Film review

Martin Scorsese (2019)

The people in Martin Scorsese’s marathon crime drama are real people.  Or, more to the point, were real people:  mortality emerges as the main subject of The Irishman.  The title character is Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro).  Old, infirm and resident in a nursing home, he recalls his working life, as a Mafia hitman and bodyguard of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), head of the Teamsters transport union – a different kind of fraternity but with strong financial links to the crime family that employs Frank.  At the beginning of his story, Frank drives meat delivery trucks in Pennsylvania, where he lives with his first wife and their daughters.  He starts selling some of his cargo to a local gangster; accused of theft by the meat packing company, Frank is acquitted with the help of a lawyer called Bill Bufalino (Richard Romano).  Soon afterwards, Bill introduces Frank to his cousin Russell (Joe Pesci), head of the  Bufalinos’ criminal operations.  Frank starts doing jobs, including killings, for Russell who, in turn, introduces him to Hoffa.   The bulk of the action extends from the late 1950s to 1975, when Hoffa disappeared, without trace or explanation.  (He was declared legally dead in 1982.)   Scorsese and the screenwriter Steven Zaillian outdo the historical facts of the case by explaining who killed Hoffa.  It was the doubly trusted Frank, forced to choose between two masters.

I saw The Irishman at an afternoon show, in a good-sized, mostly middle-aged-to-elderly audience.  A sharp intake of breath was occasionally heard in response to a killing but the Curzon Richmond was more often filled with comfortable chuckling at the characters’ wisecracks and/or outrageous behaviour.  It was as if the film had an almost nostalgic charm – with its richly familiar lead actors, evocative period songs on the soundtrack, and hoods behaving as we expect them to behave.  Scorsese, of course, doesn’t take The Irishman as lightly as this.  Its longueurs are an opportunity for reflecting on how often in the course of his long career he’s been drawn to worlds of organised crime – from Mean Streets, through Goodfellas, Casino and Gangs of New York, to The Departed.  He’s fascinated by these cultures and the men who inhabit them.  A fundamental problem for me with The Irishman (and, to varying degrees, with each of the other films just mentioned) is that I don’t often share that fascination.  There are two, colossal exceptions:  The Godfather and, even more, The Godfather: Part II.

This new film is full of echoes of Coppola’s masterwork(s).  As Frank and Russell talk together over bread and wine, alternating English with Italian conversation, we recall Robert De Niro switching between Sicilian dialect and the English learned by the young Vito Corleone on the streets of New York.  As if that’s not enough, the music by Robbie Robertson that plays in the background to this sequence is very like the ‘Love Theme’ from The Godfather.  In the build-up to the murder of the gangster Joey Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) in Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy, Frank’s voiceover explains why a visit to the restaurant ‘bathroom’ is essential to preparations for a killing like this – sparking thoughts of Michael Corleone, in the minutes before he opened fire in a Bronx restaurant and transformed his destiny.  Later on, Jimmy Hoffa takes a phone call sitting on the veranda of his home, which overlooks Lake Michigan.  With Al Pacino in the role, the image can’t help evoking Michael Corleone outside his Lake Tahoe mansion in the grave conclusion to The Godfather: Part II.

The persistent shadow of The Godfather films also serves to stress the difference between them and The Irishman.  Vito Corleone, through a combination of economic necessity, resourcefulness and atavism, came to wield power and influence.  The Teamsters give Frank a testimonial dinner and award but he’s a dependable lieutenant rather than a leader of men.  Michael Corleone’s family loyalty sowed the seeds of a personal corruption that illustrated the much larger corruption fuelled by the interactions of American business, politics and crime.  Frank is just a man doing a job; and while the connections between organised crime and organised labour are essential to The Irishman, the synergy between them is pretty simple.  Coppola’s Michael emerged from World War II a decorated hero.  The one flashback to Frank’s service in the same war is designed to show that being a soldier was good training for becoming a professional killer on his return to civilian life.  Plenty of viewers will be less uncomfortable with the ordinariness of Scorsese’s protagonist than with the alleged glamour of the Corleones.

Scorsese’s film and Coppola’s brace of films are closely comparable in terms of running time, which shows The Irishman to serious disadvantage.  The first two Godfathers ran (according to IMDb) 175 and 202 minutes respectively.  Scorsese takes 209 minutes, without approaching the narrative or dramatic complexity of either Coppola picture.  In his interview with Philip Hoare in Sight & Sound (November 2019), he explains how he decided a feature film was the right form for the material and describes the years he spent trying, in vain, to get it made within the Hollywood studio system.  Then Netflix ‘stepped up’.  S&S quotes Scorsese as finding them ‘excellent to work with.  If I wanted to add something, nobody told me “Cut minutes out of it”’.  Netflix’s lack of interference is, in principle, very good news but proves to have been a mixed blessing.  The Irishman is an epic only by virtue of being epically long.

