THE IRISHMAN

Whatever happened to Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa? Most people assume the mobbed-up union leader was done in by his associates, based on the venerable principle of "live by the sword," etc. Of course, only a few people were in a position to truly know, and they generally weren't the talkative types. 

Now my favorite director, Martin Scorsese, has made THE IRISHMAN, a movie that offers an answer. That is, so long as we believe Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), whose resumé might include soldier (and war criminal) in WWII, hit man for the mob, and Teamsters leader himself. The movie is hilariously entertaining, as stories about gangsters usually are—these quintessential outsiders and rebels, for whom to live outside the law requires them to be, if not honest, then at least stand-up guys. (No snitching.) 

THE IRISHMAN is, at the same time, an elegiac meditation on loyalty and betrayal, on guilt and redemption, on friendship, and even, in its final act, loneliness. This is to say that it is a further elaboration of the themes that have obsessed Scorsese, this great American director, throughout his career. What's new is its emphatic, poignant concern with mortality and the end of life—with just plain tiredness. It's an original approach to the gangster genre, as Scorsese gives us almost the entire passage through life of his characters, following them into their seventies and eighties—that is, those who make it that far.

When we meet Frank, sometime in the early early aughts, he's in a nursing home, and he's got a story to tell. (Steven Zaillian wrote the script, based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, which was based in turn on Brandt's interviews with Sheeran.) This is a man who lives in the past. He first learned to murder according to somebody else's orders as a soldier in WWII. (In that sense, THE IRISHMAN, and Frank Sheeran's life, is a rumination on the theme of blind loyalty.) After the war, he becomes a truck driver for the Teamsters. One day, a fellow named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) happens to help him fix his broken-down truck. Turns out Bufalino is a crime boss in the Northeast Pennsylvania/New York/New Jersey region, where much of the film's action takes place. 

Frank's friendship with Bufalino would become one of the two key friendships in his life. In fact, the spine of Frank's story, and Scorsese's movie, is a pivotal road trip that Russell and Frank, along with their wives, took together to Detroit in 1975, ostensibly for a wedding. It would prove to be fateful trip for the other great friendship of Frank's life, that with Jimmy Hoffa himself (Al Pacino). 

As we listen, Frank unfolds a tale of how he became a murderer-for-hire for Bufalino, as well as for Philadelphia boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), while at the same time he was becoming increasingly a loyal righthand man to Hoffa. This creates, you might say, a conflict of interest—or at least a sense of divided loyalties. While rising up in the ranks of the Teamsters, Frank led a double life: for example, running guns to the rightwing anti-Castro forces in the run-up to  the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He even claims to have been called upon to whack Joey Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco), who nonetheless will live forever, thanks to the Dylan song. 

What enables Scorsese to ruminate on the passing on an era and of generations, and to carry on his ongoing experiments with movie style and structure, is the film's artful use of a new digital "age erasure" technology. Presumably, it was used to go in and erase wrinkles and add hue to the cheeks, and the like. For the most part, the effect is remarkably good, and resonant both dramatically and thematically. The technology calls attention to itself only in a certain light. For me, it was most noticeable in the middle-aged Pacino. In those moments, one gets a bit on an "uncanny valley" effect: the people approach being human, but not completely.

The picture is quite long: at three-and-a-half hours, it is stately, but quick-moving and comic. I've seen 85 minute pictures that felt a hell of a lot longer. Scorsese's always liked to go long, in any case. (ALICE DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE was initially meant to be three-and-a-half hours, itself.) His storytelling is serenely calibrated, in rhythm and in tone. Credit for this must be shared with his masterful editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, with whom he's been working since the late '60s. This is film as a river. Sometimes it's wild and choppy, but it is when it is placid and serene that the observer sits and reflects, basking in the details. 

One of the things that make this tapestry appeal to me is the warm glimpses of the culture. Race and ethnic identity is always a subtext, with the Italian-American immigrant culture, specifically Sicilian culture, emerging as a chip on the shoulder, or a proud tribal badge. One of the ways this happens is with food. In GOODFELLAS, my favorite detail is still the way Paulie, cooking in prison, slices the garlic so thin, with a razor blade, that it essentially melts in the pan. In the IRISHMAN, Russell and Frank share bread and wine, even, as best they can in much diminished circumstances, in the end. 

THE IRISHMAN is one of the movie events of the year for me in part because of its spirit of getting the band back together. All these old friends—De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, Pesci—reunited. Scorsese hasn't worked with De Niro in almost 25 years, and Pesci was essentially retired. It's a nostalgia piece, and I fell right into it.  

