Oldfellas

Rating: 9/10 (15 December 2019)

The spectre of death hangs over "The Irishman" more than any other mobster movie I know. When you think about it, that's quite a strong statement; I'd hate to know what the combined body-count of every Scorsese mafia flick is. But those movies generally dealt with money-hungry fools who didn't know what we knew; that death is coming for them.
And cold-hearted sociopaths who knew how to avoid it for a little while longer.
The characters in this movie know. Part of it is the casting; Joe Pesci is out of retirement here, most of us haven't seen him since "The Good Shepherd" back in 2006, but our most vivid memories of him will always be from "Goodfellas" and "Casino" as a psychopathic pipsqueak with a volcanic temper, or from the Lethal Weapon series and "My Cousin Vinnie" as a quintessential conman.
Here, however, those traits are gone, and though he plays a mobster, he seems like one who is tired of bloodshed, tired of rage, tired of lying.
We first see our protagonist, Frank Sheeran, the titular Irishman, as an old man, clearly on his last legs, and the transition, even from middle age, that we see him make in the movie is remarkable.
This sense of foreshadowing is continued with the use of titles to introduce characters as they appear on screen, followed by a subtitle, telling you how, and when, they'll die - generally by violence, ie. an exploding car, or being shot six times in the head.
And yet the film is quite a bit less violent than the typical Scorsese movie. It still has a pretty steep body count, and no shortage of blood, but there's nothing really graphic like the head in the vice scene in "Casino", or the spike through the neck in "Goodfellas".
The film is, of course, a truly masterful and riveting jolt of cinema. And yes, it tells the story of Frank Sheeran, a small-time hitman who became personal friends with the infamous Jimmy Hoffa, and may have had involvement in his disappearance.
You're on IMDB. You don't need me to tell you what it's about. So I will tell you something you might not know about "The Irishman": it is also something none of the other Scorsese crime films were. It's moving. You really feel for this bad man. Toward the end of the movie I wondered if I might shed a tear.
Think about the casting of Anna Paquin while you're watching this movie. I think it was a very deliberate, and ingenious, choice to put such a well known actress in this role. It leaves you waiting for something. You don't get it. Imagine how Frank Sheeran, her father, feels about that?
Life is like that. You don't always get closure.
But how can you not feel for him?
"The Irishman" is one of the best movies of 2019.