Film Review: "The Irishman" ****
Around 1610, Shakespeare knew that the Elizabethan era was over and that a new form of playwrighting was emerging in the Jacobean era. Realizing that his way of life was coming to an end, Shakespeare wrote his last original play, The Tempest. In The Tempest, one of the main characters, Prospero, an old exiled wizard, realizing that the age of magic is coming to an end, decides to perform one last magic act before surrendering and returning to the world. Prospero’s last act of magic mirrors Shakespeare’s writing, bringing together his own last act of “magic” in creating The Tempest. With The Irishman, I feel Martin Scorsese has done the same. Here is a director who has an almost unparalleled career in cinema, seeing his way of filmmaking coming to an end, who conjures a last act of magic to create perhaps (I hope not) his last masterpiece.
In approaching The Irishman, I think that an insight into Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian from the recently deceased literary scholar (and elitist asshole) Harold Bloom helps frame the importance of the film. For Blood Meridian, Harold Bloom was being interviewed when he was asked, “When you called it ‘the ultimate Western’, did you mean merely the paramount example of the genre, or its final expression?” To which Harold Bloom replied, “No, I meant the final one. It culminates all the aesthetic potential that Western fiction can have. I don’t think anyone can hope to improve on it, that it essentially closes out the tradition.” I think the same is true about The Irishman. It is the ultimate mafia/mob film. It successfully closes out the tradition. There is nothing left to be said in the genre.
Considering how many films Scorsese has made involving the mafia/mob, many of them masterpieces, that is quite the statement. One of his films Mean Streets deals with the reality of how youth feel trapped by their limited choices and feel forced into a life of sin. Goodfellas played with the notion of how exciting and tempting the mob life can be. Casino dealt with its violent reality, while The Departed dealt with the lengths that the mafia/mob must go to, sending moles into police units, in order to continue to survive. Now comes The Irishman, which from its first frame feels like an elegy. Gone is the energy of the previous movies. Gone is the gratuitous violence or the use of Scorsese’s fast motion to make us feel a fight. What is left is a sad reality.
The film begins peering through a doorway of a nursing home. The doorways happens to frame the film so that it appears in 4:3 aspect ratio. Then, the camera begins to move into the nursing home and the aspect ratio widens to 16:9. This small technical choice at the beginning means so much. 4:3 is of course the aspect ratio of TV and old cinema. Scorsese is almost making a point that the old ways of doing things are dying. Also, the entire film can be read as either a confession, so the perspective looks like a confessional or a version of a story told through someone who may not be an objective narrator. As a result, the beginning of the movie looks like it is an older film, one told via old cinema.
The moving camera then snakes through the nursing home, asking us to draw comparisons to Scorsese’s infamous Copacabana club shot in Goodfellas. Where that shot put us in the film to feel the excitement of Karen, who is dating Henry Hill, who is trying to impress her and succeeding. The camera meanders through the basement of the club, lost like Karen, but Henry knows his way through the crowd and safely helps her and the camera navigate the maze. It is one of the great shots of cinema. The first shot in The Irishman purposefully recalls that one, but lacking the energy or drive. Gone is the glamour or allure, what is left is simply being lost.
Eventually we find our way to Frank Sheeran, eerily reminiscent of Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane. Here, Frank begins to tell us his story. It takes us back in time to a drive up to Michigan from New York for the wedding of Russell Bufalino’s (Joe Pesci in a career revelatory performance) granddaughter. This drive continues to disturb the other flashbacks through Frank’s life, a rise from a delivery boy who begins to steal the meat he’s delivering, through his role as a hitman for the mob, to finally his rise in the Teamster’s Union. Driving up, the elderly Russell and Frank happen to stop by a Texaco gas station where decades earlier they met by chance. That chance meeting changed Frank’s life forever. In fact, later in the movie, when he is actually introduced to Russ, he says, “That’s when I met my life.” Russ would become an employer, a protector, a father figure, and a Mephistopheles to tempt him and ultimately test him. In this role, Joe Pesci delivers not only the best performance of this year so far, but also the best performance in his storied career. Pesci became type cast as a hyper manic caricature of himself. He always had to play characters who were dialed to 10. His most famous roles in Goodfellas and My Cousin, Vinny showcase his intensity and comic timing; but, Pesci grew tired of being trapped by Hollywood’s inability to figure out what to do with him. Being forced to play the same character over and over, he left acting and has not looked back. No wonder it took DeNiro asking 75 times for Pesci to yes to being in The Irishman. Watching how easily he lives in the character of Russell Bufalino, Pesci plays it close to the chest. A simple glance can demonstrate the malice and sinister nature of the character. Watching how he transforms to an old man who is unable to even eat bread dipped into wine because he can no longer chew, sucking on the bread as if it was life, we mourn the roles that Pesci was never given a chance to play. Here could have been one of the great actors of our time.
