THIS IS ONE FOR (DE-)AGES
Scorsese’s Irishman looks back at long life in the Mob (or maybe as a filmmaker)
I’ll say this for The Irishman: It’s no Marvel movie. For one thing, it’s long — longer by half an hour than the three-hour Endgame. But it’s also slow. Not glacial, and a whole lot of people get, um, whacked, but the pace is more in keeping with an old man recalling his life, which is basically what this is. Whether that old man is 76-year-old director Martin Scorsese or his main character, Robert De Niro as Frank (The Irishman) Sheeran, I leave you to decide.
The film opens with Frank in a nursing home, looking very old — they’ve actually made De Niro up to look older than his own 76 years. Frank is talking about a road trip he once took with his (Mob) boss, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), which leads to a flashback of said car ride, and everyone’s inability to smoke in the car because Russell doesn’t like it.
Along the way they pass the gas station where Frank and Russell first met, which leads to an even deeper flashback, with digital de-aging of the characters that looks a little waxy at first. You get used to it eventually, but I don’t think the technique itself will age well. At some point they may have to re-de-age these films as the technology improves.
Anyway, Frank is a truck driver and Second World War vet who did some state-sanctioned killing and also (bonus!) learned flawless Italian while overseas, and Russell takes an interest in him and starts offering him some work on the side. Frank in voiceover talks about what he learned on the job — always use a new gun, for instance, and drop it off this particular bridge, where the camera helpfully sinks below the waterline to show the accumulation of dumped Mafia weapons.
Scorsese throws in these odd moments of dark humour. Minor characters, for instance, often come with a subtitle that lists their names and how they will eventually die — “shot three times while in his driveway, July 14, 1980,” or some such. But then we meet Tony Giacalone (Patrick Gallo): “Well liked by everyone. Died of natural causes, Feb. 23, 2001.” It’s nice to know someone got out. Because we also meet Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), whose name should really be followed by a big question mark, since he disappeared in 1975. True story: His middle name was Riddle!
Should you trust anyone who claims to have killed him, or knows where the body is? Rumours that the former Teamsters leader was buried in Giants Stadium, or in a suburban Detroit driveway, or maybe in a field near where he was last seen, have all come to naught. Likewise Frank himself, who confessed to the murder before his death in 2003. But DNA analysis of the alleged murder site was inconclusive, and historians have debunked his claim. Hoffa’s larger-than-life appearance wrenches the plot a little sideways. Up to this point we’ve been watching the story of
The Irishman. Now we’re very much into the biopic of Hoffa, a man who moved in powerful trade unions circles and — I sense a Venn diagram here — political circles, as well.
But he and Frank get on famously. In fact, Frank seems to have been another of those “well liked by everyone” types, unless you count his daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin), who saw him for the hired gun he was. Or his first wife (divorced). Or Joe Gallo (gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House, April 7, 1972). Or ... well, you get the picture.
Frank’s well-likedness often puts him in the role of Mob go-between. “Frank, send a message to Whispers from Tony. No, not that Tony. No, the other Whispers. No, not that kind of message.”
This may all sound rather jovial — more Ragnarok than Infinity War, if you will — but The Irishman is at heart quite a sombre story. Scorsese doesn’t dwell on the violence, and seems more interested in the possibility of redemption: A character who asks for a door to be left a little ajar is clearly speaking in metaphor, a language the Mob knows even better than Italian.
The Irishman has been getting rave reviews since its debut at the New York Film Festival (of course) and its limited U.S. theatrical release. But I was left a little cold, tugged between the chronicle of Hoffa, of the lesser-known Frank Sheeran, of the intersection between them, and the thorny problem of how much of this is even historically accurate. I was never quite certain where to grab hold.