A soul damned beyond recall

Rating: 10/10 (15 November 2019)

In a magnificent performance, Robert De Niro plays Frank Sheeran, a man who becomes a pitiless killer for his bosses. Sheeran is expected to show them unflinching loyalty, but is never rewarded for his efforts by promotion out of the role of Teamster grunt. He receives only his superiors' recognition as a trustworthy man and the symbols of loyalty they bestow on him. Fortunately for his bosses, he's a man who values loyalty highly: he wears the mark of their trust for the rest of his life and carries their secrets to his grave.
This puts him in the unique position of experiencing first hand the effects of living by violence one's whole life. In Scorsese's other films, we frequently encounter depraved characters who enjoy every pleasure that life can offer without the filmmaker's explicit condemnation. We begin to understand how we too are wired to be attracted to their lifestyle, but we also watch these temptations damage a person by crushing their ability to live a recognizably human life. In Scorsese's films, we're allowed to decide for ourselves whether the cost is worth it, just as we are in life. Yet I doubt whether any Scorsese character has ever lost so much for so little benefit as Frank Sheeran. If De Niro wasn't utterly convincing in the role, if we didn't see the strength of his loyalty and friendships, we'd feel that Scorsese had finally become a moralizer.
We spend the first half of the film trailing De Niro as he becomes a hardened killer. As he turns his natural talents and creativity to evil, we see him corrupted by his connections until the path he ends up following seems like his only prospect. As this happens, we see the destruction it wreaks on his family. He grows distant from his wife and children, eventually becoming severed from them entirely. When they do meet, he's reduced to muttering empty platitudes about "trying to protect them", unable to find any way to connect. We're left to wonder if any reward could be worth destroying the love others have for you. Along the way we're treated to some wonderful acting from the family members, particularly Anna Paquin as Peggy Sheeran.
Stylistically, The Irishman is a good deal less showy than Scorsese's early films, and features simpler set design than The Wolf of Wall Street. The result is a grittier gangster film than Goodfellas, which further serves to minimize any visceral appeal of De Niro's character. Any desire to live like Sheeran is adrenaline fueled, not created by glamor. This creates additional empathetic distance between the character and ourselves, forcing us to ask how he found himself on this road. Like Esau, he sold his inheritance for a bowl of stew. Is that a realistic story? Scorsese would have us believe it is.
The Wolf of Wall Street is a film that showcases the range of pleasures available to the wealthy, along with the damage they do to others, one's family, and oneself, and asks us to say "no" in our hearts to this life. Does The Irishman have similar intentions? No. Leonardo DiCaprio's character Jordan Belfort is not hopelessly lost. However unlikely it seems, he could find the way back to a decent life. If that does turn out to be impossible, it's as much the result of American culture as it is his personal failings. Not so in The Irishman. It's hard to imagine an environment more apt to produce repentance than where Sheeran finds himself. He's surrounded by kind nurses and a very sympathetic priest who visits him regularly. The film makes it clear, however, that he's incapable of reform. It spends a remarkable amount of time at the end of the film considering just what it means to be damned. It's like a gangster's Wild Strawberries.
Most of us are inclined to be hopeful about even the worst cases and think hardly anyone could be too far gone. The priest is such a person; he helpfully puts words in De Niro's mouth and suggests that one can be repentant even if one does not feel it. He needs Sheeran to be, if not redeemed, at least redeemable. But Sheeran's case is more severe than any of Scorsese's previous characters. This is a person who's able to understand the desirability of being a better person, but whose soul is so dead that he's incapable of wishing for it in his heart, unable to see any path from here to there. All that is left for him is waiting for death to make an end of waiting. This miserable condition is what wrings pity out of us despite the distance. We are not him, but we could be.
As expected, all the technical elements of the film are top notch. The acting performances in particular shine, and it's great to see De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, Pesci, and the rest together again. (The boys are back!) The fact that I could never have guessed how many visual effects artists worked on the film speaks for itself. Scorsese shows his usual impeccable taste on the soundtrack. And Thelma Schoonmaker's editing deserves a lengthy review in itself. In short, I suspect this film will be widely acknowledged as one of Scorsese's best, and it demands to be seen on the biggest screen you can find it on. Yet what stands out the most to me is how well all of these elements were put to use to tell such a remarkable story, both like and unlike anything Scorsese has told before.