The Irishman

The Irishman (2019) is a disappointment.  With a run time of 3 1/2 hours, Martin Scorsese's gangster picture is a geriatric reprise of Goodfellas but without the cinematic razzmatazz.  The film isn't bad and, despite its inordinate length, The Irishman isn't dull.  But it's an unnecessary film.  There's no reason for the picture to have been made because it doesn't tell us anything that Scorsese hasn't illustrated before with more fervor, conviction, and beauty.  Like its protagonists, the film feels weary and a bit perfunctory.  These problems are illustrated by a protracted dialogue occurring at about the one-hour mark between Frank Sheeran, the titular Irishman, and Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic leader of the teamsters' union.  Robert DeNiro acts the part of Sheeran, a mobster assassin, playing against Al Pacino as Hoffa.  In the scene, Hoffa tries to convince Sheeran to stand for election as the boss of a teamster's local, #326.  The two men are rooming together in an unpretentious motel and the sequence lasts about five minutes.  Throughout the film, Pacino chews the scenery and he is both convincing and effective as the Union leader.  DeNiro just seems lazy -- he phones in a performance so understated as to be nearly non-existent.  (DeNiro's indifference and lack of affect is thematic, but it doesn't help the movie -- a passive and emotionally repressed protagonist is problematic as the hero of an epic film.  This is demonstrated most famously by Bertolucci's The Last Emperor in which the hero's lack of agency sinks what would otherwise be a brilliant picture.)  In the dialogue between Hoffa and Sheeran there seems to be nothing at stake:  the viewer can't figure out why Sheeran would not agree to run for office as the local Union president and, similarly, it's not exactly clear why Hoffa desires this.  The dialogue is ill-focused and maundering; we don't care about the outcome and, furthermore, it goes nowhere -- of course, we know that Sheeran will ultimately agree to participate in the election that will be fixed in his favor.  The scene doesn't advance the movie.  Nonetheless, Scorsese stops the action and lets the dialogue play out in what feels like real time, presumably because he wants us to enjoy (as he does) the presence of two great actors working together in the scene.  But, even, this effect is attenuated by the way that the dialogue is filmed.  Scorsese is a studio classicist -- at least, this is how he make movies nowadays.  He stages the dialogue in a series of shots that follow the classical Hollywood paradigm of shot, then, reverse shot, then shot and reverse shot over and over again until the scene ends.  It would be more daring and effective, I think, to stage the scene as one continuous dialogue, filmed as a sequence shot without cuts -- for instance, like the famous scene with Agnes Moorhead and Tim Holt in the kitchen in The Magnificent Ambersons.  Scorsese has the best instincts of any living director and I think he understands that his material here in this scene is simply not strong enough to support the intensity of one continuous sequence shot -- the dialogue would seem empty and tedious and, so, Scorsese has his great editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, cut the sequence according to the standard shot/reverse shot formula.  But the effect is to suggest that DeNiro, perhaps, can't remember his lines and, so, the dialogue has to be cut into manageable fragments -- and, in any event, the scene is wholly superfluous.

