The Irishman
1 FRANK AND RUSSELL
Nick de Semlyen: “What’s the problem, kid?” With this question, East Coast crime boss Russell Bufalino (a man who, legend has it, was an unofficial advisor on The Godfather) hoves into the life of truck driver Frank Sheeran. It’s a fascinating relationship, not only in the way its tendrils snake into Frank’s personal life — Russell is both mentor and de facto family member
— and in how the de-ageing tech allows Joe Pesci to play a character much older than that of Robert De Niro, once his big brother in Raging Bull. The peculiar friendship reaches its awful culmination on a 1975 road trip, as Russell, who speaks only in obliquities, issues a death sentence for Hoffa: “We did all we could for the man.” The look on Frank’s face is heartbreaking,
2 frank in the war
Ian Freer: Frank’s adventures in Italy during World War II are about far more than VFX studio ILM flexing their digital de-ageing muscles. On a character level, it explains some basic plot questions. Not only does it explain how Sheeran can converse in Italian and feel so at home in the company of Sicilians like Russell Bufalino, it also details why a Philadelphia-born truck driver can easily make a career move into becoming a Mob assassin. Sheeran’s ease at killing for Bufalino and Hoffa is forged in the moment he forces two German soldiers to dig their own grave and then casually shoots them. He isn’t defending himself; he is committing a war crime. Scorsese doesn’t labour the point but it’s the start of a dehumanising process that once it starts, never stops.
3 jfk and the mafia
Christina Newland: Although the material on which The Irishman is based — Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses — is an educated guess about the JFK assassination, what it posits is believable. Kennedy, helped into office by his father Joseph’s Mob connections, refused to pay his dues and, in his struggles with Castro, was unable to get the Mob their casinos in Cuba back. Whether this spelled Kennedy’s demise or not, the parallels drawn between Hoffa’s relationship with the Mob and the President’s make for a fascinating parable about power and corruption.
Stephen Graham: Tony Provenzano was a real guy, part of an organised family who also worked for the Teamsters. That’s what they did, find legit jobs as ways for people to make shitloads of money. I got to do scenes where I’m on a golf course and stuff like that with the President — which was great fun.
4 hoffa vs tony pro
Christina Newland: Many of The Irishman’s central characters speak in a byzantine maze of euphemisms and stock phrases. Not so, bitter rivals Tony Provenzano (Stephen Graham) and Jimmy Hoffa, whose two escalating confrontations serve as major set-pieces. They also get some of the most furious, incidentally funny lines.
Stephen Graham: For the meeting in Miami where Tony is late, I didn’t have any lines with De Niro. For the first take, I felt comfortable and was enjoying it and stuff. Then I just looked across the table and I went, “That’s Robert De Niro. Fucking Robert De Niro.” I stood up and went for a walk and Marty came over to me and said, “Keep the scene on its toes. Keep punching at them.” So during the next take I turned to Frank [De Niro] and said, “So what did you think?” and we had this back and forth. At the end Marty stood up and he went to me, “That was great.” And De Niro and Pacino were like, “Did you feel it? Yeah, it came alive then.”
Christina Newland: Stephen Graham is explosively charismatic as Pro, proving he has everything it takes to go toe-to-toe with Al Pacino.
Stephen Graham: During the ice cream scene Al’s eating it really slowly and he’s got this arrogance about him. I’m, like, really pissed off at him. At the end, he just put a spoon back into the ice cream bowl. And I threw the bowl across this prison canteen. We carried on shooting and I’ve gone to jump across the table to grab him. Marty went, “Cut,” and Al went ‘Whoa... whoa. Did you see that, Marty? Did you see the kid frightened me there.” And Marty’s like, “I know. I told you this kid’s great.”
5 HOFFA’S FATE
Nick de Semlyen: Despite the scenario that unfolds in detail in The Irishman, what happened to Jimmy Hoffa in 1975 is still hotly debated. Both historians and the FBI admit they don’t know, and officially the Hoffa case remains under investigation, although it’s no longer being actively probed. One theory posits that his body was put inside a 55-gallon drum and transported to a New Jersey landfill; another that he was buried under a football stadium. As for whether Frank Sheeran was telling the truth about being involved, it’s certainly suspicious that he switched his story over the years, from denying any involvement whatsoever to claiming the killers were Vietnamese mercenaries. Scorsese himself has admitted he doesn’t care. “Whether he killed Hoffa… I’m not interested,” he said recently. “It’s a matter of the moral choices that he has to make.”
Ian Freer: The killings in the The Irishman are matter-of-fact. This extends to the form. Frank’s killings are captured in a straightforward form, devoid of Scorsese razzle-dazzle camera moves. This extends to the shooting of Jimmy Hoffa, who gets the trademark Sheeran quick-shots method, the violence over before it has begun.
