Marty’s Mob back with a bang
De Niro, Pesci, Pacino, Keitel . . . Martin Scorsese’s dream team of Hollywood wise guys are right on target
MARTIN ScORSESE, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in harness for the first time, and Joe Pesci summoned out of retirement.
Three cinematic giants aged 76 and one pushing 80 … it’s little wonder folk are salivating at the prospect of The Irishman, which also features octogenarian Harvey Keitel.
After all, there will be plenty more mob movies, but none quite like this. for fans of a sacred Italian-American tradition, it marks the end of an era, a ceremonial fitting of a concrete overcoat. Scorsese directed De Niro and Keitel in Mean Streets (1973), De Niro and Pesci in both Goodfellas (1990) and casino (1995). He has never worked with Pacino, who first presented his credentials in The Godfather (1972). So in terms of gangster films, The Irishman is an unprecedented gathering of the dream team.
Better still, it addresses a real-life mystery: what happened to Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino, giving full vent to his sheer Pacino- ness), the charismatic union boss who went missing in 1975, without any part of him ever surfacing?
An enforcer for the Philadelphia Mob called frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran, who died in 2003 and is played here by De Niro, claimed responsibility. His story was told in a book called I Heard You Paint Houses — its title a reference to mobster slang for spraying victims’ blood all over the walls, usually with a gunshot to the back of the head.
The film, written by Steven Zaillian, presents Sheeran as an accomplished house- painter, who over many decades enjoys the patronage of a well- connected Philly wise- guy called Russell Bufalino — beautifully played by Pesci as a soft- spoken grandfatherly figure, the antithesis of his sociopathic Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas.
Through Russell and other gangsters, notably mob boss Angelo Bruno (Keitel), Sheeran becomes a minder for Hoffa, with whom they are in cahoots. Over time, he and the Teamsters leader become close friends, but when Hoffa falls out with his mob allies, Sheeran is forced to pick sides.
The various mobsters, by the way, arrive on screen with a caption telling us when and how they met their maker — it’s usually grisly.
It is a neat reminder that all these men actually existed — not least Anthony ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano, a New Jersey ‘capo’ splendidly played by Britain’s Stephen Graham. AS FOR Sheeran, he is a World War II veteran, whose dearth of moral scruples is established in a flashback to wartime, when he guns down two surrendering enemy soldiers without a second thought. It’s a short scene but a hugely significant one. Here’s a young man for whom human life holds no value.
By now, however, we have also seen him as an old man.
Scorsese book-ends his film with Sheeran reminiscing in a care home, at long last wondering if there might be any redemption for his lifetime of cold-blooded slaying, which has cost him his relationship with his favourite daughter Peggy, played by Anna Paquin.
This film is as much about mortality as morality, and about regret as much as revenge.
Sheeran is at the heart of it, and for all his cold-heartedness, with
Scorsese behind the camera and De Niro in artfully restrained form in front of it, he acquires proper humanity.
It doubtless helps that De Niro plays him throughout, over five decades, with the help of the film’s much- discussed, slightly unsettling ‘youthification’ tech.
The other thing you need to know about The Irishman is that it lasts three- and- a- half hours, so you might prefer to wait until it arrives later this month on Netflix, so you can pause it for toilet breaks, mealtimes, short holidays, whatever.
Still, the indulgent running-time does enable Scorsese to tell an awful lot of story.
In this version of history, it is the mob who have President John f. Kennedy bumped off, feeling betrayed because they helped engineer his election only for him to appoint his brother Robert as an Attorney- General determined to break organised crime.
Whatever the truth of that, The Irishman is a compelling picture, but not a perfect one. Even at such prodigious length, Scorsese cuts corners.
for example, you have to be a very over- eager consumer to buy the idea that the Irish- American
Sheeran picked up his nearperfect Italian as a GI serving in Italy.
Nor, unlike The Godfather films and Scorsese’s own Goodfellas, does it contain scenes which will go down in cinematic legend.
But none of that means it’s anything but a pleasure to spend so much time with one great director and several great actors, all still at the top of their game.
WE ARE served a more glorious slice of American history in the rather indigestible Midway, about the decisive naval battle which took place in the Pacific in 1942, exactly six months after President Roosevelt’s ‘day that will live in infamy’ — the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
It’s an unashamedly oldfashioned, full-throttled war movie, with an extremely modest sprinkling of stars compared with the 1976 film of the same name, which boasted Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, James Coburn, Robert Mitchum, Glenn Ford and Robert Wagner.
Here we get Dennis Quaid and an extravagantly-coiffed Woody Harrelson as U. S. admirals, plus Patrick Wilson as the intelligence chief who worked out where to find the enemy fleet.
We also get a barrage of only sporadically convincing CGI, and a decidedly clunky script that has our heroes getting the hell in, getting the hell out, sitting the hell down, standing the hell up, and generally abiding by the John Wayne handbook of wartime cliches.
Not that Wayne would have approved of a German director — Roland Emmerich.
Or, probably, of the film’s dedication, to the Japanese sailors who perished at Midway, as well as the Americans.
Or, for that matter, of the choice of a pair of Brits, Ed Skrein and Luke Evans, to play the two most insanely courageous pilots in the U.S. Navy, Dick Best and Wade McClusky. I can practically hear ‘The Duke’ grunting in his grave.
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