REVIEW: ‘The Irishman’ and what we do with the time allotted to us
Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro star in The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese.
As we near the end of a decade, a lot of Film Twitter will be consumed with counting down the best movies of the past ten years. I’m not really into that trend – for me, I don’t see much value in narrowing the field like that – but one of my picks would probably be Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, because it encapsulates one of the greatest strengths of movies: to compress time and find meaning in its passage.
That’s also one of the most important contributions of Martin Scorsese’s latest release, The Irishman. Scorsese’s work in the gangster genre is legendary, and some might wonder what else he could say about organized crime that he hasn’t already. It turns out that observing how time withers men who believe they’re impervious to everything, especially the law, is an essential add-on to Scorsese’s body of work. Appropriately, it’s a movie about the ravages of time that would have been impossible to make without the hundreds of years of collective experience of the cast and crew.
For most of the movie’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime, we tag along with Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a Second World War veteran who’s since become a truck driver in the Teamsters union. Frank pulls off minor heists of beef to benefit a Philadelphia mob captain, and successfully fends off his employer in court when they try to fire him. This brings him into the circle of the Bufalino crime family, headed by Russell (Joe Pesci). Frank’s willingness to carry out hits for the Bufalinos endears him to the Mafia; as Frank explains in a voiceover, it wasn’t about indulging in the excesses of lawbreaking, it was about getting small rewards to help your friends, and following orders the way he did in the military.
The movie juxtaposes two brutal results of the Mafia life: you either end up prematurely dead - helpful onscreen text blurbs tell us exactly how each mobster ceases to be - or slowly deteriorating in a jail or a nursing home. There aren’t many visible benefits of crime on display here.
Al Pacino as Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa.
As Frank rises in the Mafia world, he’s connected with another, more legitimate one. Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the popular general president of the Teamsters, selects Frank as his main bodyguard, and Frank rises to prominence in that organization as well. But when Hoffa’s friendship with the Mafia is threatened over bad blood with rival union presidents, Frank is torn between his allegiances. His loyalty to his Mob brotherhood runs against the quasi-normal life represented by Hoffa (a man who Frank’s family is also much more comfortable around). Ultimately, Frank will have to choose between them, which may drive him even further from the people he wants to protect.
On many levels, The Irishman presents exactly what you’d expect from a re-teaming of Scorsese with frequent collaborators like De Niro and Pesci; there’s not a lot of wholly fresh gangster movie material here. But the execution is flawless, and there’s enough variety in the performances – with the added skill of Pacino, who has shockingly never worked with Scorsese before now – to make it worth your time. Pesci, in particular, goes in a totally new direction compared to his past work, rendering Russell Bufalino as a reserved, calculating figure that is worlds apart from the hot-headed characters Pesci is known for.
Befitting a movie with decades-long scope, there’s an impressive roster of supporting actors as well, with Bobby Cannavale, Jesse Plemons, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, along with dozens of other characters. For people steeped in Mafia mythology, this movie cuts across so many storylines that it probably offers plenty of Easter eggs the more you learn about the players and the time periods.
There’s something fitting about how Scorsese had to wait so long for technology to catch up with his vision; without the aid of expensive de-aging visual effects, it might have been harder to sell us on the portrayal of his characters through the whole arcs of their lives. Much was made over whether digitally rewinding the clock would work, and whether it was a good business move for Netflix to back such an expensive project. For the most part, the effects don’t get in the way, and much of the time they’re invisible. But if you’re expecting De Niro to look like he did in Taxi Driver or King of Comedy, the tech’s not that good. When Sheeran is in his thirties, he looks like De Niro did in his fifties, and it scales from there. Arguably, it’s less distracting than casting another actor to play the younger Sheeran, so on that score the movie succeeds.
I wouldn’t necessarily call The Irishman Scorsese’s masterpiece – Goodfellas, Gangs of New York or The Wolf of Wall Street are stronger contenders – but it’s easily one of the best this year, and maybe one of the best in the genre. Short of beginning production forty years ago and attempting a Linklater-style shooting schedule on steroids, there would be no way to achieve what Scorsese has here without digital tools, or without Netflix’s confidence behind him. The passage of time may cause some films to seem out of breath to later viewers, but something tells me this one will still be kicking in decades to come.
The Irishman gets three and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
I appreciated the little Steven Van Zandt musical cameo near the end.
Pacino gets in a few characteristically odd line deliveries that I loved.
Has anyone ever asked Jesse Plemons about what it’s like to constantly play slightly dim-witted, but loyal, characters?