It revolves around that late fifties/early sixties era, when Scorsese grew up, and there's a soundtrack to match, of course—another of the layered soundtracks that he pioneered on MEAN STREETS, inspired by Kenneth Anger's use of rock and pop in films like the feverish SCORPIO RISING. Collages of different kinds of music: "rock 'n' roll, opera, Neapolitan love songs," as Scorsese once put it. This approach became such a signature directorial flourish, accompanying especially the criminal epics (GOODFELLAS, CASINO, THE DEPARTED), that we sometimes forget the initial impact. THE IRISHMAN's soundtrack ranges across postwar popular music, stuff from the early '50s, In the Still of the Night by the Five Satins, music from THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA, the theme to The Honeymooners, lots of Jerry Vale (played by Little Steven Van Zandt in the picture). Underlying it all is Robbie Robertson's mournful cello score, evoking Bach's sarabandes. 

If this movie represents a kind of getting back to his roots for Scorsese, it represents the same for me. That is to say, it's a nostalgia piece for me, too, because when I was first getting into film, the Scorsese/De Niro collaborations of the '70s and '80s, especially TAXI DRIVER and RAGING BULL, transformed me into a convert to the church of cinema. His movies changed my life. In THE IRISHMAN, when Keitel sits across the table from De Niro, I couldn't stop thinking about these three guys—Scorsese, De Niro, and Keitel—standing around in Scorsese's mother's kitchen as young men, making MEAN STREETS. Or myself as a young person, first discovering that picture. 

Scorsese is great director of actors, and part of the pleasure of the picture is that it's alive with the electricity of acting—intelligent acting. (It takes smarts for introspective men like these to convincingly play guys who seem, on the face of it, to have no inner lives.) This is the generation, De Niro and Pacino, who revolutionized screen acting in the '70s, and this film is like a family reunion of the generation trained by iconic acting teachers like Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. Inspired by Brando and the Method, they personalized what they learned there, carrying the spirit of Stanislavski into the '70s and beyond. 

It's essentially a series of electric, edgy boxing matches, where two great actors square off against each other—dizzying tightrope walks that are all about the shifting of trust. Hoffa trusts Frank, but should he? These back-and-forths are all about betrayals of trust, between men wired with antennas acutely sensitive to any transmission that vibrates without a certain level of respect. If you say one wrong thing, you could be killed. These scenes dance on the edge of so many emotions, Zaillian's dialogue a play of profanity and violence as a person's fate hangs on the words they say.

There is so much acting firepower here, in fact, that even a witty turn by Ray Romano as a mob lawyer can escape comment. Anna Paquin is here as Frank's daughter, Peggy. While she doesn't get much screen time, Peggy is pivotal to the film's structure. From the time she's a little girl, Peggy knows there's something wrong with her dad, and with Russell. She's the one who sees the truth about them, and she is the one who asks the film's crucial, unanswerable question: "Why?"  

Pesci is revelatory. He conveys menace and a certain wounded dignity by turns. The real Bufalino, we read, was "low-key" and "cunning," and Pesci nails it. Quiet yet scary, Pesci's performance sometimes put me in mind of Lee Strasberg's great turn as Meyer Lansky in THE GODFATHER PART II. It is a master character stroke on Scorsese's part to make young Peggy afraid of Russell. (Children and dogs always know). There's something so poignant in the way Russell constantly craves Peggy's approval, and can never get it. I would have even liked to have seen this theme returned to, one more time.

A characteristic of great actors, it seems to me, is that their faces can register many different emotions at once—the way great food or wine unfolds a dance of succeeding flavors across the tongue. As Peggy refuses to acknowledge Frank at a funeral, De Niro's grand visage contains dimensions of tragedy. His eyes express worlds of hurt, while all of our sins seem written across the creases in his face.

During their mutual time in prison, Hoffa has a falling out with the diminutive "Tony Pro" (Stephen Graham). At a post-prison meeting to discuss Hoffa's comeback, Tony further inflames Hoffa's sensibilities by appearing in shorts. Of such things are great enmities made. In trying to reestablish his power, Hoffa also runs afoul of "Fat Tony" Salerno (Domenick Lombardozzi) and, irretrievably, Russell. He's just incredibly reckless, and there's nothing Frank can do about it, though he tries desperately to talk to his friend. Hoffa thinks his associates would never dare touch him, because he's got the goods on them. 

This reminded me very much of what a current gangster thug, Rudy Giuliani, said recently about why he figures the criminals he hangs out with won't touch him: he's got the goods on them. Rudy must not have seen too many mafia films. 

