The Irishman (2019)
dir. Martin Scorsese
Rated: R
image: ©2019 Netflix
With his longest film to date, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime saga The Irishman allows the legendary director room to stretch his creative talents in ways we’ve never seen, even from masterpieces like Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. You can feel in every frame the mastery over the art form that the nearly-octogenarian Scorsese commands from his half-century of making movies. The film also aches with a sense of remorse and regret which comes from its subject, mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran. Scorsese has always been interested in exploring the wages of his characters’ sins, but that’s even more acute here in The Irishman.
Scorsese has reteamed with screenwriter Steven Zaillian, who co-wrote Gangs of New York, the director’s 2002 opus about 19th century warring crime syndicates. Their source material is the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa by former prosecutor and investigator Charles Brandt. The book was met with its own controversy – two refutations of the book’s veracity were published upon its release, one in Slate and the other in The New York Review of Books – and chronicles Sheeran’s rise in Philadelphia’s Bufalino crime family, culminating with the disappearance of Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa.
Probably the most distracting thing about The Irishman is Scorsese’s reliance on the current Hollywood digital trickery of “de-ageing” the actors, so that they can appear younger in flashbacks. This is the most unsettling when used on Robert DeNiro (if only because it’s him we see the most in this “de-aged” state), who stars as Frank Sheeran. We see DeNiro as Sheeran at the beginning of his life of crime in the 1950s all the way through his recounting of his crimes, sad and alone in a nursing home, sometime in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Many, many digital artists – as is attested to in The Irishman’s closing credits – manipulate DeNiro’s face for what amounts to probably a quarter of the picture’s runtime, and looking at their work is an uncanny experience.
It is, however, an ultimately small price to pay in order to see the continuation of arguably the greatest collaboration between actor and director in the history of American cinema. This is the ninth film Scorsese and DeNiro have made together, and you can feel the rapport between the two men on the screen. DeNiro’s quiet, unassuming Sheeran lets the karmic debt rise with every crime he commits, until what he owes has stripped away everything that mattered to him.
The most haunting representation of what Sheeran’s lifestyle cost him is communicated in near total silence. Sheeran’s daughter, Peggy – who we see as a very young girl and as a grown woman, played by Anna Paquin – stands as silent witness to the horrors her father perpetrates. Throughout the film, we see Peggy see her father for who he really is and begin to pull away from him. Her breaking point comes when Peggy suspects the role Frank played in Hoffa’s disappearance, a man she had come to love almost as a second father. Her silence, her refusal to speak to Frank, is a sentence worse than any prison stretch he could ever receive.
Silence – or, more appropriately, subdued quietness – works as a major theme in The Irishman. Scorsese is renowned for pioneering the use of rock-and-roll music in his films. That aesthetic is still present, but in The Irishman, Scorsese has slowed the tempo noticeably. Goodfellas gave us the frenetic, cocaine-fueled mania of Henry Hill ping-ponging from one place to the next as Harry Nilsson’s Jump into the Fire and The Rolling Stones’s Monkey Man slams away on the soundtrack. In The Irishman, we’re more apt to get Marty Robbins’s A White Sport Coat playing over a scene of the wise guys bowling.
The Irishman is Goodfellas told not from the brash young Henry Hill’s perspective, but from the quiet, older, and wiser Paulie Cicero’s point of view.
The sequence culminating in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is a masterclass in the use of silence to build suspense and foreboding. There’s a sense of dreadful finality as Frank checks all the preparations. And lest you think I’m spoiling the plot; you don’t need to worry. The Irishman, like a lot of great cinema, is an exercise in the journey being the destination. It’s enough to witness these artists at the top of their form. Scorsese and his editor, the great Thelma Schoonmaker, are both showing just that as they abruptly cut one of those pop songs to deadly silence when Hoffa’s wife, Jo, fears that she might be the target of retaliation, and that turning the key in her car ignition might trigger a car bomb. Alfred Hitchcock couldn’t have built the suspense in that moment any better.
Scorsese also reteams with Joe Pesci in The Irishman, and the actor has rarely been better. In direct contrast to his larger-(and louder)-than-life character in Goodfellas, Tommy DeVito, Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, the head of the crime family for whom Frank Sheeran works, with a menacing quiet. Russell has no need to be bombastic because mere whispers from him get men killed, including (possibly) presidents.
Adding a tonal counterpoint to the silence is Al Pacino’s embodiment of Jimmy Hoffa. This is the first time for Pacino and Scorsese to work together. Pacino delights in chewing scenery as the infamous Teamsters Union President. The only thing that detracts from the performance is that his flat, Midwestern accent tends to come and go, depending on how worked up his character is in any given scene.
A sequence late in the film sums up my entire experience watching The Irishman. Frank, who has become very close to Hoffa, tries to warn his friend and employer that he has made enemies of very dangerous men. Just like the rest of the movie, I sank down into this scene as it played out. It’s a series of close-ups; intimate shot-reverse-shots as the two men have their tête-à-tête. The cutting makes you forget everything happening around these two men for the duration of their conversation.
There is an effortlessness to this scene as well as to the rest of the film that is hard to overstate. At first, I confused that effortlessness for a lack of vitality. I quickly recognized it as the work of a master who is in complete control of his art form. The Irishman is one more masterpiece for Martin Scorsese in a career full of them.
Why it got 4 stars:
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese in top form. My only reservations about the movie are the uncanny CGI and Pacino’s slightly over-the-top performance.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Through most of the film, DeNiro’s character speaks to us in voice over. There is a brief, fleeting moment when Joe Pesci’s character takes control of the voice over. It’s an odd moment, and I’m not entirely sure why Scorsese and Zaillian included it.
- There are several visual homages to Scorsese’s other work in The Irishman. One moment sees DeNiro blowing up dozens of taxi cabs to send a message. The power of that image and the echo back to Taxi Driver was very satisfying.
- Speaking of homages: The Irishman deals directly with the election of John F. Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs incident. Pesci’s character instructs DeNiro’s character at one point to drive down to Florida, where he would meet a man named David Ferrie, whom Pesci played 28 years ago in Oliver Stone’s JFK. It was a meta moment that made my head spin.
- It might have been possible (especially because it was produced at Netflix) to have told The Irishman as a limited-episode series, but I’m so glad Scorsese didn’t do that. The structure he and Zaillian impose on their story is so cinematic, and so very satisfying.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I was more worried than at any screening I’ve attended this year when I heard, from a few seats down in my row, this, before the movie started: “I forgot to put my hearing aides in, but I really don’t need them. Movies are so loud.” My blood ran cold. But, it turns out, she really could hear it just fine. I never heard one “What?!?” during the screening. Whew.