![]() |
De Niro and Pacino under digital facelifts bring to life Scorsese's meditative The Irishman |
Director: Martin Scorsese
Cast: Robert De Niro (Frank Sheeran), Al Pacino (Jimmy
Hoffa), Joe Pesci (Russell Bufalino), Ray Romano (Bill Bufalino), Bobby
Cannavale (Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio), Anna Paquin (Peggy Sheeran), Stephen
Graham (Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano), Stephanie Kurtzuba (Irene Sheeran),
Jesse Plemons (Chuckie O’Brien), Harvey Keitel (Angelo Bruno)
Scorsese had wanted to make this film for almost 20 years
but it took the mega bucks of Netflix (to the tune of over $150 million) to
finally bring it to life. With complete creative control, we get Scorsese’s
epic as he saw it, an over three-and-a-half hour long sad meditation on the
life of the gangster. For the first time in almost 25 years, Scorsese is
reunited with his muse Robert De Niro – appearing here under various digital
facelifts to tell the story of Frank Sheeran, an Irish member of the Mafia, and
his relationship with infamous Teamster union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).
Was the film worth the effort to make it?
Now I love films that take their time, and I have a great
deal of time for films with long runtimes – but good Lord I struggled with The Irishman. It feels like the worst,
laziest, form of criticism to say it – but I found the film a little bit, well,
boring. And I totally get what is
being attempted here. The Irishman is
a totally different beast to Scorsese’s previous gangster movies, a quiet mood
piece, contemplative, sad, quiet, lacking in vibrancy and energy, a genuinely
tragedy-tinged, doom-laden reflection on the emptiness and costly violence of
the gangster life, and the empty shells it leaves of the people in it. And at
its centre, a man so dehumanised by war, by obeying orders, so lacking of
personality, so incapable of emotion it seems, that he ends the film as a
blank, lonely, abandoned slate. It’s a real, and deliberate, counter-point to his
electric, engaging, dynamic gangster films of the past, from Mean Streets via Goodfellas to Casino and
the cartoonish The Departed.
Frank Sheeran is a drained automaton, a human being possibly
in name only, who takes on violent acts without question, who can kill without
remorse. But he also essentially has no – or very little – personality, a
taciturn killer. To be honest he’s a tough person to follow, and he’s not
really that interesting or engaging at all. De Niro’s blankness, his coldness,
is perfect for the character, but it hardly makes for a compelling viewing
experience. Sheeran’s life should be full of incident, but it drags as the
film’s long run-time stretches over impenetrable union politics and gangster
turmoil.
The Teamster content of the film is dense, hard-to-follow
and frequently not that interesting. So it’s tough that it takes up almost two
hours of the film’s run-time. Al Pacino is good value as Jimmy Hoffa – the film
uses his “hoo hah” shoutiness to great effect, but Pacino also makes Hoffa an
unexpectedly vulnerable and lost figure amongst all the politics, a showman who
overestimates his importance and invulnerability. The entire film is shaped (we
discover) around a series of flashbacks from Sheeran on a road trip on what
turns out to be the final days of Hoffa’s life (the film includes a solution to
Hoffa’s famous disappearance) – but the story of Teamster funding of gangster
crimes and the struggles of Hoffa to win back the presidency of the Union after
his imprisonment for fraud, is frankly not as engaging as it needs to be. It’s
almost a slog.
The film is stronger on the emptiness and doom-laden
nihilism of the gangster life. Told by Scorsese deliberately without flash and
excitement, with a score so sparse that long stretches of the film echo with
silence, there seems to be no fun at all in the gangster world, instead a
series of mundane men sitting in small restaurants, talking about admin and
punching the clock. Many of the gangster characters are introduced with
on-screen captions that detail the dates and natures of their violent deaths. It’s
the exact opposite of what you might expect from a Scorsese film. It’s a
director showing the dark flipside of his previous films, of the way the
gangster life is a dwindle through a dull life marked with moments of danger,
where death is a sudden violent explosion that ends a life too soon.
And it leaves families in a mess. Anna Paquin speaks very
few words as Sheeran’s adult daughter, but only because her silent disapproval
and disgust at her father’s life becomes the haunting of Sheeran’s whole life.
The attempt to puncture her silent disapproval (present from her school days)
with some form of acknowledgement and engagement becomes a large part of the
sad coda of Sheehan’s life. It’s no surprise that this sort of life leaves the
gangsters alone and abandoned at the end of their lives.
I can’t argue with the skill with which this quiet,
meditative, grim and slow exploration of the gangster world is put together by
Scorsese – or the artistry that every moment of the film has, or the control of
the director. But nevertheless, it makes for something that increasingly feels a
little dull, a little hard-to-watch and not always as engaging as it should (I’m
not surprised so many people have assembled a viewing guide on Netflix to break
the film up into chunks). I frankly didn’t care about any of the characters, so
watching four hours of them lead miserable lives that lead to isolation,
failure and death was hardly entertainment.
There are good parts for sure. Joe Pesci, lured from
retirement, is a revelation as a sort of cool, calm, grandfatherly fixer a
million miles from the lunatics he played in Casino or Goodfellas.
It’s simply brilliant work from Pesci, whose every scene suggests quiet reason
laced with real menace and ruthlessness. Stephen Graham is also excellent as
the sort of dangerously impulsive bully Pesci played to such great effect in
those earlier movies.
And those digital facelifts? Well they are fine technically.
You ignore them after a while. But no matter of digital trickery can make De
Niro move with the gait, physicality or certainty of a man more than 30 years
younger than he is. As we watch De Niro (supposedly a killer in his prime)
shamble forward, or gingerly give a rude grocer a kicking, you can’t forget
that he’s really a much older man. The whole thing makes for a metaphor for the
entire film – it’s an old man of a film, given an expensive new face, but at
heart it’s a little bit slow. I feel guilty saying it, but the film is a
handsome bore, something that goes on far, far, far too long and while it’s a
great mood mirror to Goodfellas, it’s
also a tough way to spend a long evening.
No comments:
Post a comment