Scorsese’s final word on gangsters
It really doesn’t seem like the brave new world of viewing choices we were promised does it? When a film that should already be dominating the conversation in the leadup to awards season is instead the subject of a moaning campaign that hardly anyone managed to see the darned thing on a decent-sized screen.
We are talking, of course, about Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman (Netflix).
Coming in at a leisurely and absolutely bottomnumbing three hours and 29 minutes, some people might argue the film is better suited to home viewing.
At least that way you can pause, make a cup of tea, fall in or out of love, mow the lawns, and make a decent lash of painting the roof while the goings-on that led up to the disappearance of American union boss Jimmy Hoffa unfold on your telly.
It has long been supposed that Hoffa was murdered by the Mafia for simply knowing too much about its dealings.
That is the scenario that Scorsese lays out in this adaptation of Charles Brandt’s 2004 possibly-nonfiction I Heard You Paint Houses, on the life of
Frank ‘‘The Irishman’’ Sheeran, who claimed to have pulled the trigger.
The great attraction of The Irishman, other than Scorsese’s trademark control, and another virtuoso spin in the editor’s chair from veteran cutter Thelma Schoonmaker, is the casting, which puts Robert De Niro and Al Pacino together on screen for only the second time since Michael Mann’s 1995 Heat.
With Pacino as Hoffa and De Niro as Sheeran, The Irishman isn’t short of scenes that allow these two titans of the past five decades of cinema to knock the hell out of each other as the relationship shifts from knockabout buddydom to murderous betrayal.
Anchoring the triangle, and maybe even better than both of the others, is Joe Pesci, lured out of retirement by the prospect of working for Scorsese one last time.
Scorsese is even more synonymous with gangster stories than is Francis Ford Coppola. Scorsese’s 1990 Goodfellas is one of the definitive American crime epics, while Casino – released in 1995 – is criminally underrated and well worth revisiting.
Scorsese imagined the creation myth of American organised-crime culture in Gangs of New York and its latter-day shambles in The Departed.
And now, surely, he has had his final word on the genre. So, all whinging aside that I didn’t get to see it on a real screen, in a darkened theatre, with the speakers thundering on all sides, at least
The Irishman exists. It is an astonishing film that’ll reward the most attentive of viewings. Even if you do have to pause for a cuppa once in a while.