THEY’VE MADE A HOFFA YOU CAN’T REFUSE
It’s impossible not to be captured by the brilliance of Scorsese’s Teamster tale, writes Tymon Smith
For more than four decades, since the release of Mean Streets in 1973, no US director has worked harder and with more visual bravado than Martin Scorsese to redefine the gangster genre. So it is with no small amount of expectation and plenty of preceding hype that the director’s three-and-a-half-hour, $150m (R2.2bn) epic The Irishman arrives on Netflix. The streaming giant and Scorsese have taken a big risk, both in terms of budget and with regard to the release strategy for the film, adapted from the true crime book I Heard You Paint Houses, the story of an
Irish hitman for the Italian mob, Frank Sheeran, who claimed to have killed his friend, legendary Teamster Boss Jimmy Hoffa.
Sheeran’s account has been dismissed by many experts and commentators and is not regarded as the final word on what happened to Hoffa when he disappeared from a diner near his house in Detroit on July 30 1975, but the film is not an attempt to solve that mystery. Rather it’s a dazzling, masterfully controlled and thunderously acted epic about the long shadows cast by the corruptive allure of power, the fragile bonds of friendship and the inevitable playing-field-levelling equaliser that is death.
It’s also a witty, touching and meticulously observed homage and elegy to the gangster genre and Scorsese’s own long and indelible influence on it. Made with signature pizzazz and style but also demonstrating a maturity in the handling of its subject matter that could only be achieved by the director and his longtime collaborators in the last decades of their lives, The Irishman is not only one of the year’s most eagerly awaited and justifiably acclaimed films, it’s also an instant classic of the genre that will live on long after those involved in making it are no longer around.
Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence) takes us straight into the story with a long corridor tracking shot that recalls a similar shot from the Copa Cabana scene in Goodfellas. But here we’re not celebrating the breezy cheer of the celebrity status that gangster money can buy the young, but rather the anonymity and ordinariness of the life of just another old man in an old age home, gleefully telling stories of his unbelievable youth to anyone who might bother to listen.
That man is the chunky-gold-ring-and watch-wearing Sheeran (Robert de Niro) whose story will form the basis of the next three-and-a-half hours and take us from the corridors of his frail care home in the 2000s to the streets of New York in the 1950s, the high-stakes political machinations of the battle between the Kennedys and his pal Hoffa (Al Pacino) in the ’60s and the fateful day when Hoffa met his end in 1975.
Sheeran begins life as a truck driver for the Teamsters, delivering meat and then, thanks to a chance meeting with mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), becoming a trusted cleaner for the Mafia whose services are one day required by Hoffa in what will become the beginning of a mostly beautiful friendship.
Much of the budget and the hype around the film has been devoted to Scorsese’s use of de-aging technology to enable his seventysomething cast to play much younger versions of themselves. Their younger avatars are at first a little jarring, but you soon become used to them without the work of visual effects supervisor Pablo Helman distracting from their performances.
De Niro gives the kind of layered and reserved but deeply felt performance that we’ve been waiting for most of his later career to see. Pacino likewise, for the most part, reins in his scenery-chewing tendencies. The moments between the two are some of the highlights of the film but the man who steals the show here is Pesci, reportedly dragged begrudgingly out of retirement to play puppetmaster and bigpicture pragmatist Bufalino with a quiet but unnerving restraint that never sees him fly off the handle in Goodfellas or Casino mode, but always lets us know who’s really in charge.
As a goodbye from Scorsese to his beloved and much mined gangsters, The Irishman is a slyly referential but deeply relatable examination of the toll that the life of these men takes on them. As a daring epic drama released on a platform that caters to the reduced attention spans and frenzied viewing habits of the smartphone era, it’s impossible not to be immersed in and captivated by.
Finally, though, in a movie universe populated by the interconnected, intergalactic, geeky glees of comic-book heroes, The Irishman is a carefully controlled cinematic tour de force that provides a deftly told, complex and deeply dramatically satisfying examination of the battle between the forces of history, the machinations of power and the men who live in the tangled webs on the ground. It’s only a pity that there’s no word yet on whether we’ll get to see it on the big screen. It definitely deserves it.
The Irishman is available on Netflix