The Long and Winding Road to Nowhere

Rating: 5/10 (25 December 2019)

THE IRISHMAN
The Irishman is about the relationship among three main characters: Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) and Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Hoffa was head of the Teamsters Union in the 1950s and early 60s, but it's his connection to the Kennedys that is at the core of this movie.
In 1961, with the help of his father's mob connections, John Kennedy was elected President. He appointed his brother, Robert, as Attorney General. Robert Kennedy made the arrest and conviction of Hoffa a top priority. Hoffa was jailed for trying to bribe a juror and fraud, then pardoned by Richard Nixon in 1971 (he gave Nixon a large contribution). By that time, he had lost control of the Teamsters and was banned from holding office in a union, but he refused to retire and was fighting to get back 'his union' when he disappeared on July 30, 1975, never to be heard from again.
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese's fourth movie about the mob or gangsters (I don't count The Gangs of New York as a mob movie) among over fifty non-gangster movies, but this is what he is known for. It runs for three and a half hours - or I should say, strolls, leisurely cutting back and forth in time from the early 1950s to the turn of the century. Veteren screenwriter Steven Zaillian wrote the script from Charles Brandt's book, "I Heard You Paint Houses, " the title of the book being mob-talk for a hit man.
Martin Scorsese loves voice over narration and most of his mob movies have voice-over narration as does this one by Sheeran. He starts out as a truck driver who helps things fall off the back of the truck - in his case, sides of beef - and ends up a mob hitman. Along the way, he marries, divorces and has four daughters, one of whom refuses to have anything to do with him when she gets old enough to understand what he was - a murderer.
The Irishman is not primarily the story of Jimmy Hoffa which has been told in a major film before, Danny DeVito's Hoffa (1992) from a script by David Mamet and starring Jack Nicholson in the title role. Hoffa was neither a critical nor commercial success.
In The Irishman, Scorsese has bigger fish to fry than the story of Hoffa - he wants to connect the election of John F. Kennedy, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA's undercover operations to kill Castro, the assassination of Kennedy and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.
He doesn't quite make it, but that doesn't stop him from trying very hard - like the fact that Sheeran in 1961 is ordered by Bufalino to take a truck to Miami that is loaded with military weapons and deliver it to 'a guy with big ears.' When Sheeran gets there and talks to the 'guy with big ears' we see that the guy doesn't have big ears because, as the big-eared guy explains, he had an operation to fix them. The weapons are loaded into a van with Spanish writing on its side - apparently these are weapons that were used in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. All of this is done so that thirteen years later, when Sheeran is watching the Watergate hearings on TV and sees 'big ears' testifying, it can be revealed that he is Howard Hunt, a Watergate conspirator. So instead of just telling Sheeran to deliver the weapons to Howard Hunt we have a lot of time wasted on hiding who that person is just so we can be 'surprised' that it is Howard Hunt of Watergate fame.
There are very long scenes about ...nothing much. For example, the core of the movie is a long car trip that Sheeran takes with Bufalino and their wives. There is a lot of talk about taking 'cigarette breaks' and the fact that Bufalino makes many stops along the way to collect money from various people. All of this has nothing to do with anything.
Scorsese's use of the same actors playing their characters' decades-long relationships is made possible by using CGI to change the actors aging face. I don't know if it was a conscious decision, but all the actors look like they are wearing masks. And the fact that peoples' faces change, not just wrinkles, over time is a real hindrance to this technique. I was never distracted by it but I did wonder, at times, where we were in the story - is this older Sheeran or younger?
DeNiro and Pesci have the same great chemistry that has made them a delight to watch since Raging Bull. Pacino enters the movie about a third of the way through and gives it a boost. Ray Romano gives a solid performance as Bufalino's lawyer brother and Bobby Cannavale does his crazy mobster bit as Skinny Razor. But the best performance in the movie belongs to Stephen Graham (Capone in Boardwalk Empire) as Anthony 'Tony Pro' Provenzano, a rival of Hoffa's.
Is it worth watching? Of course - but don't get your hopes up. This isn't the crowning gem of anybody's career. It a long, too long, poorly told story of some very bad people who did some very bad things - things that Scorsese seems reluctant to touch. For example, Hoffa helped destroy not only the reputation of the Teamsters Union, but unions in general. Movies about union bosses rarely show them for what the vast majority were and are - leaders working to make life better for the working people of America. Instead, Scorsese's union bosses are all corrupt - or fools.
A final note - a lot of the action takes place in South Philadelphia where I grew up. There is not even a slight attempt to make it realistic and there are no South Philly accents in the movie. But there is Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). I never figured out why he was in the movie. Local color I guess.
A final final note - a lot of the mobsters on display are introduced by a blurb on screen telling us what happened to the mobster e.g. for Bruno: shot in the head sitting in a car outside his home. I am not sure why this was done. Crime doesn't pay? Not quite Michael Corleone sitting and staring out into space, wondering when and where and how it all went to hell.