Everybody and her brother has already reviewed Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, and here’s my two cents. In my humble opinion, The Irishman is a good movie but not a great one. As history, it is dubious. As cinema, it’s not bad.
I would be remiss without mentioning the film’s use of technology, which has been a boon to filmmakers (but a curse to some audiences – it’s made the interminable Transformers films possible), allowing them to rejuvenate older actors though CGI wizardry. Scorsese employs it to his advantage here in his flashback sequences.
Back to the film – to me, movies about mobsters have the same problem that movies about zombies do; they’re not interesting characters. Zombies are inarticulate, they lumber around, and they eat your brain if they catch you. Mobsters are inarticulate, they’re chauffeured around, and they kill you if you cross them.
You guys just aren’t interesting
Robert DeNiro plays Frank Sheeran, a member of the Teamster’s union (and friend of Jimmy Hoffa) who tells his story to an unseen interlocutor. Scorsese begins the film with one of the long tracking shots that he also used in “Goodfellas”.
The story is then told in flashbacks as Sheeran, mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), and their wives begin an automobile journey to the Detroit suburbs, ostensibly to attend a Bufalino family wedding. The weekend happens to coincide with Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance.
Frank is apparently someone who wants to be liked, especially by mobsters; the film’s early scenes depict his willingness to pilfer sides of beef and act as a mob enforcer to ingratiate himself into the exciting world of Bufalino and his mob pals. Ever the eager beaver, Frank soon adds arson and murder to his resume, further establishing his credentials.
At length, Frank becomes the friend and confidante of Jimmy Hoffa, and the film kicks up a notch as Al Pacino enters the scene. I originally had my doubts about the casting of Pacino as Hoffa. Several actors have now played Hoffa, including Robert Blake (in the TV movie “Blood Feud”) and Jack Nicholson (in Danny DeVito’s “Hoffa” – a misfire of a film, though Nicholson’s performance was solid.) Everything I have read about Hoffa suggests that he was a man with little sense of humor, and I thought that Pacino’s performance would be too expressive. Pacino walks the line, acting larger than life and delivering lines that are funny without seeming to have the slightest clue that anything he says is humorous. Pacino delivers.
I’m gonna skip over the stuff about Hoffa’s disappearance for two reasons: 1.) I don’t want to spoil the film for you and 2.) as I’ve mentioned, the film’s accuracy is somewhat dubious – Scorsese is apparently more interested in telling a good story than he is in telling the literal truth.
The film is ultimately about the ravages of time – after Frank and Russell get sent to the big house (but not for their involvement with Hoffa’s disappearance, they’re in the joint for other stuff), we see their wizened forms as they play bocce in prison (with Pesci bowling from a wheel chair.) These once dangerous men are now pathetic old men. Frank gets out and ends up in a nursing home. In these scenes, Scorsese seems to be saying that the tritest thing that one can say is in fact the most profound: crime doesn’t pay.
de jungle 