Casino.

I don't entertain the slightest doubt that Martin Scorsese is a great filmmaker, but I'm beginning to wonder if he's a good one. To put it another way, this director, for all his command of cinematic lyricism, humor, melodrama, narrative drive, Dickensian vitality, Dreiserian naturalism, and operatic flourish, seems to lack common sense. And though a poet in full spate may do without common sense, a storyteller cannot.

Casino, his latest, is a big, gaudy, busy, rather amazing contraption, but rattling around inside it are nothing but a couple of little melodramas that would have been better filmed by unpretentious craftsmen like Don Siegel or Phil Karlson. It's not that these stories go untold or are told incompetently. (Scorsese forgot how to be incompetent a long time ago.) But they aren't truly connected to each other and don't fulfill the design of this wannabe masterpiece. Like a giant who has been afflicted with rickets, Casino is big and powerful but always on the verge of collapse.

The Las Vegas casino operated by the film's protagonist, Ace Rothstein (Robert DeNiro in his best vein of impacted rage), isn't just a gambling joint but a world unto itself, and it is the recreation of this world that gives Casino whatever fascination it has. A deluxe hotel, nightclub, restaurant, brothel, tourist attraction, and watering hole for criminals, the casino is above all a massive conveyer belt processing money out of the pockets of customers to the Kansas City vaults of its gangster proprietors. Not only does the movie traverse this main road of money but also the little side treks: the tips and bribes and skimmings and downright robberies. With Ace Rothstein as our narrator-guide, we take it all in, including the invasions of scam-artists whom Ace spots, blocks, and punishes. Casino, at its best, is a sort of how-to movie: How to get highrollers to keep on gambling until they've lost all they won; how to cajole national and local politicians with sex from call-girls and jobs for their relatives; how to calm the local citizenry with good works and charitable contributions; how to keep the local cops happy. Scorsese's camera and Ace's narration draw us the most intricate yet lucid of diagrams. It's hard to think of any place or system so well explored and explained in any recent American film. Casino is to Las Vegas what Moby Dick is to whaling.

But accuracy of setting and richness of atmosphere aren't enough to keep a three-hour movie interesting. There must be a central theme and a story to convey the theme. To be sure, Scorsese and his co-scriptwriter Nicholas Pileggi (drawing upon Pileggi's concurrently released nonfiction book) have a theme and three stories. But only one of these plots embodies the theme and it's the least interesting of the three.

"When you love somebody, you've got to trust them." That's what narrator Rothstein tells us right at the start, and you can understand why Scorsese has picked this theme for this particular setting. The world of the casino is one in which everybody trusts nobody. Each employee is watched by whoever is one rung up on the ladder of command, and "the eye in the sky [the electronic eye] is watching us all." Trust in this environment can be life-endangering. Risks taken for the sake of love are the stuff of high drama.

But a risk taken out of stupidity is merely risible. And when Ace falls for Ginger (Sharon Stone, giving an energetic but rather hollow performance), his situation quickly becomes irritating rather than compelling. Almost the very first thing he tells us about her is that the other men who have known Ginger didn't "know what really moved her." Huge close-ups of heaps of jewelry tell us that Ace does. And yet, minutes later, Ace is telling Ginger, "I have to be able to trust you with my life." Say what? Trust somebody whose highest pride is in turning a dollar? Who, on her wedding night, phones the pimp who used and abused her? Who keeps running off to the pimp? Ace's trust finally turns into a compulsive need to dominate Ginger, and perhaps this psychosis was the real substance of his earlier, putative love. But, if so, what becomes of the theme of trust fighting for survival in a world of distrust? I'm not saying that Scorsese is supposed to depict only sensible people carefully choosing worthy lovers. Pages and stages have been memorably littered with the bodies of heroes and heroines loving not wisely but too well. Mark Antony knew the risks he was taking with Cleopatra and held the world well lost for love. That's dramatic. But the supposedly shrewd Rothstein latches onto the Bimbo from Hell and then whines that she's not a loyal wife. There's nothing dramatic about three hours of masochism.

The second plot has nothing to do with trust but with the territorial imperative. Ace turns against his former strong-arm man, the mad-dog killer Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), when the latter's freelance crimes unfairly bring press and police down on the casino manager. This situation alone might have served for an effective, ninety-minute gangster movie, but, spread over a three-hour narrative and with no decisive showdown between Nicky and Ace (despite a confrontation in the desert staged as a clash of the titans but containing nothing but predictable threats), it fizzles.

Casino gets a quick shot of adrenaline in its last hour. Driven from his managerial post for firing the incompetent relative of a local bigwig, Ace refuses to knuckle under and rejects a less important position. Recklessly, he creates his own local cable talk show and broadcasts his wrongs, thereby infuriating the mob. Because we have seen Rothstein's pride in his work, have sensed his conception of himself as the custodian of an incredibly complete moneymaking machine, we understand this act of self-destruction very well, and it is dramatic because Rothstein's instinct for self-justification wars against his instinct for self-preservation. The idea of self-justification in defiance of convention, morals, and even reason is the burden of many Scorsese movies from Mean Streets to Cape Fear, and he handles it well (if sketchily) here. But if only he had zeroed in on it earlier.

Helping to keep Casino watchable is Scorsese's sheer facility. Though his use of multiple narrators becomes irritating and incoherent (Rothstein should have been the only narrator), his camera can still work wonders. When Ace first notices Ginger as she walks away from him in a gaming room, the director films this walk in slow motion and dims the casino's noises to emphasize Ace's wonder-struck concentration. So far, just standard movie lyricism. But then Scorsese and his sound editor do something cagey. The background clatter is brought back to its normal level but Ginger continues to walk in slow motion. The erotic fascination persists even when reality reasserts itself. Though the Ace-Ginger romance may finally come to nothing dramatically, at least it is well-established.

Or consider the pop music on the soundtrack. Scenes dominated by Ace feature the best saloon singers like Johnny Mathis and Dinah Washington, but the New York hoodlum, Nicky, is accompanied by Mick Jagger and other rockers. When Santoro's tactics threaten Ace's livelihood, rock 'n' roll gradually drives the nightclub headliners off the soundtrack. Neat.

So, once again, Scorsese has proved he can make great movie moments even when he isn't making a good movie. But how much longer will he do his rounds over territory he has explored to his heart's content but long past the point where he can discover anything new in it? Many of the characterizations here (especially Pesci's) are facsimiles of those in Goodfellas. And the violence has been escalated. Now that the director has shown a torture victim's eyeball exploding, what will he do for an encore?

Let there not be an encore. His 1993 adaptation of Wharton's Age of Innocence proved a refreshing departure for Scorsese, a stretch of his talent to accommodate the concerns of a very different artist. If Martin Scorsese must turn to adapting classics in order to grow, then, by all means, let him adapt. By all and any means, let him move on.