The film opens with a single, extended take.  The camera proceeds down a corridor inside an old people’s home, passing residents on walking frames and in wheelchairs.  As it approaches a communal day room, the camera moves a little sideways, as if itself wheelchair-bound and needing to adjust position in order to negotiate the entrance.  Frank, one of the people sitting inside the room, starts to tell his tale – to camera, though not, it seems, and in spite of that striking opening movement, to anyone in particular.  Scorsese’s narrative structure is more functional than imaginative.  It relies on a lot of voiceover from Frank; there’s no suggestion that he’s either an unreliable narrator or, in spite of his age, a forgetful one.  The flashbacks comprise two timeframes, which interlock neatly enough.  The larger covers Frank’s life over a period datable by shots of cinema hoardings at either end of the story:  The Three Faces of Eve (1957) and The Shootist (1976).  The more compressed timeframe is a car journey from Pennsylvania to Michigan in 1975.  Frank drives, Russell is in the passenger seat and their wives (Stephanie Kurtzuba and Kathrine Narducci respectively) sit behind them.  The couples are on their way to the wedding of Bill Bufalino’s daughter in Detroit.  Frank eventually learns, to his horror, that there’ll be a stop on the way whereby Jimmy Hoffa will disappear.

His recruitment by, and early assignments for, the Bufalinos don’t appear to cause Frank any soul-searching.  As a result, and though Scorsese stages the mayhem with easy aplomb, Frank’s crimes don’t make for involving viewing.  The pace and interest pick up, for a while, when Al Pacino’s Hoffa joins the film.  This is partly down to Pacino’s panache; partly because, at the same time, the story’s scope broadens to describe not only the connections between the mobsters and the Teamsters but also the help the Mafia gave to John F Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election, and a little way beyond it.  Scorsese contrasts Hoffa’s loathing of JFK with the Bufalinos’ delight at his election:  they expect one of his first acts as President to be getting rid of the Castro regime in Cuba and returning Havana casinos to their rightful gangster ownership (another echo of The Godfather: Part II).  Frank’s truck delivers a consignment of arms for use in the Bay of Pigs debacle of early 1961.  Even so, the chief interest here is in a version of political history rather than the characters themselves.   It’s only when it reaches Frank’s belated moral dilemma, his betrayal of Hoffa out of loyalty to the Bufalinos, that The Irishman takes off dramatically.  The build-up to Hoffa’s murder is very lengthy but Scorsese’s calm, painstaking description is compelling and De Niro’s playing masterly.  As Frank dutifully carries out his assignment, we can almost see the onus of responsibility, of a guilty conscience to come, gathering weight and pressing down on him.

The source material is a 2004 work of narrative non-fiction – I Heard You Paint Houses: Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran and Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa, by Charles Brandt.  To ‘paint a house’ is slang for killing someone (the ‘paint’ is blood on the walls).  Frank, in an early phone conversation with Hoffa, extends the DIY metaphor; when Hoffa says, ‘I hear you paint houses’, Frank replies, ‘Yeah, and I do my own carpentry’.  Brandt’s title is so vividly distinctive that I wondered beforehand why Scorsese had opted for a less colourful one.  Watching the beginning and end of the film increases the puzzle.  There aren’t any opening titles as such, except that the words ‘I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES’ appear, in big letters, on the screen.  There’s no mention of The Irishman as a title until the start of the closing credits.  Even when it appears there, ‘I Heard You Paint Houses’ is reiterated as a subtitle.  And there are moments when Scorsese seems to regret Frank’s ethnicity.  He’s so keen for him to speak Italian with Russell that Frank’s fluency in the language is explained, somewhat improbably, as something acquired during his war service in Europe.

On the other hand, Scorsese is sufficiently at pains to stress Frank’s Irishness that he turns De Niro’s brown eyes blue – one element of the well-publicised digital processes that have also, and more remarkably, de-aged the main actors.  The effect of this is very odd, especially in the early stages.  Only the face and hair are subject to ‘youthification’; you see a CGI head stuck on a much older body.  You get used to the technique but it always looks artificial, on De Niro and Pacino anyway.  Joe Pesci is less of a problem – possibly because his longevity as a screen performer doesn’t compare with theirs:  we haven’t watched Pesci actually, gradually age over the course of nearly half a century.   Frank Sheeran died in 2003 at the age of eighty-three.  This means that he’s in his mid-thirties when he start working for the Mafia; the de-aged De Niro doesn’t look anything like so young, though he’s more persuasively in his fifties a couple of decades later.  Now seventy-six but still with a head of hair, De Niro has been lightly aged up and wears a bald wig cap for the nursing home scenes.  Pacino, in his eightieth year, always seems too old for Hoffa, who disappeared when he was sixty-two, and gives the distracting impression of a man keen to conceal his true age.

