We did what we could for the man.
It’s always a daunting task to approach reviewing a Scorsese film. His films are packed with subtext, symbolism and extra meanings. There’s never a meaningless shot in a Scorsese film. He’s a director that’s always getting at something and in many ways, he is the last of his breed, the last of the classically styled technical masters with the soul of an artist or of a priest perhaps. And approaching The Irishman is even more daunting than usual; it’s Scorsese’s longest film to date, right on the three-and-a-half hour mark.
Is it a perfect movie? No. There are issues certainly with everything from the failure to use body doubles for the deaging, resulting in youthful faces on elderly bodies, to the effort, and ultimate failure in my opinion, to explicate the characters by explicating their sociopolitical environment. There’s a point to the length, of course; much of this movie is dedicated to creating a sense of numbness to violence, a sense of a kind of grinding routine, where this one guy just basically went out every night and killed somebody. Could it have accomplished this and been a more manageable three hours? I think so. I found much of the larger sociopolitical stuff to just kind of grind things to a halt for long periods. Why is there a lengthy sequence involving Frank meeting Howard Hunt? Why is Howard Hunt in this movie? Why is DAVID ******* FERRIE in this movie? I mean, you know you’re lost in the weeds when you bump into David Ferrie bumbling through. I understand Scorsese’s desire to wrestle with this turbulent period of American history, but once you top three hours on your movie, you’ve just got to try to wrestle into some kind of shape, I think, and make some hard decisions. I mean, David Ferrie. Jesus. I don’t know why cutting him would even be a hard decision, but whatever, maybe it was, you still need to make it.
Where the film excels is in the characters who are both well written and also brought wonderfully to life by the mostly excellent ensemble. De Niro is better than he’s been in decades as Frank Sheeran. To some degree, this movie is Scorsese examining the sociopathic character and in Frank De Niro and Scorsese bring the journeyman killer to life. He takes no thrill from violence, doesn’t particularly like it, doesn’t even consider it much of a craft; it’s simply drudgework, like the housepainting that is code for murder. He is, as Patricia Highsmith’s own sociopath, Mr. Ripley, once said, not troubled by a conscience. But as the film progresses, Frank finds himself torn between two father figures, Joe Pesci’s ruthless, soft-spoken Russell Buffalino and Al Pacino’s volatile, abrasive Jimmy Hoffa and watching Frank wrestle, for what seems like the first time, with an actual moral quandary is what gives the last third or so of the movie its heavy emotional weight. With a very minimal performance, De Niro communicates the uncertainty he feels for the first time and the weight that, for once, his violence seems to have.
Joe Pesci is close to career best as Russell Buffalino, a man with immense power, but no inherent need to demonstrate it. In a lot of ways, it’s self-commentary on Pesci’s performance; he’s the polar opposite of the hot-headed psychopaths Pesci has typically played for Scorsese. It lets Pesci engage in minimal, but always sharply engaged, acting. He’s never less than compelling, even when all he’s doing is listening to a conversation. Pacino has the showiest role and it would be easy for his Hoffa to slip into self-parody, Pacino doing the kind of shouty, over the top performance he’s become infamous for. But Pacino finds depths there and he makes Hoffa into a figure of real tragedy. If Frank’s journey is more specific, Hoffa’s journey in this film seems distinctly American, not to say distinctly masculine. He’s the alpha-male who just won’t back down, won’t bend, won’t compromise, ultimately won’t get out alive. We’re frustrated by him, as Frank is, but it’s because we wish he would listen to reason. But Scorsese isn’t Tarantino; this isn’t Once Upon a Time . . . in Detroit. The fates of these characters are sealed when the movie begins; maybe that’s why Scorsese constantly introduces characters with a textual note indicating the violent manner of their deaths. When you enter this story, the end is already written.
But Scorsese’s getting at something about violence in general here. I had already pinpointed that Scorsese was reevaluating GoodFellas back with The Wolf of Wall Street. GoodFellas is a coke-fueled frenzy of a movie; it is one of the few crime movies that actually does what the moral hand-wringers think they all do, ie. glorify the life of crime. The life of crime in GoodFellas is vibrant, colorful, high-energy, a jolt of pure ecstasy and it’s taken up with an iconography of cool that really does pervade the characters there. The Wolf of Wall Street was also a film about that kind of high-energy, full-throttle, excess driven lifestyle, but there was a numbness and a weariness to Wolf of Wall Street that made me realize that Scorsese was showing us the ugly side of the life he captured in GoodFellas. The energy of GoodFellas was a twitchy jitter in Wolf of Wall Street and the guffaws were just a little too forced and a little too painful in Wolf of Wall Street. With The Irishman, he’s gone even farther down this road of reexamining GoodFellas. Frank Sheeran and the people he pals around with in this film are not cool in the slightest and when violence happens here, it’s fast, clumsy and occasionally just kind of goofy. At one point, a character gets shot in the face and he falls like he’d tripped on a curb. There’s no glamour, no energy, no fun in the life of Frank Sheeran.
That final half-hour or so really just hits the point home with a powerful force. I could see how some might find it to be too on the nose, but for me, it really worked. It’s this slow descent into darkness as we watch Frank just keep on living. In some ways, Frank’s the lucky one; he “got out” alive, unlike most of the other characters. Maybe this is another reason for those constant text boxes detailing how people in this story died, to underline just how rare it really is for someone to pull off what Frank pulled off by surviving. But, Scorsese asks us, to what end? If Frank has had one virtue, it’s been his loyalty; it was in that area that he faced his only real moral struggle. But as the movie rolls to a close, as one investigator tells him, everyone he’s ever been loyal to is dead. What is it worth now? Of course, when one survives as Frank has, there’s always the option of redemption in those twilight years. But, brutally, harshly, unflinchingly, Scorsese tells us that Frank still feels nothing about the hundreds (probably) of people he killed over his lifetime. “Water under the dam,” he says. Is the regret he still feels about Hoffa enough to grant him redemption when his time comes? Does that prove that he has enough of a soul for us to even bother? I don’t know. Frank’s a puzzle and it’s a marker of just how brilliant this screenplay is that we spend three-and-a-half hours listening to Frank talk and yet, at the end, it’s hard to say how much we really know him. I had some problems with this movie, even aside from the ones I talked about above, but I find it hard to quibble with a movie that takes me somewhere as profoundly emotionally troubling as this one does. It’s the reason I tend to give Scorsese movies 4-star rankings; it’s not that they’re perfect, but it’s that the emotions they evoke are so profound and intense. That’s the experience I had here and so, despite all my problems with the film, as that final quiet shot comes to a close, I find myself deeply moved. I’ve seen this movie twice now and it left me emotionally devastated both times. That trumps any structural issues or pacing problems the movie might have as far as I’m concerned. And in terms of thought-provoking? Well, I could probably dedicate a paragraph each to the character of Peggy, the role of the US Military in shaping Frank Sheeran’s sociopathy and a handful of other things too. This filmmaking on a grand scale, driven by ideas and emotions in equal measure. Scorsese remains a national treasure and The Irishman delivers all down the line. 4 stars.
tl;dr – pacing and structural problems are noticeable, but can’t detract from the cumulative emotional impact of this devastating, brilliant, thoughtful masterpiece. 4 stars.