‘Irishman’, engrossing crime drama

Scorsese’s saga tackles greed, violence, ambition

IBy Owen Gleiberman

t’s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld that’s rippling with echoes of the director’s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

Scorsese, working from a script by Steven Zaillian (who adapted the 2004 memoir “I Heard You Paint Houses”), tells the true story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and unassuming truck driver who, in the 1950s, finds himself drawn into the orbit of Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), the elegant and sinister boss of the Pennsylvania-based Bufalino crime family. Sheeran, who became a trusted Mob soldier and hitman, had many assignments, and one of them was to go to work for Jimmy Hoffa (played, in the film’s most extraordinary performance, by Al Pacino), whose Teamsters Union was mired in underworld connections. For years, Sheeran served as Hoffa’s right-hand thug, and then, according to Sheeran, he was the one given the order to whack Hoffa (though the labor leader’s sudden disappearance in 1975 has never been officially solved).

Scorsese turns this saga into a vast American canvas of greed, violence, ambition, politics, and corruption. The backroom string-pulling, the casual executions, the murderous muscle flexed with a terse euphemism (“I’m a little bit concerned...”) – we’ve seen much of this before. But Scorsese’s 1990 landmark “GoodFellas” was a Mob diary staged to feel like a party; without falsifying what it showed us (if anything, the film made it look more genuine than it had ever looked in the movies before), “GoodFellas” asked us to revel in the thrilling amorality of easy money, fast pleasure, and quicker brutality, even as we confronted the sometimes horrific consequences.

“The Irishman” presents Mob life as a far more solemnly unromantic and toll-taking experience. A film of masterly hushed precision, it digs deep into the nub of its subject, which is the dark heart of power. Yet it’s not quite what I would call an intimate drama. Films about the Italian underworld have always showed us how Mobsters try to keep family and business separate, but in “The Irishman”, though Frank has a family, they’re barely on our radar except for his daughter, Peggy, played as a wily young girl by Lucy Gallina and as an adult by Anna Paquin. As a girl, Peggy stares at her father without saying a word, and what her inquisitive silence tells you is that she knows, more or less, what he’s up to. He loses her as a daughter, but in a sense he never quite has her.

At 209 minutes, “The Irishman” is longer than “The Godfather” or “The Godfather Part II”, longer than “Titanic” or any of the “Lord of the Rings” films – and that, on the face of it, could make it seem intimidating, like a mountain you have to climb.

Attention

One might even ask: Why, in the age of skittery attention spans, did Scorsese choose to make a three-anda-half-hour magnum opus for Netflix? But the answer, it turns out, is rather up-to-the-minute. That running time is a mere blip in the world of binge-watching; if “The Irishman” weren’t a movie at all but, in fact, a show (a limited series, say), we’d be talking all of three episodes. And the reason that connection is so relevant is that what Scorsese has made is, in a sense, a kind of glorified series. I don’t mean that as an insult to his cinematic ambitions. Scorsese, in contrast to what he did in the overly knotted-up “Casino”, is working here at full power – the jittery sweep of his voice, the intuitive music of his camera movement, the classic volcanic eruptions of male rage. Edited, with flowing contrapuntal brilliance, by Thelma Schoonmaker, “The Irishman” unfolds with an ominous momentum that’s heady and engrossing.

Yet the film, by design, is episodic in a way that’s small-screen-friendly and a little “objective.” It sits back and gawks at its characters – their close-to-thevest style, their violence, their drive for dominion – rather than drawing us into any sort of shattering communion with them. It shows us the explosive force of their actions without necessarily asking us to be deeply moved. The first two “Godfather” films added up to a kind of tragedy (almost a Hollywood version of Shakespeare), because they were about how far men could fall who had soaked their rise in blood; we watched the humanity drain out of Michael Corleone until he was a waxworks Mafia vampire. “The Irishman” never glamorizes the violence it shows us, and never risks making it look like a lark; the film presents Mob crime as the cutthroat utilitarian business it is. But what it also shows us is characters who don’t necessarily feel a lot for themselves. They’re clockwork operators – efficiency experts of violence. There’s little on the inside for them to confront, because that part of them is already dead.

The movie is set over a period of 30 years (60 if you count the framing device that portrays Frank as a man in his eighties looking back), and the digital de-aging process that delayed the film’s release and ballooned its budget to $150 million is integral to more of its scenes than not. It’s not just a matter of “flashbacks.” Much of “The Irishman” is set in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, and in these scenes De Niro appears as a more pink-fleshed, streamlined version of himself, and so does the now imperiously crinkly Joe Pesci (though his character is middle-aged even in the earlier scenes).

Is the de-aging process perfect? Of course not. You may feel, at moments, that you’re seeing characters who have been nipped and tucked with a kind of digital cosmetic surgery. Yet the process is still effective, and there’s a strange, singular way that it works for the movie. Even when Frank and Russell are younger, we feel an echo of the actors in their mid-seventies who De Niro and Pesci actually are. And this makes it seem like even the younger versions of Frank and Russell have the armored hearts of old men. Who knows where this technology will lead, but in “The Irishman” the deaging turns out to be a mesmerizing experiment, even if it’s more of a device than a time-machine miracle.

How does an ordinary man like Frank become a killer? According to what the movie shows us, his time in combat took him part of the way there – not because he had to kill to survive, but because he was ordered to kill German POWs (after they’d dug their own graves) in a way that amounts to a war crime. And that hardened him. (It’s a tough movie that’s willing to snuff our idealism about America in WWII.) (RTRS)