If Russ was Frank’s mentor and father figure, then Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) was his best friend or soulmate. Russell introduces Frank to Jimmy when Jimmy needs a strong man to help put down a rival company hiring drivers and undercutting union wages. Frank immediately takes to the job. Their friendship is one that spans the decades, and their families grow close in a way that Russ always wanted to, but never could. Frank’s daughter Peggy senses Russ’s willingness to kill, while she is more attracted to Jimmy’s absolute loyalty to his friends. Peggy plays a haunting presence in Frank’s life, always seeing through his family veneer to Frank’s toxic masculine tough guy persona. Watching Jimmy and Frank interact, we immediately see Pacino and DeNiro’s natural chemistry. The actors life long friendship exudes off the screen and real life informs the fictional life long relationship between Jimmy and Frank. Notice how they always share hotel rooms and sleep in separate beds almost like a married couple from the fifties. They have those special talks at night when you are preparing to go to sleep and reflect not only upon the day, but upon life.
The film’s pace is hypnotic. It builds so gradually, you don’t really understand how involved in the characters you become. The emotions sneak up on you. I was surprised how much I cared by the climax of the movie. In fact, although the film is three and a half hours, I never noticed the time, not glancing at my watch even once. I would have sat there for another three hours of this without complaint. Over the course of these three hours, we see American history shaped by the constant warfare between organized crime, union officials, and politicians. Historical moments interweave into the film and allow us to experience the gravity and weight of the decisions being made. Jimmy’s reaction to JFK’s assassination or Russ and Frank watching the Bay of Pigs take moments of history seared into my mind and show them from a point of view I had not seen before.
All the while, Scorsese is once again a magician at work. He subtly works in at least eight allusions to his other films; never drawing too much attention to themselves, but again, not to be missed. Examples include the way the plane is shot flying through the sky (Aviator), to the guns being laid out on the bed (Taxi Driver) to the steak scene that evokes Raging Bull or the fact that the Copacabana (Goodfellas) actually makes an appearance. This is why I began by saying that this may be Scorsese’s swan song. He seems to be calling back upon all of the films he’s made to explain, like Frank, how he has reached this moment.
Coloring this films reception are Scorsese’s now infamous argument about the MCU, which I believe, despite being a fan of the MCU, has a lot of merit. Scorsese has two major complaints about the MCU. His ultimate complaint is that they are not auteur driven films, but rather, films that are made by consensus. Scorsese came of age as a director in the 1970’s when the auteur theory of film took hold and pushed Studio’s power to the background. In the 1980s and 90s, the rise of production companies as powerhouses in cinema reduced some influence of auteurs, but they remained in control of cinema for some time. In fairness to the MCU, there are a number of the films such as Guardians of the Galaxy and Black Panther where the director’s style actually allows a “low culture” art piece to be elevated to “high art” or cinema. Scorsese’s other complaint is that the MCU has changed the way films are financed. Look at The Joker, which is an auteur film, but in order to make it, the story had to be connected to the DC universe otherwise it never would have found funding. Scorsese recognizes that his way of making films is unfortunately coming to an end. As the viewership shifts from theaters to home streaming only tent pole visual extravaganzas like the MCU seem to have a chance at getting made and placed in theatres. Scorsese’s films are meant to be seen as a communal experience on a large screen. He himself has compared the theater to the church quite often where a communal and individual spiritual experience takes place. This seems to be coming to an end as less and less movies are being made by auteurs and released in theaters. It is a sad reality. The Irishman is not a movie that will function well on the home screen. Given the ability to pause it or take a ten-minute break will in many ways ruin the film. The purposeful pacing and numerous characters who appear can quickly be forgotten in such a break and the effect of the build to the emotional climax would be ruined.
Years ago, Scorsese would have ended this movie after the climax, but it is in the last thirty minutes that The Irishman finds genius. We return to Frank in the nursing home and see him live out his days, unable to let go and left with no where to go. Frank’s life, even with all of his crimes, especially against his family, becomes one to pity rather than to hate. Despite everything he’s done, he is sorry, but cannot say it, making him even more tragic, even if he is not forgivable.
Watching this movie, I conceptualized a great class: The Mob and the American Imaginative. It would begin with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II where the fantasy of a benevolent organized crime family is established. A system that operated with an honor code, before watching the beginning of that deterioration in The Godfather Part II. De Palma adds to the fantasy with Scarface which seems like the first act of Scorsese’s own Goodfellas where men are tempted by the excitement of living such a life. Casino demonstrates that ultimate necessary violence of such a life. And it would end with The Irishman, which shows how the American imaginative and the mob has finally de-evolved to demonstrate that nothing in the mob or mafia life is worth imitation or fantasy.
The Irishman may be Scorsese’s swan song, but I hope it is not. Like Shakespeare, who after The Tempest wrote several more plays, I hope Scorsese continues to make cinema. In the meantime, do yourself a favor while it is in theaters and see The Irishman.
