Old Man's Story

Rating: 9/10 (28 November 2019)

Viewing a movie that runs nearly three-and-a-half hours long, I demand it grapple with weighty subject matter; I have little patience for laborious trivialities. Fortunately, "The Irishman" deals with no less than issues of life, aging and death, and it's framed fundamentally by the art of storytelling. While the story of Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance has held long-term interest, it's secondary here to the gang of old men who come together again to tell another story about the mafia and brutality, with Martin Scorsese directing a cast led by Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. This is well-trodden ground for them all; Scorsese previously helmed De Niro and Pesci in "Raging Bull" (1980), "Goodfellas" (1990) and "Casino" (1995), has frequently collaborated with De Niro and Harvey Keitel since "Mean Streets" (1973), and while this is the director's first work with Pacino, the actor has been in plenty of gangster films made by others, beginning with "The Godfather" trilogy. This filmic heritage is what truly bears weight in the narrative's historical expanse, and it finally allows for some intelligent use of de-aging CGI--a technology that up to this point has been mostly employed for action, superhero and otherwise stupid flicks.
Sure, I agree with others that the reverse-aging process here is more convincing than past attempts. Most recently, I complained of "Captain Marvel" (2019) (I have yet to see "Gemini Man" (2019)), that young Fury's inflexible skin transgressed the uncanny valley, which wasn't helped by conspicuously hiding him under various lighting schemes. And this despite such a comic-book movie already being largely animated. One would think for a picture more purely photographic as "The Irishman" that the technology would be even more distracting, but I didn't find that the case. The one big exception for me has nothing to do with any facial "sheen" mentioned by others, but with movement. This is most evident in scenes of fighting or other violent actions. A 70-year old Samuel L. Jackson doesn't throw a punch like he would over 20 years ago, and so it looks off when his de-aged self does just that in the 1995 setting of "Captain Marvel." In "The Irishmen," De Niro and Pacino sometimes look like young and middle-age bodies walking around like the elderly men they really are, but the scene where De Niro throws a grocer onto the curb was the one scene that put me off the effect technically. How to put this not delicately... De Niro looks like the Frankenstein monster, a re-animated body of dead parts stitched together, lumbering after his victim. I was almost afraid he was going to toss his daughter into a lake next. But, besides that, it looks fine.
More importantly, the digital fountain of youth is well integrated into the narrative structure. This isn't just about exploiting stars (and, sometimes, long-since-dead ones--looking your way, "Rogue One" (2016))) for blockbuster time-traveling gimmicks. Here, the plot is established as the remembrances of a disabled and elderly Frank Sheeran (De Niro) sitting in a nursing home, addressing the camera but no other character in particular. Narratively and technically, this is an old actor--Sheeran and De Niro--reflecting on their younger selves. Not as they were when young, either, but how one mutates their current identity into the memory of their past self. And, by extension, the same goes for Pacino and Pesci, all of whom are on-screen surrogates for the film's auteur, Scorsese. In turn, we the spectators bring our own memories of these artists' past films to the process. To only look at this as the story solving Hoffa's disappearance is to not see the whole picture. Indeed, that assumes De Niro's Sheeran is a reliable narrator in the first place, which I'm not taking for granted. This a man nearing death, left with only strangers (FBI agents, a nurse, a priest and, through the camera, us) to confess to. He's either outlived everyone else, including those he may've murdered, or been abandoned by a family revolted by his violent ways. The story itself revolves a lot around gangsters relaying stories to others and through intermediaries, employing code words and speaking in riddles (including the original title, "I Heard You Paint Houses"). Sometimes these stories are understood, others are tragically not, as with Hoffa, still others turn out to result from misinformation, such as with a "bad hit," and still more are lies, beginning with the missing meat, and confabulations. That's what the de-aging CGI and the movie itself are, too, after all: a fiction.
Bringing your own memories of past films from these master storytellers makes this something of a culmination of the filmmakers' oeuvres. It's more about the life, aging and inevitability of death of gangster filmmakers (and us viewers) than it's about the gangster characters in the story. Furthermore, Scorsese and his "New Hollywood" ilk radically changed film beginning in the middle of the last century (around the same time that the story in the movie takes place, by the way). Now, movies are more often digital rather than film. Even live-action pictures that aren't action and superhero fare are substantially animated and made by computers into photorealistic imagery. Although most are made to look like they were made on film, they aren't. These movies, too, are seen less and less in cinemas. Like most viewers probably, I waited out its limited theatrical release, to see "The Irishman" streamed on Netflix. Heck, even if you see a "film" in a theatre, it's likely to be from a disc, hard drive, satellite or Internet stream--like Netflix on a bigger screen. Indeed, the narrative's passage of time is further reflected in the style of the picture, down to its TV images, aging and de-aging along with the actors and characters. In the end, perhaps, it's film's mortality that is most striking. As "The Irishman" indicates, its life to its death has already had a profound impact on our reminiscences and continued storytelling. We're left mostly only with the myth in place of its disappearance.