It’s a messy, inelegant death (blood splatters the wall), the verbose Hoffa denied last words.
6 THE RITUAL OF FOOD
Food has long been a sub-theme in Scorsese’s work and The Irishman delivers big time. Check out Hoffa’s ice cream craving, an ageing Frank and Russell dipping bread into wine — the Catholic rite of Intinction — and hot dogs cooked in beer: the new slicing garlic with a razor blade from Goodfellas.
Ian Freer:
7 PEGGY’S ARC
Christina Newland:
Anna Paquin’s supporting role as Frank Sheeran’s daughter Peggy has been among the most debated elements of The Irishman. Some viewers, annoyed at Scorsese’s perceived sidelining of women, cited her lack of dialogue in the movie as a major flaw. But Peggy has the sharpest mind and moral sense of anyone in the film; her silence serves as knowing judgment, even as a frightened child who watches her father kerb-stomp a grocer on her behalf. Peggy is quick on the take and deeply ambivalent, and it’s all in Paquin’s excellent performance, all sideways glances and unnervingly long stare. The visual language of the film allows Scorsese to avoid overstating what we know to be true: namely that Frank is a stone-cold murderer. What could Peggy possibly say to him, this patriarch over a family of women; this violent, inscrutable man? She knows, and he knows she knows, and this is the uneasy dynamic between them. No words are necessary.
It’s only after the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, a lifelong and close family friend, that Peggy speaks. When she finally does, she says one word — “Why?” — and it’s lobbed at her father like a grenade. Knowing she has long seen through him, he sputters, “Why, what?!” She clarifies, asking why he hasn’t made a phone call to the wife of the missing Hoffa. But the crucial moment is the pregnant pause before she responds; a lifetime’s worth of accusatory feelings. This is a woman who knows her father is the ‘bad people’ he claims to be protecting her from. Her ‘why’ is a question not just about the mechanics of what she seems to know is a Mob hit, but it’s also ‘why?’ as an existential query — why has Frank made a life for them by taking lives from others?
8 the phone call
Christina Newland: In the half century we’ve been watching Robert De Niro on our cinema screens, there’s no denying that the bombastic, live-wire performer of Mean Streets and Taxi Driver has changed. In The Irishman, collaborating again with Scorsese after over two decades, De Niro moves more slowly, accordingly with his age; his Frank Sheeran is all icy sangfroid and stilted delivery, coming the closest to showing vulnerability with an occasional sputter in his speech. We spend the better part of three hours watching
Sheeran navigate the murky waters of the Mob hitman and explain his job with sociopathic casualness; but after he is forced to betray and snuff out Jimmy Hoffa, his best and longtime friend, there’s a marked shift in proceedings.
In a devastating scene in the privacy of his bedroom, Frank makes a phone call to Jimmy’s wife, Jo Hoffa (Welker White), in an unrelenting one-take close up. In murmured, stuttering sentences he tries to tell her not to panic about a murder he himself has committed. Just as Jo picks up and Frank begins to speak, there’s a very quick jump cut — so disruptive and rapid that it seems like some kind of mistake. It’s like a frantic heartbeat, or a spike in your gut, or a little filmic reminder that Frank has now entered into the biggest lie and the lowest moral rung of his life. De Niro’s raw vulnerability, his inability to finish his sentences, his voice a sort of breathless thrum, is astounding — like nothing we’ve seen him do before in all his years on the screen. 9 the shootist Ian Freer: Glimpsed on a cinema marquee, Don Siegel’s The Shootist is John Wayne’s final film, an epitaph for the Western in the way The Irishman is for the gangster flick. Wayne plays J.B. Brooks, a dying, disabled gunfighter haunted by the violence he inflicted on people. Sheeran can probably relate.
10 frank’s reckoning
Ian Freer: Unlike most gangster films,
The Irishman doesn’t end with the arrest of all the major players. Instead, Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian give us an extended coda as the toll of Frank’s life of crime becomes apparent to him. He is rebuffed by Peggy in a bank, talks to a priest, bargains for a deal on a coffin and languishes in a retirement home playing with the gold ring given to him by Russell. It’s a final 20 minutes that plays in a completely different register to the rest of the film, as if the energy and life we thrived on in the first half has been overtaken by loss and tragedy. It’s an ending — a man confronted by his past misdemeanours — that has played out throughout Scorsese’s career; Jake Lamotta in Raging Bull looking at himself in a dressing room mirror; Henry Hill in Goodfellas, staring accusingly back at the camera, and Sam Rothstein in Casino going full circle back to where he started (“And that’s that,” a variation on The Irishman’s, “It is what it is”). Yet The Irishman is perhaps the director’s fullest expression of a character reckoning with his actions; contemplative, elegiac, moving.