The Irishman spans a period of about forty years -- even a longer time if a flashback to Anzio and the campaign in Sicily is considered.  The picture doesn't have any real narrative trajectory and there's nothing like a convincing plot -- rather, the movie is a chronicle about hoodlums and the Teamsters that is detailed, historically accurate, I think, and, even, pedantic:  the film uses the equivalent of footnotes, titles projected over the images of various gangsters advising the audience at to their eventual fates -- either prison or being shot to death.  The problem is that a raw chronicle doesn't make much sense as a story -- it's just one damn thing after another.  Frank Sheeran is a Philadelphia hoodlum who begins his criminal career stealing meat off trucks. Petty theft follows a logic of ever-increasing depredations until the crook gets caught.  So Sheeran is charged with stealing carcasses for his gangster buddies -- he literally empties one of the trucks and, so, the officials can't look the other way.  The Teamsters' lawyer, played effectively by Ray Romano, gets Sheeran acquitted and, then, introduces the Irish thug to his uncle, a Philadelphia crime boss, Russell Bufalino (played by Joe Pesci in a very restrained manner).  Bufalino is entangled with the criminal enterprises operated around the fringes of the Teamsters.  Through Bufalino, Sheeran becomes factotum to Jimmy Hoffa, distinguishing himself by making bombs to blow up cabs during a conflict with the taxi-drivers.  Hoffa has donated a million dollars of Teamster money to Richard Nixon and, therefore, is despised by the Kennedy family.  Bobby Kennedy spearheads a prosecution into mob influence on the Teamsters and, ultimately, Hoffa goes to prison for four or five years.  In jail, Hoffa gets into a fight with a hotheaded Italian gangster named Tony Provenzaro -- Hoffa is contemptuous of the Italians and there's some funny dialogue about the inadequacies of criminals of that ethnic stripe.  (The audience can see that Hoffa is making the wrong sort of enemies.)  When the union leader is released from prison, he wants to regain authority over the teamsters.  But his surrogate, a fat dullard named Fitzsimmons, has been loaning Teamster pension money to the mob, financing their enterprises in Las Vegas, and the gangsters are concerned that Hoffa will call in these loans.  Ultimately, a scheme is hatched to execute Hoffa.  Repeatedly, Russell Bufalino and Sheeran try to persuade Hoffa to relinquish his campaign to recapture leadership of the Union.  Everyone tells him to retire, but he's stubborn and won't listen to this advice.  (These sequences involve the only real suspense in the movie and have a mildly tragic aspect -- Hoffa is too stubborn to quit while he is ahead and, therefore, seals his fate.  However, it must also be said that this part of the movie is highly repetitious -- all the main characters have extended, flaccid dialogues with Hoffa in which they beg him to cease and desist from his efforts to regain control over the Union.)  Sheeran, who is Hoffa's only close friend, is enlisted to assassinate the union leader.  He kills Hoffa and presides over the incineration of his corpse.  Then, he calls Jo, Hoffa's wife, and tells her that he's pretty sure that the union boss will turn up alive somewhere soon.  This singular bit of disingenuous cruelty later haunts Sheeran in his dotage.  After Hoffa is killed, the movie has nowhere to go.  The various thugs get shot or sent to prison.  Sheeran ends up in jail with with Russell, the mob boss whom he has loyally served.  Later, the FBI interviews Sheeran in a nursing home where he is confined.  Sheeran refuses to tell the G-men how he killed Hoffa and disposed of the body -- this aspect of the movie is puzzling; we're supposed to admire (or, at least, respect) Sheeran's omerta, that is, his refusal to snitch, but there's no one left to snitch on, and, furthermore, Sheeran didn't respect that code in babbling about his crimes to various writers who, apparently, were the sources for Charles Brandt's book about the murderer on which the movie is based. (In fact, Sheeran repeatedly squealed, telling various implausible stories about Hoffa's murder in the hope of securing a book deal -- you can read about this in The New York Review of Books on-line as of December 1, 2019; no one bought Sheeran's confession -- it was deemed too unbelievable.)   Sheeran has a painful colloquy with one of his daughters -- one of the very few scenes in which women get to talk in this movie -- and prepares for his death.  Just before the ending, a kindly nurse admits that she has no idea who Jimmy Hoffa was -- this may be a problem for younger viewers of this film as well.  Sheeran counsels with a priest and, in the final scene, is shown sitting alone in his nursing home room, the door half-open because he doesn't like the feeling of being confined.  (This synopis leaves out about 15 murders in which various gangsters get their brains blown out against walls or sidewalks.)

So what is this supposed to be about?  Sheeran is a blank, a man without qualities.  He's not ingenious or witty or courageous.  He's just a cowardly killer. He doesn't feel remorse for his crimes.  The priest that sits with him at the end of the movie, is reduced to saying:  "You can be sorry without feeling sorry."  And, as far as we can see, Sheeran doesn't feel anything at all.  There's a suggestion that his moral vacancy was formed during World War II in which we see him murdering prisoners of war in cold blood.  (These scenes are implausible:  Sheeran makes the enemy prisoners dig their own graves.  Why does he take the time for this exercise?  After all, these scenes are supposed to be set in the midst of the bloody chaos of combat in Sicily.  Why wouldn't he just shoot the POWs and leave them rotting in the woods?)  At one point, Sheeran compares Hoffa to General Patton.  In effect, Sheeran's defense is like that of Eichmann -- "I was just following orders."  This seems to be his justification for killing Hoffa who is one of his only friends and who trusts him implicitly -- Bufalini gives the command and Sheeran obliges by betraying the only man who really trusts him.  As punishment for his evil deed, Sheeran is shown to be estranged from his daughters -- yet, they really have almost no role in the film and, so, this estrangement doesn't feel tragic or, even, pathetic; it's merely a perfunctory plot element.  In an early scene, Sheeran is told that his daughter was "pushed" by her boss, a Philly grocer running a "mom and pop" street-corner store.  Sheeran takes his daughter by the hand, goes to the man's grocery store, and beats the grocer, finally operatically stomping on his wrist until it is broken.  Of course, the little girl is horrified.  From that point onward, she scarcely talks to her father and, later, very sensibly, rejects efforts by Russell  Bufalino to befriend her -- with friends like this, you don't need enemies.  Another daughter does talk to Sheeran late in the film.   She tells him that she never came to him with her problems for fear of the violent mayhem that he would commit.  Sheeran is so dimwitted that this comment comes as a surprise to him.  But these themes are undeveloped.  Sheeran's family life is underwritten to the point that it doesn't really register at all.  Indeed, in one short scene, we see him embarking on a love affair with a mistress whom he will later marry -- deserting his wife and his four daughters to whom he was supposedly devoted as a good family man.  Scorsese has no interest in any of these aspects of his hero's life, nods vaguely in this direction, and, then, moves onto what chiefly concerns him -- old men plotting about one another and making picturesque threats, followed by murders.  The director's total indifference to these aspects of the film renders the pathos at the end of the movie completely nugatory -- Sheeran has never cared about his daughters before, so why should we care that they won't talk to him when he's old and infirm.