De Niro and Pacino have co-starred before and in a crime drama – Michael Mann’s Heat (1995).  Even so, the roles they played for Coppola ensure a fascination in seeing them both in a Scorsese Mafia picture – and a degree of suspense in waiting for this to happen:  it must be an hour into The Irishman before they’re on screen together.  (They were that, of course, in The Godfather: Part II too but only through a split-screen image, and momentarily.)   There are times when film fanatic Scorsese is wonderstruck by the pairing:  he clearly never gets tired of watching these actors but some of their dialogues are so protracted that we do.  It’s a problem also that Pacino’s performance rarely dispels the feeling that his acting has become predictable, narrowing over the years into a default aggressive dynamism.  Scorsese and Zaillian give him plenty to say here, and an awful lot of it is shouted.  The Pacino who portrayed Michael Corleone, Sonny Wortzik in Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman (1992) showed a much more varied intensity.

Joe Pesci’s playing is also far removed from the style that made his name but this is a plus.  It was quite a coup to lure Pesci (also now seventy-six) out of his longstanding retirement:  other than his cameo role in De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and a more surprising outing opposite Helen Mirren in the poorly received Love Ranch (2010), he hasn’t been seen on screen since the late 1990s.  One associates Pesci chiefly with manic characters – in Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino (and, in a broader comic vein, My Cousin Vinny).  Russell Bufalino is mostly vicious, occasionally sentimental.  It’s rare for Pesci, in either mode, to raise his voice.  (He does most of his snarling at his wife on the road to Detroit, when she asks how long to the next cigarette break and, because the answer is too long, breaks her husband’s rules by lighting up in the car.). This quietness strengthens Pesci’s characterisation and its impact.  Harvey Keitel’s playing of the mobster Angelo Bruno is similarly successful.  In other smaller roles, Ray Romano is outstanding as Russell’s geeky but canny lawyer cousin.  Stephen Graham is ‘Tony Pro’ Provenzano, rising Teamster star and, along with JFK, Hoffa’s bugbear.  Graham holds his own though you occasionally hear Liverpool vowels in his American accent.  Bobby Cannavale registers though he has little to do as Frank’s earliest mobster connection.  Jesse Plemons, as usual, is good, as Hoffa’s foster son.

The two wives on the car journey to Michigan aren’t the only women in The Irishman to take a back seat.  Gangster cinema is no place for female characters to stand a chance of passing the Bechdel test; it’s rare enough for the genre to feature an exchange between women at all.  On the face of it, Scorsese is intent on recognising the issue through his use of Peggy, one of Frank’s daughters.  As a child (played by Lucy Gallina), Peggy comes home one day upset because the owner of a local grocery store shouted at and pushed her.  When Frank’s (first) wife (Jennifer Mudge) tells him about this, he marches round to the store, with Peggy in tow, and takes disproportionate revenge on the grocer (Roger Brenner).  Frank drags him out of his store, beats him up and, as the man lies groaning in the kerb, repeatedly stamps on his hand.  Peggy witnesses the whole thing.  As a result, she knows from an early age that her father is capable of remorseless (in both senses) violence.  From this point onwards, she gives Frank a long, hard stare each time he comes home from a job.  His reactions to her searching gaze are increasingly furtive.  Lucy Gallina stares (and De Niro responds) expressively.

Peggy’s attitude to her father could be seen to represent the traditional plight of women married to, or offspring of, the mob – but comes across as a rather pious contrivance.  Frank’s and Russell’s wives also know about their husbands’ occupations and have little to say yet their reticence is acquiescent rather than accusatory.  Besides, Peggy becomes herself an example of an underdeveloped female role – a nearly non-speaking one even when she’s an adult and Anna Paquin takes over.  Scorsese tells Philip Hoare in S&S how he got Steven Zaillian ‘to layer in more of Anna Paquin’s character’.  Goodness knows what less layering would have left Paquin with:  she’s asked to keep repeating the one same thing that Lucy Gallina did (Paquin too does it very well).  The closing stages include a corny subplot in which the geriatric Frank tries and fails to make peace with Peggy – but this is an opportunity for the actor concerned, not the actress.  Given what happens subsequently, it’s hard to see why Frank insisted on Peggy watching what he did to the store owner.  It would have been more coherent, though less gruesomely spectacular, to have had instead brief sequences of the grocer’s reprimand, Peggy overhearing her parents’ conversation about it, and her later revisiting the store and seeing the grocer looking the worse for wear.

