The Irishman
I saw The Irishman at a peculiar moment in my life. After a year of making my own short films, and looking forward to moving to New York City, I find myself in the throes of writing a feature screenplay. It’s turned into an oversaturated process: there’s nothing I want to do each day other than write. Write and write. The act has become a compulsion — I want to keep going, to keep unearthing new material. Aside from work, my family, and a couple of friends, it’s all that I have going on in my life right now. It’s a period of isolation as much as it is a moment of personal discovery.
Cold weather greeted me as I left my home to make the hour drive to Stamford, Connecticut. The Irishman is only playing in a handful of theaters; it's set for a streaming release on Netflix the day before Thanksgiving. Director Martin Scorsese has been bemoaning this fact throughout his press tour: he gripes that the studios won’t produce his movies anymore, devoted as they are to Batman and the Avengers. (A nervy interviewer might do well to ask him whether this could have had less to do with studios’ affinity for franchises than the commercial viability of a three-and-half-hour epic about three old men talking.)
This is a hard pill for Marty to swallow; after all, he’s of that generation of artful filmmakers who were embraced by Hollywood in the 1970s. To have your latest movie playing in only a few dozen theaters — after a career that saw the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Goodfellas play across hundreds of screens the world over — must be more than a little disillusioning.
It felt right to see The Irishman on the big screen. I was joined in Stamford (an odd city — contained and artificial) by two friends, both of whom I’ve collaborated with on different projects in the last several months. We watched the movie from plush chairs in a theater that was undergoing renovations. The whole affair felt roughhewn, or like a right of passage: three gawky kids watching a trio of geriatric pros take one last lap around the track.
When it was over, we were hungry, and huddled into a nearby bar for some dinner.
As for the movie, I am largely indifferent. The Irishman finds Scorsese returning to his roots as an auteur sanglant: trading in blood and violence as stimulants for his meek, vampiric audience. “I heard you paint houses,” Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) gurgles to Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) over the phone. “Yes sir, I do,” Sheeran replies. This is a euphemism for sending brain matter splattering against walls, of course, but it’s also Scorsese’s calling card; I find it hard to sympathize with a filmmaker who complains about branding when his latest effort is as close to self-congratulation as anything to be found in the Marvel cinematic universe.
After this phone call, Sheeran goes to work for Hoffa, while simultaneously keeping close to the man who facilitated his entrée into mobland: Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). The movie charts their relationships over a few decades, beginning after World War II and extending all the way to Hoffa’s disappearance, and evident death. How he dies is the cherry to this movie’s whiskey sour — for while the circumstances of his death remain unsolved to this day, Sheeran (whose account of the murder was published by Charles Brandt in his book, I Heard You Paint Houses) provides a resolution of Shakespearian proportion.
Friendship, betrayal, ice cream: it’s all here. I can just see Scorsese grinning in his director’s chair, giddy at the familiar luridness of this tale.
The truth is, Scorsese has pulled a good one out of his hat. The Irishman isn’t bad by half; if you like movies, and especially if you like Scorsese, you’ll likely get something out of it. But the best thing is how far he takes his trademark subject, strings it out, as if daring it to break. On the one hand, this is a movie about getting away with murder; on the other, it shows how a life of crime will get the better of you. Frank kills for pay without hesitation, until his job takes a turn for the personal. Even then he goes through with it — but as the years pass and friends fade away (“mors vincit omnia”), he finds himself alone. An old man. With nothing but the vague consequences of his actions to keep him company.
There are plenty of things about The Irishman that get on my nerves, too. The “reverse aging” technology used on De Niro and Pesci’s faces does nothing more than lend the men the semblance of a bad tanning spray, or grant them the airbrushed sheen of video game characters. (Call of Duty and The Polar Express come to mind.) It encapsulates the fundamental audacity of this film: that it dares to believe that hours of three conservative, stunted white men barking at one another while pretending to be younger versions of themselves is worth people’s time and money. The attention it lavishes on De Niro, Pacino and Pesci is unwholesome, especially when one considers how the female characters in this movie (represented by Anna Paquin, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Kathrine Narducci, and Welker White, among others) are virtually silent in comparison. (One also feels a deficit in regard to the supporting male players: Bobby Cannavale, Jessie Plemons and Havey Keitel are given almost nothing to do.)
When all is said and done, I doubt that The Irishman will hold in the way that Scorsese’s earlier films have held. As far as I’m concerned, his latest masterpiece was The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) — a movie that said more about the world we live in today than I believe even its director was aware of at the time. Its Fitzgerald-esc mixture of repulsion and awe for decadent lifestyles came as close to predicting the rise of Donald Trump as any other film in the last twenty years. The Irishman feels like a continuation of that theme — only it takes us further back. It stretches into the era of Trump’s youth, digging up the rancid seeds that fueled United States politics in the middle decades of this last century.
Everything was shaped by the mob, according to Sheeran. Even the Kennedy saga was essentially a mafia-induced daytime soap. And for all that warring, all that playing of sides and personalities — what’ve you got? A room in a nursing home and a fear that someone will come for you if you aren’t too careful.
How have the mighty fallen. The Irishman is here to remind us that some of the boys are still kicking.
