Robbie Collin’s five-star verdict on Scorsese’s mob epic
The Irishman ★★★★★
Imagine Martin Scorsese had made The Irishman with young actors who aged on screen in the conventional manner, with make-up and prosthetics. Over the course of the film’s stately half-century arc – which describes the life of Mafia fixer Frank Sheeran and his increasingly conflicted ties to the union leader Jimmy Hoffa and the crime boss Russell Bufalino – the cast’s fresh features would have wrinkled and bulged, morphing into artists’ best guesses of what the future might hold.
Now consider how the 76-year-old director has actually tackled the tale: with a trio of actors in the three central roles, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, whose ages already correspond their characters’ last acts.
Using startlingly plausible digital technology – which absorbed a significant chunk of the film’s
$159 million budget, stumped up by Netflix with one eye on the coming Oscar race – the trio are temporarily restored to an artificial state of youth, which fades before your eyes.
That small but crucial difference imbues Scorsese’s magisterial mob epic – elegantly adapted from Charles Brandt’s true crime book – with a slow-build existential force that’s cumulatively astonishing. The Irishman is not a film about time’s onward march. It is about history’s unfailing knack for catching up.
And history – specifically, that of the modern United States itself, from the Fifties to 1975 – is intricately entwined with Frank’s own rise through the American underworld. Organised crime is revealed to play an arterial role in the country’s day-to-day functioning, pumping corruption through industry, society and politics alike. Frank (De Niro) is that system’s faithful foot soldier, learning his trade as a lowly haulage driver who takes a cut of his cargo for himself.
Soon he graduates to a professional thug who’ll burn down any business that makes life harder for a certain vested interest – and from there, it’s a short career hop to the euphemistic profession of “house painter”, whose interior makeovers tend to entail bright sprays of blood all over the walls.
A chance encounter with Bufalino (Pesci) sets him on this path, but Frank himself seems grateful for the opportunity. His can-do spirit eventually brings him to the attention of Hoffa (a fully energised yet controlled Pacino), the charismatic president of the Teamsters union and no stranger to law-bending himself, who enlists him as an unofficial right-hand-man.
This is a weighty, contemplative work, but one that moves like lightning for its entire three-and-aquarter hours, and sporadically shakes with darkly comic amusement.
It would be unchivalrous to put a date on when De Niro was last this good.
But he’s sensational – giving a grippingly subtle, internalised performance that melts through the de-ageing process as if it were no more than make-up.
A clever framing device keeps bringing us back to a 1975 road trip he and Bufalino take with their wives, which immediately allows De Niro and Pesci, who’s tremendous, to rekindle their old, bone-deep chemistry from Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino.
Their scenes together are a gift – like discovering a new album by your favourite broken-up band. They also largely play as comic relief, until the film reaches its devastating final movement, when the trip itself is revealed to have been a destination of sorts. Frank has been travelling his whole life to arrive at this point, whether he admitted it to himself or not. But now the road has ended, the engine’s off, and it’s time to get out.
The Irishman will be released in UK cinemas on November 8 and on Netflix on November 27
‘It would be unchivalrous to put a date on when De Niro was last this good’