The film has a complex and fluent structure:  for the first two-thirds, the picture is enveloped in a double frame:  Sheeran is narrating events from the nursing home but focuses on a momentous trip that he and his wife took with Bufalini and his spouse -- the two women are addicted to nicotine and the trip cross-country takes three days because the gangsters have to stop every hour or so for the women to smoke.  Along the way, Bufalino makes calls at various enterprises that he is "protecting" and picks up tribute.  Ultimately, we learn that this road trip will lead to a wedding (the lawyer Bufalino's daughter is getting married) and, then, Detroit where Sheeran will murder Hoffa.  Scorsese and his scriptwriter, Steve Zaillan, are nimble at keeping these narrative elements up in the air.  The film's typical plot device is to show two parallel strands of action occurring simultaneously and intercut with one another.  For instance, when we are shown a jury trial, the film cuts away to scenes in which Hoffa and his lawyer are conniving to corrupt the jurors.  When Sheeran's daughter delivers a speech to her elementary school class about the Teamsters and how everything arrives by truck, her words are intercut with shots involving explosions and other mayhem committed by the mobsters affiliated with the Union.  In one of the French New Wave films, I think it's Shoot the Piano Player, someone swears an oath on his mother's life -- Truffaut cuts away to an insert of an old lady dropping dead.  Scorsese does the same thing repeatedly in this film:  if someone mentions a killing, the film cuts away to show the murder.  In one scene, the movie stages Kennedy's inauguration, a Christmas party at Sheeran's house in which his daughter rebuffs the creepy Russell Bufalino and, then, when someone remarks that Joe Kennedy has had a stroke and is an "eggplant", we see the elder Kennedy sitting in his wheelchair on a terrace looking across the bay to Miami Beach.  On a granular level, the picture is continuously ingenious, mildly entertaining, and exceedingly nimble in the way the narrative is advanced.  (It goes without saying that the doo-wop soundtrack replete with minor hits from the era -- it's devised by Robbie Robertson -- is lushly gorgeous.) Furthermore, the last fifteen minutes of the movie develops some real emotional power as Sheeran confronts the fact of his impending death and grieves for the loss of those who have died before him.  (There's a particularly memorable sequence involving an aggressive casket salesman.)  These parts of the film are effective, but they have nothing to do with Sheeran's criminal career -- in fact, these scenes are effective because universal; they show us a destiny common to us all. There's more emotional impact in watching Sheeran lose control of his legs in the hallway of his house and slowly fall to the ground than in the dozen murders staged in the film.  But we would respond to this kind of material with the same emotional response if the hero were a garbage collector.  (There has been much press accorded to the CGI effects in the movie that "de-age" the characters, showing them much younger than the chronological age of the actual actors.  These effects are really not that noticeable and work pretty well.  But one cavil is in order:  CGI can take the wrinkles and jowls out of the faces of the actors, but it can't make them move like young men -- in a couple of scenes, most notably the beating of the grocer, we see a young Robert DeNiro brutalizing his victim but he walks with a hunch and limp like someone 75 years old.) 

Scorsese has been an important director to me.  In fact, I would say that Raging Bull is the film that has most influenced my view of how movies should be made.  Raging Bull is the Ciizen Kane of my generation.  I thought Scorsese's Silence was a masterpiece and have immensely admired many of his films.  But with The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that I loathed, Scorsese seemed to have lost his way -- you can't make an effective movie about villainy without showing someone who exemplifies some good traits.  In The Wolf of Wall Street, everyone is vicious and Scorsese seems to admire the exuberance of their villainy.  The Irishman lacks exuberance.  Scorsese's characters are too old to be robust in their evil.  But everyone in the movie is either wicked or clueless -- a film in which everyone is a villain or a victim of a villain, ultimately, isn't too interesting.  The Irishman simply recycles nasty stuff that Scorsese did with much greater flair in Goodfellas (and, there's nothing as brilliant as the sequence in which the cocaine-addled hero played by Ray Liotta is tracked by the FBI while trying to run too many quotidian errands at one time).  Thus, The Irishman simply feels redundant.