A Farewell To Arms

Rating: 8/10 (6 January 2020)

I'm reasonably familiar with Frank Sheeran's story having some time ago read the book on which it was based. I suppose if anyone was ever going to film it, it would have to be Scorsese. He assembles his age-no-object three acting principals De Niro, Pacino and Pesci, using the new de-ageing technology to literally take years off their physical appearance and once you stop looking for the join in this, it's possible to settle down and enjoy this engrossing movie centring on Sheeran's life which saw him become the New York Mafia's main hit-man and along the way become the friend and confidante of the powerful but controversial Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose sudden disappearance and almost certain murder in 1975 makes for the inevitable climax to proceedings here.
At three and a half hours long, I don't mind admitting it took me two nights to get through it, but Sheeran had a long life living and killing and it was never likely that Scorsese was going to telescope it into a two hour film.
Scorsese of course has made some of the most iconic gangster movies of the last forty years usually with DeNiro and Pesci on board and clearly this is his goodbye to the genre for which he'll principally be remembered. That obviously also goes for DeNiro and Pesci too, as well of course for Pacino who's certainly added to the genre in his long career too.
The framing device for the narrative is an innocuous-seeming journey involving DeNiro's Sheeran and Pesci's Russell Bufalino characters taking a long drive to Detroit with their wives, the true purpose of which starts to become obvious as they progress. Through a series of intermittent flashbacks we get to see the story of Sheeran's recruitment as the Mafia's assassin, his rise up the ranks and along the way his introduction to Hoffa. There's a long epilogue where we see all the gangster bosses still living, Scorsese with subtitles having handily told us the date and usually violent means of death of the ones who didn't get that far, only by then they're all finally incarcerated and by the very end so aged and infirm that you wonder at the power and fear they once exerted.
Which of course is pretty much the point of the film. These dealers in death will themselves be reduced to ashes and for all their attempts to make peace with their God, you have to wonder at their minuscule chance of redemption in the next world, if there is one.
All of the big three do their bit to carry the load of the movie. De Niro as Sheeran is the blue, or should that be congealed blood biding the narrative together, Pacino largely reins in his sometimes hoo-hah acting style for who is the biggest character in the film while Pesci for me steals the accolades with a performance of almost avuncular menace in his part. It's significant that Sheeran's oldest daughter all through her growing life never takes to Pesci's Bufalino character as if even as a child she can sense the malevolence behind his kindly old man facade. Instead she and Hoffa become firm friends making the point that behind all his criminal abuse of power, he never killed or ordered the killing of anyone. The film is otherwise noticeable however for the almost invisibility of women in this man's, man's, man's world of criminal activity cloaked by a veneer of respectability.
I found Scorcese's direction to be commendably non-flashy with mostly conventional set-ups concentrating a lot on the faces of his actors. The period recreations of time and place are meticulous and authentic. I would however have liked to have seen more evidence of the background criminality as at times it just seems to be all about hierarchical or territorial jostling at the end of a gun, when behind it all fuelling the ill-gotten gains lurked prostitution, gun-running, drugs, protection and trafficking no doubt amongst many others.
I haven't always been a fan of Scorcese's big budget gang films like "The Departed" or "Gangs Of New York" but this one works for me as it seems less exaggerated in focus and is at pains not to glamorise these still despicable old-school gangsters.
If it's to be his farewell to mob life, while it's certainly a long and largely unsympathetic one.