Was The Irishman a Boring Snoozefest or a Masterpiece?
The Irishman. Image courtesy of Netflix.
Martin Scorsese’s latest gangster epic, The Irishman, is a strange film. Netflix gave it a gargantuan budget (over $150 million, apparently mostly for de-aging effects) and an impossibly long and indulgent run time, gave it a limited theatrical run so it could qualify for the major awards and then released it on the streaming service so that millions of viewers suffering from insomnia could finally get some sleep.
The film uses its 3 1/2 hour run-time to explore the life of Frank Sheeran, a low-level mob enforcer and Teamster goon from a Pennsylvania backwater who not only was the real-life killer of Crazy Joe Gallo and Jimmy Hoffa - he was also a bit player in the Bay of Pigs and, if you read the book upon which the film is based, may have helped the mob to assassinate President Kennedy. Well, that’s if you believe his biography. Which many people don’t.
It stars every mob movie actor in existence including Joe Pesci, who was coaxed out of retirement to play the aging mafia don Russ Bufalino. It reunites Al Pacino and Robert De Niro for another impossibly long and meditative crime flick. And it traffics in the typical Scorsese oeuvre - a story of violent, anti-social men and the world they inhabit, chronicling the terrible things they do for money and ego.
The Irishman assumes a certain level of familiarity with mob lore - if you don’t know who Crazy Joe Gallo was, or why Albert Anastasia being gunned down in a barbershop was a big deal, then you might be a bit lost in this film. It both moves quickly, because it has to cover decades, but somehow also manages to meander. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, this film is content to just spend time in an imagined past, in days gone by.
It still has some of that Scorsese energy, and the acting is very good - if a little subdued. These guys are all old now, and the pep has gone out of their step. The production spent tens of millions of dollars to de-age De Niro, apparently, but he still moves like an old man recovering from prostate cancer even when he is supposed to be a relatively spry 45-year-old. In many ways the story takes on the affect of a rambling narrative delivered by a nursing home patient, which perhaps not coincidentally is the film’s primary framing device. The narrative is filtered through an old, rapidly declining Frank and basically takes on the form of his waning recollections, which is perhaps why it meanders.
Or maybe it meanders because Netflix armed one of the last great auteurs with an endless budget and runtime and told him to go wild. The production design, the cinematography, the acting - it’s all top notch, so even if the movie feels like the ramblings of a lonely old man, it’s still an enjoyable ramble. But the most interesting thing about this film, perhaps, is that it is loaded with a kind of end of days pathos. It does feel like the work of a filmmaker, and his stable of long-time actor collaborators, in the autumn of their careers. The movie goes to great lengths to show us how many of these crime lords and underworld figures met untimely ends - dying in jail, or by the gun. And even the ones like Frank, who made it to a natural end, run out the clock alone, friendless and trapped with the memories of the awful things they did.
You might call it elegiac, in that sense. It’s an elegy to the heyday of organized crime in America, the 1950s and 60s and 70s, but also to Scorsese’s own earlier works like Goodfellas, sometimes accused of glorifying mob life. I think I would have preferred if The Irishman played up the ambiguity that these might just be the demented ramblings of a mafia hanger-on, rather than the depiction of an underworld heavy that the film fairly sincerely commits to. But either way, it ends on a tragic note - no matter who Frank Irish really was, in the end he is left alone in a room with his sins and his memories, as the flame of the past grows dimmer in his own mind and in the collective memories of the nation. So what we are left with, in the final summation, is an old man who lived a violent bloody life, but is still afraid to leave the door closed all the way.