Scorsese may want to address the issue of female subservience in the screen lives of gangsters but you feel he’s doing so out of a sense of duty rather than personal conviction.  A view of women as, simply, the gentler sex is evident in scenes like the one where news comes through of the Kennedy assassination in November 1963.  Frank, Hoffa and others are in an ice cream parlour at the time (Hoffa has a passion for sundaes).  All the men in the place (including the male waiting staff) watch the television screen straight-faced and dry-eyed.  Every woman in sight claps a hand to her mouth or is already in tears.  The Kennedy material is a peculiar mixture.  There’s news film of the actual JFK and of his funeral.  In the ice cream parlour, we hear the text of Walter Cronkite’s announcement on CBS (‘From Dallas, Texas, the flash apparently official, President Kennedy died at 1 pm Central Standard Time… ‘) but it’s not Cronkite’s voice.  Robert Kennedy is played, in sequences showing his interrogation of Hoffa at Senate hearings, by an actor who bears no resemblance to the real thing.  (The actor is Jack Huston, John’s grandson – a scion of a rather different American family dynasty with Irish connections.)

Scorsese repeatedly freezes the frame on minor characters then puts up a title summarising when and how that person was killed or, in one case only, died of natural causes.  That exception’s date of death (1992) is exceptional too.  All the killings occurred between 1979 and 1981 inclusive:  this has the effect of suggesting that something particular was going on in the mob world in the three years in question rather than, as Scorsese presumably intends, that violent sudden death was an occupational hazard for all concerned.  By the end of the film, it’s possible to see the device as an element of the mortality theme; even then, though, it hardly amounts to an insight.  What happened to these men is what any viewer who’s seen a few gangster movies would expect to happen.  Scorsese makes the point more incisively and wittily when Frank is visited in the nursing home by detectives still investigating Hoffa’s death.  Frank, in a senior moment, refers them to his attorney and is told the attorney’s dead.  His instant response is, ‘Who did it?’

Except for inordinate length, The Irishman might seem to have little in common with Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975) yet the epilogue to that film, concluding with the words ‘they are all equal now’, comes to mind throughout Scorsese’s melancholy coda[1].  Even if you survive to old age, as Frank Sheeran does, in spite of his line of work, you won’t go on forever.   Even if you’re not a gangster and just make movies about them, the same will apply, and Scorsese is now seventy-seven.  A last scene between Frank and Russell, when the latter is close to death, rhymes resonantly with that earlier one in the restaurant, when they were first getting acquainted.  Again, there’s bread and wine, with its Catholic mass associations, on the menu but Russell can now hardly consume food.  Both Joe Pesci and De Niro are very fine here and the latter realises Frank’s physical decline impressively, not least when he collapses at home.  This too is a powerful reminder of The Godfather and of the actor who, along with De Niro, incarnated Vito Corleone.  Marlon Brando’s falls, when Don Vito is shot in the street and when he eventually dies in his orange grove, are among the highlights of his performance.

At the end, as at the beginning, the camerawork in the nursing home is intriguing.  Frank’s final exchanges there are with a Catholic priest (Jonathan Morris) and a nurse (Dascha Polanco).  The latter, after she’s left his room, returns Frank’s file to a colleague and goes on her way.  I assumed the film would stop there and thought it would have done so effectively – Frank disappearing unemphatically, just another ill old man now, a set of case notes.  When the DP Rodrigo Prieto started heading back to Frank’s room, I felt a twinge of disappointment but, by the time he got there, I’d changed my mind.  It’s as if Scorsese can’t resist going back to Frank for more – for another conversation with the priest.  Tempting as it is to dismiss Frank’s eleventh-hour, anxious interest in spiritual matters as par for the course, Scorsese’s own persisting struggle with them ensures a more sympathetic reaction.  When a picture goes on as long as this one a cinema audience – as distinct from the much larger numbers who’ll watch The Irishman on Netflix once it starts streaming in a few days’ time – can be forgiven self-satisfaction at having seen it through.  For plenty of people it’s unconscionable to give three-and-a-half hours of your life to a movie and not declare it time well spent.  It’s a bonus for all viewers, and will probably multiply the praise accorded The Irishman, that it concludes strongly.  You can come away feeling the whole film has been as potent as its last forty-five minutes.

19 November 2019

[1] The full Barry Lyndon epilogue is:  ‘It was in the reign of George III that the aforesaid personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.’