The film extends Scorsese's interest in organized crime. It'd be fair to ask, though, why we need another film about criminals and murderers? Haven't we been there, done that? (I thrilled to aspects of CASINO, but, sitting in the theater 25 years ago, I remember asking myself variations on the same question.) What new facet to the gem can Scorsese find? He once told the late critic Richard Schickel that CASINO was his final curtain on that world, his final statement. Specifically, the brutality of that final cornfield scene—which I've never forgotten—represented his last word on what he had to say about these people, so rotten, so human. He added, though, that if he did do another one, "it would be something that would be from a perspective of somebody who's in their seventies, looking back. That would be interesting." Now, he's given us that film.

Actually, in his book Conversations with Scorsese, Schickel writes perceptively about what Scorsese finds in these stories. He reckons it is the "the extremes of behavior found in the underworld that fascinate him. And also the ironies it presents." He notes that CASINO tells of how rum runners "needed paved highways to move their contraband," and the result was "the beginnings, at least in Jersey, of an excellent road network that ultimately benefited the general public at least as much as it did the gangsters." Indeed, Schickel goes on, it "is this alertness to the curious by-products of criminal activity that distinguishes Marty's work in this field from that of his competitors. Comedy, like violence, is a form of extreme behavior, and there is a lot more of the blacker varieties of comedy in his films than most people perceive. It is an important factor in making GOODFELLAS, for instance, such an extraordinary experience."  

THE IRISHMAN deepens Scorsese's interest in the ironies of the intersections between the deviant personalities of organized crime and world-historical events. Consider how the mob, made up of working-class guys who spent their lives scrambling desperately not to work, infiltrated labor unions, and not only led them to the pinnacle of their influence, but also helped precipitate their decline in the US (and thereby the decline in the working class, more generally). Did Hoffa, with his fine line in pugnacious populist patter, really care about the little guy, or was he in it for his own power? The soul, as well as the comic mileage, is in the details, such as the way Hoffa loved ice cream and hated people being late. Details, like the way Frank goes for chili dogs at Lum's as soon as he gets out of prison. Or the liquor in the watermelon, or the way a life can be reduced to cigarette butts in an ashtray. From the micro level of personal quirks, the movie's epic canvass also considers the mafia on a grand scale, in terms of revolutionary Cuba and the Kennedy assassination, evoking the geopolitical concerns of THE GODFATHER PART II and JFK.

 

The gangster trope also allows Scorsese to ruminate on certain home truths about the society and culture, in essence, to consider the double life of America, where, as Scorsese has pointed out, the dream is too often confused with the idea of getting rich quick, by whatever means. Like THE WOLF OF WALL STREET, which was meant to be a satire on our greed-based value system, THE IRISHMAN hold up a mirror to a kind of "success," but it's a success of gangsterism. 

 

In its beautiful, blue final act, the film becomes virtually a kind of prayer. Frank is a man alone, estranged from his family, haunted by a fateful phone call he once made to Hoffa's wife directly after his cherished friend's disappearance. Something Frank says as he flips through old photographs in the nursing home made me think of the sublime spirituality of the conclusion of SILENCE. Will we ever be able "to see ourselves as God sees us?" One of Scorsese's favorite lines from Bresson is, "God is not a torturer. He only wants us to be merciful with ourselves."  

In a thoughtful essay on THE IRISHMAN in Film Comment, Nicholas Rapold wrote about worrying that he is slightly burnt out on death as a symbol, or signifier, in mob films. He noted that "for the deaths inflicted directly by Frank, the valence of each murder seems to be just as much metaphorical as literal: each stands in for a sacrifice, a tough decision, the bearing of responsibility on behalf of someone else or something greater—in some nagging sense, more fictive than felt." Just like Frank, who seems to feel nothing at the end of his days when coaxed by a priest to make some sort of confession, Rapold worried that he too felt nothing, in the end.

It was different for me, as Scorsese finally puts the gangster to bed, for good and all, as Rodrigo Prieto's camera wheels away from Frank, this hollow shell (and a word should be said about Prieto's photography, dark and beautiful). As we leave suffering Frank Sheeran, all alone to face his mortality, I felt heartbroken for this man—a man who certainly doesn't deserve any sympathy. (He might say, I was just doing my job.) This is a testament to the virtuosic power of De Niro and Scorsese's art in winter. They had me asking, doesn't Frank, even, deserve sympathy? I realized that once again, De Niro and Scorsese had shown me a man who was so rotten, and so human. They'd made it quite impossible to judge him. This might be the great grace of Scorsese's cinema.

Rating: *****

Key to ratings:

***** (essential viewing)
**** (excellent)
*** (worth a look)
** (forgettable)
* (rubbish!!)