I Heard you Paint Houses is a mature, clever perspective on a gangster epic.

Rating: 9/10 (3 December 2019)

Scorsese brings us a last (probably) nostalgic jaunt into his old familiar territory with some old (kinda) familiar faces. From the very start of the film you are reminded of the echoes of all the great gangster films Marty has brought us before.
We begin with a long slow tracking shot, instantly calling up visions of the one from Goodfellas. However, whilst in that film the shot is there to show the wide-eyed surprise of Lorraine Bracco's character as she is seduced into the life of being a mobsters wife as she is swept along into the glamorous side of the life of crime and the headiness of power, here, in The Irishman (or rather I Heard you Paint Houses) the shot is there to show the inevitability of life spiralling into its final conclusion.
This is, at its heart, a story about ages and about aging. This is a story seeped in the fact all the principle people involved in making it are well into their seventies. This is not to say the film is slow or lacking energy, but rather measured, well-paced, doing everything it needs to do without being rushed. This is a mature film.
That our lead character and narrator the titular Irishman (De Niro) is first shown sitting on his own in a nursing home (retirement community as Tony Soprano would have forcefully corrected) works in a few ways. It sets up he is a survivor; he has outlasted all the other characters in this story. He is alone; everyone he loved is either now dead (often at his hand) or has disowned him. As he begins to relate the story we switch from non-diegetic voice over to diegetic articulation; this emphasises a key concept that undercuts the whole movie, the idea of the unreliable narrator. At first we assume he is talking to someone, maybe a cop, maybe a journalist, maybe a priest, out of shot. Much later we see a wider angle of where he is sat, that heavily suggests he is relating this story to no one, talking to himself, in what could very much be the confused ramblings of an old man. How much of what he tells us is true, dreamed or made up or even misremembered? Unlike his other gangster films, there is no contradictory or complimentary (depending on how you view it) commentary from another character. Also, because everyone else in the story is dead, there is no one left to gainsay his story, we are asked to trust him, or not.
The body of the movie covers familiar territory for a Scorsese gangster film, an account of how an outsider came to be integral to a crime family and their criminal operations across the span of several decades. A rags to riches and back to rags tale (although age and death is the leveller this time instead of arrest, being a rat or universal paranoia and distrust). We have several moments that echo earlier gangster films (such as the car bomb in Casino) but I won't dwell on those as it is more fun discovering them yourself.
This is not an absolute masterpiece, it is not quite to the level of a Taxi Driver, a Goodfellas, a Casino or a Wolf of Wallstreet, however, it is still significantly better than almost every other gangster film you could chose to watch. If you are a Scorsese fan you are richly rewarded for your knowledge of how Marty makes a film, if you are a stranger to films by this director, well, where have you been? Painting houses?
The best thing I can say about this film is, even though it is long, I wanted to watch it again right from the beginning once I had finished it, and the only reason I didn't is it was already nearly two in the morning.