nope

Rating: 9/10 (15 November 2019)

We all know that artists are prone to making art about the same thing over and over. Martin Scorsese is certainly prone to this. His latest film could be characterized as his second remake of his own film, Goodfellas. But whereas the first remake, Casino, simply felt like an inferior retread, The Irishman feels utterly different from the first two films, even though it seems to literally have many of the same scenes. It might be a better movie than Goodfellas, and that is saying a lot.
In a way, The Irishman feels like a disavowal of the earlier two gangster films, in which organized crime was depicted as a negation of the mundane and an attempt at transcendence. Here, gangsterism is the mundane par excellence. It is what makes society and history move forward, it IS the everyday reality. The main character, Robert De Niro's Frank Sheeran, doesn't aspire to criminality. He finds himself a hitman the way some people find themselves in any job- by sheer luck and an appropriate resume- four years of killing people in WWII. So, seemingly, do most of the characters we meet. They don't seem to have tried to get into this world, they are just in it, and don't question it's rules- one of which is a near guarantee of a violent death. In a very real sense, these are very passive people.
The one major exception is Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino. One of the ways this film is uncharacteristic for the director is that the traditional Scorsesean protagonist, they who assert their own, absolute law in the name of transcendence, is here a supporting character. And unlike most of Scorsese's other transcendentalist-characters, we of course know Hoffa is doomed from the start. This is by far Scorsese's saddest movie, of any genre. Indeed, if one were to try to describe what it is trying to evoke with one word it would probably be "regret." This film could probably only have been made by a bunch of old people. And Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, and Joe Pesci, the film's third lead, are all in their 70s at this point.
De Niro has been phoning it in, at best, for years, maybe decades now. He sure makes a comeback here. This is one of his strongest performances ever, and possibly his single most vulnerable. I've rarely seen an actor convincingly convey so many different stages of a character's life. The film is so long we almost feel like we're aging with Sheeran, but that's not in any way a criticism. We come to feel the way that memory has salted the character's wounds.
Pesci gives a performance that noone could have thought him capable of. He's actually subtle, and utterly magnetic. His Russell Bufalino isn't an evil man, exactly. Murder has shaped his world from the start even more than it has those of the other characters.
On the other end of the spectrum, Pacino reveals that he can now only be Pacino. It's a good thing that in this context, his strutting, shouting-self works, because it's not really a performance, it's just schtick. I remember watching his films from the 1970s and thinking he was a good actor. He's always had presence to spare. I wonder now if he ever had anything else.
There is a sense in which this film's message is no less mundane than that everyone, regardless of the choices they make, will die one way or another, and that we all must face death, in the most ultimate sense, alone. But we must compare the way that the asserter-transcendentalist dies, unknowably but possibly without regret, with the very knowable, inevitable end of the rule followers. Perhaps Hoffa is marginal exactly because old Scorsese is finally throwing up the white flag in the quest for transcendence, he's acknowledging that it's probably always only been a myth, like Jimmy Hoffa has become. If that is what he is doing, then it is ironic that he does so in what might be his most transcendent work of art.