead of his younger punk rock, Ventura writes, Scorsese now does movies he gets paid to do by studios that essentially own him, the worst proof of this being that his last few films, for the most part, were completely left off any discussion of the Top Films of the 2000s. Maybe The Departed warranted a mention on lists stretched to 100, but even this is disappointing, the article posits, because it’s not his best work.

The only thing one can say to this is, no Punk Rocker lives forever. Rebellion is a skill only the young possess. All the Ramones are dead, and the last few years for them were brutal. Johnny Rotten is still around, but he doesn’t do much aside from the occasional reality TV appearance. Genesis P’Orridge is still going strong, but now as a woman, no longer as a man. Meanwhile, Henry Rollins does lecture tours, the Buzzcocks play for whoever pays them, Joe Strummer’s gone…you see where I’m going with this?

Complaining about the 67-year-old Scorsese no longer possessing the incandescent spirit and energy of his youth reeks of unrealistic adolescent expectation. Someone who made five or six of the greatest films ever made, a person with Best Director and Best Picture Oscars to his credit and the respect of everyone he will ever meet and most he has ever known, no longer needs to make gritty gangster dramas on a shoestring budget. If you want that scene, however, he bought the rights to and released in America the heartbreaking and beautiful Italian gangster drama Gomorrah, which, even though he didn’t make it, bears his influence and signature. That movie is great, and Scorsese did what he could to make sure people saw it. He didn’t make it himself, but he brought it to the masses.

Ventura takes Scorsese to task for making more personal films in the last fifteen years. Movie critic Dana Stevens, on the other hand, blasts* Scorsese’s Shutter Island for being, among other things, like “a quickie-B movie from the fifties,” confusing, “inert,” unstable, and “unsuccessful,” making broad claims as to what “the audience” can or cannot figure out for itself and drenching the critique with enough disdain to make the casual reader think this film is an abomination.

On a second and third thought, Shutter Island lags far behind the best of Scorsese’s canon. But it was certainly affecting, and I had no problem keeping up with the changes. What’s more, I heartily enjoyed bathing in the imagery and moodiness and sorting my way through the film’s labyrinthine plot. None of these qualities are mentioned with any emphasis in the review, however, because it seems that Stevens, more than anything else, is really upset that this movie isn’t Goodfellas. Or if not Goodfellas, then Mean Streets.

Which raises the problem for any auteur in any artistic medium: how does one follow up a masterpiece? Or, in Scorsese’s case, how does one age gracefully? So Goodfellas came out twenty years ago. Scorsese has certainly moved on since then. He’s never stopped making movies. Never once, not since he got his start. He appears to be (and this very well could be wrong) a director who understands exactly how lucky he is to get to make motion pictures for a living and be amazingly good at what he does. He has made seminal movies about New York, about Gangsters, about The Band, about Jake LaMotta (and so, so much more, in that case). And now he wants to make psychological thrillers, bad movies about the Rolling Stones, documentaries on The Blues, films about Howard Hughes, and films about gangsters in New York, but in the 1850s, not the 1950s.

In short, Scorsese is living the dream. He has achieved a prominence and level of access that allows him to do whatever the hell he feels like doing whenever he feels like doing it. The thing that Stevens’ review either misses or disregards, I can’t tell which, is that while Shutter Island is no Goodfellas, it is a hell of a lot better than the average movie coming down the pike for the next, oh, three months or so. It’s virtuosic filmmaking, even if in the service of “lower” material. It’s a professionally rendered head-trip that left me buzzing for a long time afterward. In the hands of a lesser director, it would have been drivel; in Scorsese’s hands, it was as good as it possibly could have been.

At the end of the day, that’s all any artist cares about, and his thankful audience as well. If you really need to bash a legend, go after DeNiro or Pacino. At least Scorsese’s movies remain watchable and artistic, and immensely so on both fronts.