Scorsese’s good ol’ fellas make a Mafia hit once again
The Irishman is three-and-ahalf hours long and is out on Netflix towards the end of the month, raising the initially tempting prospect of watching it at home, maybe spread over two, even three nights. But I urge you to go and see it in one sitting in the concentration-enhancing darkness of a proper cinema… After all, it is a Martin Scorsese film, its epic sweep captures Robert De Niro’s best work for a long time, and come awards time it’s definitely going to be there or thereabouts.
I’m not going to pretend the marathon running time isn’t a challenge, and there are some scenes that don’t work nearly hard enough, as an over-excited Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplay for
Scorsese’s Gangs Of New York, determinedly sets out to show he’s a big fan of the legendary director’s early work too. The already much-imitated scene from
Taxi Driver, which sees De Niro repeatedly addressing himself in the mirror with the line: ‘You talking to me?’ may not be reprised verbatim but its presence certainly hangs heavily in the creative air. Two moments in particular – one involving the line: ‘You looking at my ears?’, the other: ‘Fish – what kind of fish?’ come very close to self-parody.
But then this is very much Scorsese going back to his roots – the mob, murder and De Niro, with whom he first worked an astonishing 46 years ago on what was to be a breakthrough film for them both: Mean Streets. That was about the American Mafia, and so is this, albeit closer in style to Scorsese’s other Mafia masterpiece, Goodfellas.
In a sprawling picture that doesn’t so much serve up a slice of Americana as two or three cakes’ worth, De Niro plays the Irishman of the title, Frank Sheeran, a young man who emerges from World War II with two talents likely to endear him to his local New Jersey gangsters – he can speak almost fluent Italian and, thanks to his Geneva Conventiondefying treatment of German prisoners, kill in cold blood.
A lifelong association with local crime boss Russell Bufalino (played
‘This is Scorsese going back to his roots – the mob, murder and De Niro’
by De Niro’s fellow Goodfellas star Joe Pesci) soon begins, as does Sheeran’s new career as a hitman – or house-painter, as it’s known euphemistically. ‘I also do my own carpentry,’ he reassuringly tells prospective employers.
The film covers the best part of six decades, with an elderly Sheeran providing a linking narration from a wheelchair in his old people’s home. De Niro, who is 76 in real life, achieves this with the help of hair, make-up and some tinted glasses – old-school acting, you might say. But many of the flashbacks have been created using the hugely expensive process of ‘digital de-ageing’, which has already rejuvenated Samuel L Jackson in Avengers: Endgame and Will Smith in Gemini Man, and now allows De Niro, Pesci, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel to roll back the years.
Apart from one ambitious early shot that attempts to return De Niro to his 20s and ends up making him look like one of the animated motion-capturecharactersfromThe Polar Express, it works pretty effectively, justifying the tens of millions of dollars Scorsese has apparently spent on the process. That said, with the action jumping backwards and forwards in time at a rate of knots, you get used to the main characters not looking the same from one scene to the next.
It’s not a perfect film. Unravelling the labyrinthine links between the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamsters union and the American political establishment is complex – particularly for audiences here.
Pacino is over the top as Hoffa, the charismatic union boss who suddenly disappeared in 1975. And the whole thing doesn’t look quite as good – or as cinematic – as we expect a Scorsese film to look. But De Niro is fabulous, Pesci quietly almost as good, and Scorsese is clearly enjoying himself behind the camera.
The ol’ goodfellas have still got it.