MOVIE REVIEWS
REVIEWS THE IRISHMAN
Starring Robert De Niro. In English and Italian, with English subtitles. Rated 14A
➧ HERE’S WHERE Martin Scorsese bids arrivederci to the gangster saga—or at least should do so, since he smacks everything on the table in The Irishman’s mostly taut 210 minutes, and leaves the cannoli.
The film’s likewise a valedictory run for Robert De Niro, returning to his dramatic roots as Frank Sheeran, the last mobster standing—or in this case, sitting in a Catholic retirement home—of the crowd involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. The real Sheeran’s confessions have come under renewed scrutiny, since there’s no one around to refute them. But anyway, his Zelig-like presence at so many key moments in U.S. history gives Scorsese a chance to ruminate on midcentury twists that, one could argue, lead directly to the sordid collapse of empire we’re witnessing today.
Courtesy of the new and notquite-perfected de-aging technique (probably the only aspect here to benefit from the film’s small-screen home on Netflix), we first see Frank as a youngish family type who happens upon a meat-trucking scam around the time he meets made man Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), whose connections, and many cousins, keep moving this Irish odd man out up through the Italianate ranks.
Relying on the elegant camera moves of Mexico’s Rodrigo Prieto, the lovingly crafted film allows De Niro to run a greatest-hits reel of his mob characters, with hints of Raging Bull, minus the pathology. His Frank is ambitious, sure, but that’s mainly to provide for his first family, later traded in for another. Neither introspection nor cruelty is involved when he’s tasked with bumping off small fry or, further on, the bigger fish in this polluted sea.
The largest bass on the hook here is, of course, Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster boss once as powerful as the Kennedys, and now almost forgotten, as Steve Zaillian’s smart script keeps reminding us. He’s played by
Al Pacino, (relatively) blimped-out, buzz-cut, and blustering his way through a performance of such towering megalomania that it’s hard not to relate it to certain overpowered blowhards today who can’t tell when they’re sealing their own fates.
If Pacino’s Hoffa is the wild card— tragicomic relief, if you will—Pesci, playing against type, is the calming factor, while De Niro’s good soldier remains a twitchy enigma. Among many players who graduated from Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire, Stephen Graham has the best bits as Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, a mobbed-up Teamster who truly drives Hoffa nuts.
It’s testimony to the veteran director’s cachet that he’s able to get people like Harvey Keitel and Bobby Cannavale to play mere walk-on parts, and to have Anna Paquin in the thankless role of daughter Peggy Sheeran—the only female character of real note, reduced to nearly silent disapproval of Frank’s violent ways. The Irishman itself notes the high price of the masculine isolation imposed by this fading way of life, eulogized in its last 20 minutes. But what of the taint still coursing through the nation’s veins?
THE WARRIOR QUEEN OF JHANSI
Starring Devika Bhise. In English, Hindi, and Marathi, with English subtitles. Rated PG
➧ IT’S RARE to complain about an Indian film being too short, but The Warrior Queen of Jhansi definitely feels like every third scene is missing. The tale of Rani Lakshmi Bai, who led a rebellion against British colonial rule in 1857, deserves to be told more fulsomely than this costume-and-talk heavy drama can muster, despite the presence of big names and a widescreen panorama.
Back then, the Indian subcontinent was ruled not by Britannia but indirectly, by the British East India Company. Students of Canadian history can easily relate to this, while clutching their Hudson’s Bay blankets and contemplating the merger between today’s corporations and the underfunded, overcompromised governments expected to regulate them.
In this female-centred action movie, Queen Victoria (Jodhi May) is seen as a mitigating force unable to dampen the avarice represented by the company’s Lord Palmerston (Derek Jacobi), who thinks only of the bottom line. “We owe these vulgar natives nothing,” says one of his shareholders, encapsulating the arrogance, racism, and inability to recognize other realities that would eventually doom the empire—as well as even the rump state it would become in the Brexit era.
Here, the Great White Father’s sense of order is threatened by various rebel forces, some of whom unite behind the real-life queen who uses her education and martial skills to mount a fierce campaign against the redcoats, ever ready to back the English ka-ching machine.
Our warrior queen is played by young Devika Bhise, who also cowrote the highly expository script with her mother, Swati Bhise, a Mumbai-born choreographer, based in New York, making her feature debut with this hugely ambitious artifact. She is notably clever at massing the larger scenes, with women learning the art of war and then practising it in the eventual showdown with the British army, led by a hammy Rupert Everett, whose huge muttonchop whiskers offer him plausible deniability. (“She’s like Joan of Arc,” he says helpfully, during their climactic battle.)
Unfortunately, the tale is too stiff, abbreviated, and confusingly edited to make for the gripping stuff it was meant to be. By the way, a 1953 version of this story, Jhansi Ki Rani, was India’s first Technicolor movie. It bombed at the box office. Now here’s hoping renewed interest in the anticolonial Wonder Woman at its centre will ensure that it keeps getting told.