Film Review: The Irishman (2019)

In 1995, when the film world was celebrating the first century of the Seventh Art, numerous esteemed filmmakers from different countries marked the occasion by producing documentaries for the British Film Institute dedicated to their national cinemas. The honour of representing American cinema fell to Martin Scorsese, who directed A Personal Journey Through American Movies, an epic three-part documentary that portrayed the history of Hollywood. From today's perspective, that choice seems truly justified, as one could say that Scorsese is now the most esteemed and, for evaluating the work of his colleagues, one of the most meritorious Hollywood filmmakers. He has managed to maintain his reputation even in the last few decades, when the quality of his output has been considerably inferior compared to the classics he made from the 1970s to the 1990s. This can primarily be interpreted by the fact that Scorsese invested significant effort to make each of his films as different as possible from the previous ones. Despite that, many of his best, most popular, or most notorious films rely on his earlier oeuvre. The same could be said for his latest work, the epic biographical film The Irishman, which thematically and stylistically represents a kind of variation on the theme of Goodfellas, in a similar way to how Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street did.

The film's plot is based on Charles Brandt's book, which was itself based on the accounts of Frank Sheeran, a union activist who claimed before his death that he had served as a mafia hitman and that one of his victims was the missing union leader Jimmy Hoffa. The film roughly begins in an old people's home where Sheeran (Robert De Niro) starts talking about his long and colourful criminal career, which had its roots in the Second World War when, as a young soldier, he unquestioningly obeyed his superiors' orders to execute German prisoners. It was then that he realised he could kill people without any moral qualms, but the opportunity to use that ability only began to present itself a decade later, when, as a lorry driver, he accidentally met Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a mafia boss on the rise. Bufalino, however, would first exploit Sheeran's membership in the Teamsters Union, which in the USA of the 1950s represented one of the most politically powerful organisations, and which, along with its charismatic leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), was symbiotically linked with the mafia. Sheeran meets him and becomes his close friend and bodyguard, simultaneously carrying out liquidations, sabotage, and other "wet jobs" for Bufalino. The friendship of the three men would, however, be tested in the 1960s by the efforts of the Kennedy administration to imprison the "problematic" Hoffa, efforts that increasingly involved the Kennedy clan and would not end even after the assassination of the president. Hoffa managed to secure a pardon from President Nixon in the early 1970s, but upon his release he sought to regain control of the union, although his mafia allies and patrons explicitly opposed this. When one day Sheeran, together with Bufalino, goes on a seemingly routine trip to Detroit, he is unaware that he will receive the most unpleasant task of his life from his friend.

The Irishman will lead many critics to accuse Scorsese of reheating the stew – not offering audiences anything in terms of content and style that, in one way or another, they couldn't have seen in his older and much better films. Arguments for such a view can be found in the fact that the film deals with organised crime in America as its theme, or more precisely, its intertwining with the political and economic establishment, and in the fact that the epic story spans several decades and is accompanied by the ironic narration of a morally dubious main character. Scorsese adds a kind of stylistic variation to all this by using the technique of "flashback within a flashback" – by having the aged Sheeran from his wheelchair in the old people's home remember his golden days of the 1970s, and then from that perspective show how he became what he became in the 1940s and 1950s. The "déjà vu" effect, however, is perhaps most provoked by the appearance of De Niro and Pesci, who represent variations of the characters they played in Goodfellas and Casino. This duo, to which, however, Al Pacino has been added, do an impressive job in this film, with particular praise due to Pesci, who for this film briefly emerged from a more than well-deserved retirement, and whose character of a calm, composed, and silent mafia boss is so different from the violent psychopaths that brought him fame. Thanks to that character and Pesci's brilliant performance, Scorsese once again demonstrated his supreme directorial skill, creating dramatic tension in scenes where what is left unsaid represents a far greater and more ominous threat than any raised voices.

Audiences, however, will notice Scorsese's use of modern wonders of film technology far more than his proverbial mastery, above all the CGI that, at least partially, solved the problem posed by the decision to cast actors for the main roles in a film whose plot describes more than half a century, actors who, like Scorsese himself, are in their eighth decade of life. The attempt to digitally de‑age Pesci and De Niro mostly succeeded, and this minor detail won't catch the audience's eye at all, at least until they appear in scenes that require physical action demanding young people, action that doesn't look so convincing when performed by old men.

Scorsese, on the other hand, caused far greater controversy with his decision to make his film as a Netflix production, which provoked avalanches of rage from all art‑snob puritans who believe that proper cinema is something that can only be enjoyed in the sanctity of a cinema auditorium. It is clear that the majority of viewers will see The Irishman only via streaming, in the much more prosaic atmosphere of their own home, which in this specific case might not be such a bad thing. The Irishman, with its three and a half hours of running time, is an example of old films for which intermissions were invented. It requires considerable patience and endurance from its viewers. It can also be assumed with certainty that The Irishman is Scorsese's first film that the majority of viewers did not manage to watch "in one sitting", and due to the large amount of content, characters, and subplots, many critics have declared it more suited to the medium of a mini‑series. A much more serious criticism of Scorsese would be that he stuffed too much content into his film, much of which is incomprehensible to viewers not well acquainted with 20th‑century American history, and some of the details, including Sheeran's claims that he was indirectly connected to the mafia assassination of Kennedy, and even the key claim that he killed Hoffa, provoke serious objections from serious historians.

Nevertheless, the biggest problem with The Irishman is still its excessive length, which could be interpreted as an unusual conceptual dilemma for Scorsese. Namely, it is not a matter of one Scorsese film but of two films sometimes violently inserted into one – one is truly Scorsese's, and it represents the classic story of the rise and fall of a gangster; the other is De Niro's, which actually represents a much more intimate, down‑to‑earth, but far more depressive drama about old age, the loss of friends, and confronting mortality. Steven Zaillian's screenplay failed to firmly unite the two, so the result is about forty minutes of dark, depressive, and quite predictable finale after which the audience experiences no catharsis. Perhaps with that ending, both Scorsese and De Niro intentionally wanted to convey to the audience that they are aware their best days are behind them. They understood The Irishman as an opportunity for a kind of symbolic testament. They didn't succeed best in that, but a master like Scorsese, even when he misses, delivers quality dozens of categories higher than anything his colleagues these days deliver to cinema theatres.

RATING: 5/10 (++)

(Note: The text in the original Croatian version is available here.)

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