The Irishman
By: Petr Swedock
Tags: Review, Film, Netflix, Movies, Cinema

I can’t help but thinking, however, and for the very first time in their long history of collaboration, Scorsese made a mistake in casting Robert De Niro.

Scorsese and De Niro both seem to take the biography of Sheeran, by Charles Brandt, at face value: that Sheeran was introspective and full of remorse.

Steve Zallian the writer of the screenplay, however, inserts a dose of scepticism into the plot: Zallian has deftly crafted scene after scene where things are patiently, repeatedly, explained to Sheeran. It takes a lot for him to get the point, until one wonders exactly how modest his intellectual gifts or even if he possessed any curiosity at all. De Niro plays him, I think, with more agility than the plot allows and Scorsese hurries the pace through somewhat heedlessly. Perhaps adding to the mistake is the post-production coloring of the eyes, going from De Niros true brown to Sheerans Irish blues. Not just distracting, this change calls attention to the characters interiority, the inner life of struggles and desires and emotions we are all supposed to possess and for which Scorsese, it seems, is endlessly searching.

What we end up with is De Niro’s often antic depiction of someone who struggles to articulate their inner dialogue — a off-kilter scene of Sheeran on the phone to Hoffa’s widow after his murder is particularly cringeworthy— and it is a counterpoint to the absence of any arc in the character over the course of the plot.

The screenplay, time and again and again, simply and boldly, underlines the idea that Frank Sheeran simply didn’t have an inner dialogue; that he was wholly subsumed in the motives, if not the directives, of others and wholly lacking any real initiative of his own. Sheerans later efforts at remorse may have been true, as the movie seems to think or they may have reflected the substitution of one set of organizational principles and persons for another: after the mob and Hoffa and Buffalino are gone, Sheerans’ external world becomes that of the Catholic Church, which wants him to repent, and Charles Brandt, who doggedly questions him, over the course of many years, on his life.

Sheeran started killing in World War II. When he got back from the war he started stealing from the trucking loads he was delivering. He had a family. He left his wife. He doesn’t say why he did any of these things. He doesn’t say it hurt him to do any of them. He doesn’t say it pleased him to do any of them. He just did them and appears never to have questioned the doing of them. In as much as he describes what he did, it is a confession. But in as much as he doesn’t question his own motives or reactions, it’s not much of a confession. Much of the confessions that Sheeran made have been contested by both FBI investigators and other persons, themselves mob related. The disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa remains officially unsolved.

In short, did Sheeran really repent? Or are his confessions merely the reflected directives of the new people in his life: people who were asking consistently about the old directives and persons. Did he, in fact, have anything to repent for — as others have alleged that he made a bunch of stuff up — or was merely he trying to bond with a new gang?