Friendship & Betrayal over a lifetime, masterly told.

Rating: 10/10 (22 April 2020)

If Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a take on middle age via the conceit of an actor (& his stunt double) looking around and asking himself, "Is that all there is?"...The Irishman is a reflective take on old age as 3 players in and around the Mob face the consequences of their choices, with the last man standing having the final say.
I started out in children's theater, and our best writers used to say that the stories were really about real people - but it's more fun to tell them through the lives or royalty, witches, giants and such.
In The Irishman, the stories are about real people from history. And there is plenty here about unions, gangsters, politicians. In one of his last interviews, Gore Vidal told Bill Maher that grade school writers of classroom textbooks really don't get enough credit for the great care and skill they take to make history dull. Nothing dull here.
But the metaphors are also there for the average person, and the not-so-average alike, in the changing relationships between the 3 main characters (De Niro, Pacino and Pesci). Friendship & betrayal, over a lifetime - what life and death are all about.
In what little criticism I heard about the CGI de-aging that was used in a more advanced way for the 1st time here, I was impressed and glad to see I disagreed. The critics miss several points. The fact that the changes are so subtle is a marker of how good the tech is. Also, the high quality of the actual aging for the final scenes deserves credit - that may have been traditional makeup. But the remarkable thing is you cant tell whether they are using makeup or CGI. Scorcese is right, they were able to use CGI as if it were makeup.
As always, among the celebrated filmmaker's mastery of skills is his use of music - one could write a nice chapter on his choice of songs alone. I'll just mention that he's set "In the Still of the Night" as a kind of theme song, opening and closing the picture with it. Among other things, as a colleague with a guilty conscience once said to me, it's at that hour, alone, that one thinks about the awful things one has done to those one claims to love.
As a last thought, on this 1st viewing, I noticed that the film began to take on a disturbing urgency in Act 3. This is notable because we all know more or less what is going to happen. And as with every great tragedy, I found myself rooting for an outcome that I knew was not possible.
That's how good this movie is.
As always, Scorcese works with the best - and the best are happy to work with him. No need for me to list them here, but thank you everyone, especially writer Steven Zaillian, DP Rodrigo Prieto, editor Thelma Schoonmaker.