Andrew Lewis Conn on Martin Scorsese’s “Life Lessons”

I’ve always longed to write about “Life Lessons,” a short film by Martin Scorsese from 1989, written by Richard Price and starring Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette—about a famous middle-aged artist named Lionel Dobie, his young live-in girlfriend-cum-assistant Paulette, their Punch and Judy relationship, a looming gallery show deadline, and his fetishistic desire to kiss her foot. It’s an extraordinary work—perhaps the loosest and funniest thing Scorsese’s ever done—and if the picture has been largely overlooked or forgotten it’s perhaps because it appeared as part of the omnibus picture, New York Stories, and the rest of that movie, with shorts from Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola (his segment co-written by a then-teenage Sofia) is such a negligible grab bag. (The Woody Allen picture, “Oedipus Wrecks,” is funny, but one-note, the filmic equivalent of a New Yorker scribble. The Coppola piece is spun sugar; it dissolves while you watch.)

I’ve been obsessing over “Life Lessons” for years and must have seen it something like fifteen or twenty times now. I think it’s a masterpiece—one of the four or five greatest things Scorsese has ever done—and propose here for its twenty-fifth anniversary a thought for each of the picture’s glorious 44 minutes.

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“Life Lessons” is very loosely based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella, The Gambler. More accurately, its story is something like a straight-up adaptation of that short book—as astringent as a shot of vodka—mixed with the circumstances behind the story’s writing. Legend has it that Dostoyevsky, suffering from terrible gambling debts, made with his publisher a kind of deal with the devil: the author agreed to deliver a complete manuscript within thirty days or relinquish the rights to all of his work. So, here, in the picture’s first scene, Dobie’s art dealer (Patrick O’Neal, perfectly cast) comes round the abstract painter’s Soho loft to have a look at new work for a major exhibition coming up in three weeks, to which the big man responds that he has nothing to show and is “going to get slaughtered, man.”

In the film’s next scene, Dobie surprises Paulette by picking her up at the airport, whereupon the young woman tells him she was in Florida with another man, the performance artist Gregory Stark, not a girlfriend like she’d said, and that she’s returned to New York intending to leave the painter. Dobie convinces her to stay: that she’s got a good deal as his assistant, that they’re adults and she can continue on with him as “employer-employee,” that she doesn’t have to sleep with him if she doesn’t want to, but if she decides to leave, if she drags it out, “I’ll die, you know...