Scorsese's Labour of Love

Rating: 9/10 (9 May 2020)

Based on "I Heard You Paint Houses", a remarkable true account of the life and times of a Mafia hit man, Frank Sheeran, written by Charles Brandt, this is a wide-screen, vertiginous vision of America from World War Two until almost yesterday. That's a lot of years, something like half of The American Century.
How much you enjoy this movie depends on whether you lived through the period depicted and how much you know about it. A lot happened: it was the heyday of the American Mafia and the zenith of the USA's economic and military power.
There was the unexpected election of JFK (fixed by the Mob?), the ill-fated invasion of Cuba (The Bay Of Pigs, a "reward" for JFK's election, intended to get back Mafia assets lost as the result of Castro's revolution), the concerted assault on the Mafia and the Teamsters by JFK's brother as Attorney General (a breach of a promise to the Mafia), JFK's assassination (allegedly a Mafia payback for breach of promise) and Teamsters' boss Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance (knew too much about the Mafia, obstructed the Mafia, started saying too much about the Mafia...). The Mafia was everywhere: Teamsters' pension funds helped build Las Vegas, for example.
I remember a lot of the major events, albeit as a youngster, so, for me, this is an engrossing trip down some dark, neon-flashing streets of my memory. Cinematically, it's meticulously portrayed - from the fashions, to the cars, to the music and even the lighting: this is truly what it was like. Or, in a chillingly anodine phrase "this is what it is".
Very little of Frank Sheeran's youth makes it onto the screen, except for a couple of flashbacks to his 411 days in combat in Europe, intended to explain why and how he found killing people so easy. Today, you'd say he had a very bad case of PTSD which he used, and was used, to his and the Mob's advantage.
He killed at least two dozen people. The book's title is a Mob code for killing someone. If you replied in the affirmative and added that you did all your own carpentry, that meant you disposed of the evidence as well. Sheeran became so senior that he stopped having to do the carpentry quite early on.
The movie pivots around the (im)famous Union Leader, James R Hoffa, aka Jimmy, and his building of the Teamsters into an empire, more powerful, almost, than the Government or the incredible wealth and heft of Mafia. Frank and Jimmy became close friends.
In fact, through the Teamsters' huge pension fund, they became fatally entwined. In the USA, traditionally, Labor relations between workers and bosses were lethally violent and both sides used hired muscle to make their case. Inevitably, there was a lot of dirty money washing through it all. Corruption, high and low, was everywhere. It ends badly for just about everybody.
This movie is a staggering achievement and could be used effectively as a dramatic teaching aid on modern American Studies' courses. There's no doubt that Scorsese's intense love of the period has overruled his matchless skills as a fine movie maker. It is too long. Nevertheless, it's an outstanding chunk of personal and national history: it will never be done better.