Perhaps no director better portrays the passage of time than Martin Scorsese, who has set films in five different centuries and usually tells stories that span decades, not days. So when his latest film, “The Irishman”— another mobster drama, but this time with more spiritual depth— starts with a burst of nostalgic ’50s music, the audience is prepared to be transported to the past. Instead, the camera moves back to reveal the setting is the present day in a nursing home—and not a particularly nice one— where Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) sits alone, trapped in the past, with only memories and guilt to keep him company.
To answer the immediate question on most people’s minds, yes, “The Irishman” is similar, in style and quality, to Scorsese’s famous crime epics —“Goodfellas,” “Casino,” and to a lesser extent, “The Wolf of Wall Street.” It’s an enormous endeavor, with over 300 scenes in over 100 locations over the course of an expansive three-and-a-half hours (though with Scorsese’s fluidity it never feels nearly that long). But even with this sprawling scope, “The Irishman” is arguably more thematically focused than those past films, which delighted in exploring the culture and the logistics of crime. In contrast, “The Irishman,” which feels like the work of an older, wiser, less flashy filmmaker, is much more preoccupied with the soul of Frank Sheeran and reckoning with his choices.
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To answer the immediate second question on most people’s minds, yes, “The Irishman” features a lot of de-aging VFX, but it’s likely a testament to the quality and subtlety of this work that I barely spent a moment thinking about it.
In “The Irishman,” Frank Sheeran is just an ordinary teamster delivering meat in 1950s Philadelphia when he meets mafioso Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Having learned both Italian and killing in WWII, Frank earns Russell’s trust and moves up in the organization until he becomes a dependable hitman (painting houses, in the parlance). Through Russell, Frank eventually meets Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the larger-than-life Teamsters President whom Frank calls “the second most important man in the country.” Frank bonds with Hoffa, as well, and is soon serving two masters, which isn’t a problem while Bufalino and Hoffa’s interests are aligned, with Hoffa steering the Teamster pension fund towards low-interest loans to fund the mob’s investments in Las Vegas. But after Hoffa goes to prison for four years and tries to win back his post from his popular pushover replacement, Frank is caught between his two friends and father figures and must choose which one he’ll betray.
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One of the knocks on Scorsese, as far back as “Taxi Driver,” is that he might be a little too sympathetic to his lawbreaking protagonists. While “Goodfellas” and “The Wolf of Wall Street” can both be considered “rise and fall” narratives, he spends most of his time and all of his energy depicting a wickedly entertaining rise, while their downfalls often feel like obligatory codas (it didn’t help that Jordan Belfort actively profited from ‘Wolf Of Wall Street,’ but that’s more an indictment of our society than Scorsese). But more modern and mature in its ideas of accountability, “The Irishman” feels like an answer to these criticisms—it channels the thrill of chasing power, but never loses sight of the violence these men traffic in, the damage it causes and guilt they carry with them. One of the film’s most effective devices is to interrupt the warm greetings of new characters with subtitles that not only show the men’s names, but also the violent deaths they eventually arrive at. The cost of violence and wrongdoing is finally contemplated in a way Scorsese hasn’t really reckoned with as effectively before.
Yet despite this quality of reflection and regret, Scorsese avoids a somber trap, and most of “The Irishman” is as exhilarating as anything the filmmaker has made before. He retains his knack for instantly vivid characterizations, his vast supporting cast is uniformly excellent, and the dialogue swerves in hilariously unexpected directions (Sheeran teaches us to use the bathroom before a hit, you don’t want to be uncomfortable). All of the three lead performances are first-rate; Pesci is the consummate mob boss, De Niro is a tight-lipped cipher until his face betrays more and more emotion with age, but surprisingly, Pacino perhaps stands out the most. It’s a joy to finally see the actor in a Scorsese picture and his performance brings together the different parts of his career, blending his late-career wildness with the gravitas of Michael Corleone into a compelling, detailed portrait of Jimmy Hoffa (who loves ice cream and hates people being late).
The friendship between Hoffa and Sheeran is the bedrock of the film. While Bufalino is something of a friend, there’s always a power differential between them, and the violence that provides that power is palpable on him, scaring Frank’s daughter Peggy. Hoffa, on the other hand, is far more personally endearing, treating Frank as an equal and winning over Peggy immediately, plus he provides a respectable bridge between Frank’s world and society at large, making Peggy proud of her father for the only time. Peggy (Anna Paquin as an adult) is something of a bellwether for Frank’s soul, hardly talking but fixing him with stares that speak volumes. As a child, she silently watches him pack a pistol and leave at night “for work,” and as an adult, she quickly senses what happened to Hoffa and never speaks to her father again.
Ultimately, “The Irishman” is a major success for Scorsese—not only does it incorporate the best aspects of his past crime dramas and their thrilling energy, but it adds context to those films and wrestles with their legacy resonantly. In a way, “The Irishman” fills in the gaps between “Goodfellas” and “Casino” to tell the overall story of the mob’s rise and fall in postwar America, but it does so while anchored to one man’s story and morality. The law never catches up to Sheeran—not for the real damning stuff anyway— but as Scorsese demonstrates with profound solemnity, he cannot outrun his conscience. [A]
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