Far too long, but the existential and eschatological elements make up for it

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2019)

Based on the 2004 book by Charles Brandt, "I Heard You Paint Houses": Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran and the Inside Story of the Mafia, the Teamsters, and the Last Ride of Jimmy Hoffa, written for the screen by Steven Zaillian, and directed by Martin Scorsese, The Irishman is about aging, loss, taking stock, regret. To a certain extent, it is to the gangster genre what The Searchers (1956) was to the classic western. One of the best-reviewed films in years, although I certainly don't disagree that it has (many) masterful elements, I felt it's just too long. Shorten it by just 20 minutes in the mid-section and you have a masterpiece. Now, don't get me wrong, I have no problem with long films - I'm a fan of pictures such as The Godfather: Part II (1974), Once Upon a Time in America (1984), Dances with Wolves (1990), The Tree of Life (2011), Potop (1974), and Sátántangó (1994) (all 442 minutes of it). However, such length has to be narratively justified, and I just felt that in The Irishman, it wasn't, with the film's 206 minutes occasionally feeling padded and (dare I say it) self-indulgent. Nevertheless, the acting is universally superb, the directing is more contemplative than we've seen from Scorsese in a while, Thelma Schoonmaker's editing is predictably awesome, and Rodrigo Prieto's cinematography is flawless.
The film opens in 2003 as we meet an elderly Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) living in a nursing home and close to death. Wanting to go with something of a clear conscience, he begins speaking about his time as the go-to hitman for the Bufalino crime family in Pennsylvania. In 1954, Sheeran becomes friends with family patriarch Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and soon, Bufalino has him carrying out various hits. Loyal to the family, and adept at his job, Sheeran quickly moves up the underworld ladder, and Bufalino introduces him to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). The president of the Mob-funded Teamsters union, Hoffa is facing federal investigation and is struggling to deal with rising teamster Anthony "Pro" Provenzano (Stephen Graham). Bufalino wants Sheeran to babysit the volatile, unpredictable, and confrontational Hoffa and try to keep him out of trouble. Hoffa and Sheeran hit it off, and soon Sheeran is Hoffa's unofficial bodyguard. However, as the years go by, Hoffa continues to antagonise his Mob backers, and some of them soon come to see him as more of a liability than an asset.
Originally set at Paramount, when The Irishman's budget started pushing $150m before shooting had even begun, the studio dropped it. Then came Netflix, who not only put up the money, they also offered Scorsese a near unheard-of degree of creative control. Netflix's involvement is an interesting situation because here you have a film that simply could not have been made through the modern studio system (at least not in its current form). Many are predicting that streaming services such as Netflix will ultimately destroy the cinema industry entirely, but in this case, it's hard for a cinephile not to celebrate their salvaging such an ambitious and auteur-driven film. It was a great PR move, sure (and they really, really want a Best Picture winner in their catalogue), but it was also a massive financial risk. In terms of the real-life background to the film's narrative, most historians dismiss Sheeran's account of how important he was to the Bufalino family, maintaining he was a low-level goon with a drinking problem who was never assigned to any important task. Indeed, several of his claims have been explicitly proven as fabrications, and several people who knew him have stated he did none of the things he claimed.
Irrespective of this, however, The Irishman is a film written in regret. Much of this is tied up in Sheeran's daughter Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult). An almost completely wordless role, Peggy is introduced in a scene in which she watches her father viciously beat the grocer for whom she works because he pushed her, a scene which speaks to his sociopathy if not necessarily his psychopathology. The impression of him which this gives her is something Sheeran spends much of the rest of the film trying to ameliorate.
Another important thematic element is that as each gangster appears for the first time, a subtitle tells us who they are, and lists the date of their deaths and how they were murdered. There's no better illustration of just how concerned the film is with the nature of transience - every single one of these guys is a colossus in their own mind, and each deems themselves invincible (as do we all when young). Yet none of them make it out of life alive. In the film's last act, this theme is distilled down to its very essence, essentially positing that the only important thing you leave behind is your relationships with other people, and Sheeran has badly mismanaged his, resulting in him sitting alone in a nursing home at Christmas. In Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995), the protagonists lose their wealth, possessions, and status, but in The Irishman, the loss is more existential - Sheeran loses his soul.
As the violence settles and the zingers dry up, the film's last act is remarkably bleak in a way that the last acts of GoodFellas and Casino aren't, and as we watch Sheeran sitting in that nursing home, taking stock, spelling out his regrets, reminiscing about his actions as a young man, it's impossible not to see the meta dimension - Scorsese himself looking back on his career, remembering the classics of yesteryear, keenly aware that old-age is stalking him.
In terms of the acting, the closest we get to a poor performance is Pacino, who portrays Hoffa as if he was playing, well, Al Pacino. Look at footage of the real Hoffa, then watch both The Irishman and Hoffa (1992) in which Jack Nicholson plays the character, and tell me who gives the more authentic performance. Don't get me wrong, Pacino is fun (I would gladly watch an entire film composed of nothing but him and Stephen Graham insulting one another), and most of the laughs come from his over-the-top antics, but it's not an especially accurate depiction of the real man. As for De Niro, this is his first not-phoned-in performance in decades, and he imbues the character with real interiority and complex psychology, without diluting the inherent inhumanity. However, the real standout performance is Pesci, although those looking for the fireworks of Tommy DeVito or Nicky Santoro will be disappointed, as this is literally the inverse of such performances. Bufalino is quiet, calm, considered, highly intelligent, but cold and sociopathic, the kind of man who wouldn't beat your head in, but would order someone else to do so without a second thought.
If the film has a single problem, it's the runtime. As mentioned above, the last act is devastating; there's little tension as such, but there sure is pathos. However, by the time we got to this point, I was starting to feel the film had outstayed its welcome, when I should have been the most heavily invested in the story. This has been a recurrent problem in recent Scorsese films, but this is the first time he's strayed from over-long into self-indulgence. The film simply doesn't warrant this length; whole scenes could easily be removed without compromising the story, character beats, or emotion.
Another problem, albeit a smaller one, concerns the digital de-aging. It's a little jolting at first, but easy to get used to. What stood out, however, was the tired bodies beneath those de-aged faces. This is most notable in the scene where Sheeran beats up Peggy's boss. Except the beating is pathetic - the kicks are about five miles away from the man's face and De Niro's exhausted stomps wouldn't flatten a wet cardboard box. It's a shame as, it's a good scene, but the lack of correlation between face and body is undeniably jarring. Another issue is one that has cropped up in all of Scorsese's Mob films - glorification. Obviously, The Irishman is about the toxic masculinity of this world and the lonely endgame (if one even gets to the endgame), but much as was the case with the (frankly stomach-churning) softening of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Scorsese runs a very real risk of glamorising what he claims to be condemning.
For me, The Irishman was a very good movie, but not the masterpiece many have felt it to be. But that's just me, and I can certainly recognise and celebrate such ambitious filmmaking, especially coming at a time when more and more it feels like films are being made by committees rather than by artists. Arguably Scorsese's most eschatological film, certainly since Kundun (1997), The Irishman is the story of how one man lost his soul, and, by extension how the world for which he lost it, dehumanises and degrades those who participate in its rites. Although Sheeran is brought down by old-age, abandonment, and the merciless nature of human existence, Scorsese refuses to afford him an easy out - he made his choices, and he must now live, and die, with the consequences.