Movie Review: “The Irishman.”
If you have to wait in all day for a plumber, or are recovering from surgery, you might want to consider the fact that Martin Scorsese’s latest three-and-a-half hour movie has finally landed.
Released with a great fanfare by Netflix, who agreed to distribute after others pulled out, “The Irishman” tells the story of Frank Sheeran, a mafia hitman whose life serves as a roadmap of post-war organised crime in America.
Now languishing in a nursing home, Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) recounts his past directly to camera, flashing back to his younger days (via digital de-aging) and his work for crime boss Joe Pesci, which in turn leads to his relationship with union leader Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino.
The first question is: Can we now use computer effects to change the age of actors? The Irishman is a pretty hard “no” on that front. The CGI facelifts the actors have been given work pretty well on Pacino (late seventies but playing sixty-ish) and Pesci (similar ages) but are at their worst on DeNiro, mid-seventies but playing anything from twenty-five up. Weirdly, the effects team have opted to turn DeNiro’s younger self into a strange facsimilie of his older self, rather than just recreating what we all know young DeNiro looked like in Taxi Driver and Godfather II. It’s distracting and never quite works. Shots from the trailer of DeNiro’s character during World War Two turn out to be, mercifully, a single short scene in the finished film which could honestly have been accomplished with a different camera angle and a body double.
Unfortunately, this wasteful approach — spending money digitally recreating someone rather than just filming a double from behind — is symptomatic of the film’s biggest problem — that it is being made by old men who don’t want to be told what to do and who have thereby lost their ability to be creative. The fact that much of the plot focuses on Pacino’s Hoffa, an old man unwilling to bend to the demands of changing circumstances, is the sort of meta-irony that could be explored forever.
Indeed, “The Irishman” isn’t a bad film, so much as it’s a pretty good one that’s over-long and slightly confused in its focus. Even the title, “The Irishman,” doesn’t appear at the start, with the opening credits seeming to prefer the original moniker of the source book, “I Hear You Paint Houses.” The fact that the framing device for an over-long and unfocused narative is the anecdotes of an old man is the sort of meta-irony that- …forget it, you get the idea.
There are, in truth, two compelling stories contained in “The Irishman.” One sees the mob’s role in the election of John F. Kennedy and their sense of betrayal when he selects his ambitious brother Bobby as attorney general, railroading the plans of Hoffa and his Mafia partners. The other story is that of post-Kennedy Hoffa’s determination to return to power, and DeNiro’s agony as he, now Hoffa’s right hand man, has to watch his friend blithely burn increasingly vital bridges.
With such an obvious two-part structure (to say nothing, no pun intended, of Anna Paquin’s silent daughter, the emblem of DeNiro’s isolation from normal family life) it feels as though “The Irishman” should have been two films. Or a TV series. Instead we get a too-long movie.
There’s one truly brilliant scene, in which Pacino’s juggernaut self-confidence rides roughshod over DeNiro’s emotionally stunted attempts to make his friend see that he’s in danger, but one great scene in three and a half hours isn’t a great hit rate. Other moments that could have been affecting (DeNiro’s one moment of guilt, quickly stifled before anyone knows the full horror of his past) would have been better served if the structure of the film had been different.
Overall, we’re left with a pretty good Greatest Hits set from the old pros, but one can’t help but wonder how great it could have been with younger, fresher creative blood.