Rating: R
Runtime: 3 hours, 29 minute
Director: Martin Scorsese
Quick Impressions:
The Irishman is easily Scorsese’s most reined in film of the new millennium. (Well, I mean, it’s not that new anymore. I am so excited for the 20s when decades become easily nicknamed and clearly defined again!) I’m a person who always likes Scorsese’s films but almost never loves them. (The “almost” is for The Departed. I loved that movie and connected to DiCaprio’s performance so intensely. Such a great performance, and not even nominated! What a crime!) Most of Scorsese’s recent movies feel like runaway train rides to me. (Ironically, the least frenzied of them features a train literally jumping out of the screen at the audience.) He always does good work, but it isn’t always my favorite (though I strongly preferred The Aviator to Million Dollar Baby (a movie that frustrated me to no end because it is a fictional situation deliberately contrived to be as frustrating and no-win as possible). (I’m glad Morgan Freeman finally won an Oscar, though.)
I truly wasn’t sure how I would react to The Irishman. I was dying to see it. (If it had played near me, I would have gladly bought a ticket to see it on the big screen.) But I didn’t know what watching it would be like. I mean, three-and-a-half hours! The Wolf of Wallstreet nearly killed me at three, and keep in mind, Leonardo DiCaprio is one of my favorite actors. (That movie is just so exhausting! Jonah Hill’s antics alone are enough to make you prematurely gray.) I truly do love that scene on the yacht, and I did love the introduction to Margot Robbie, but that movie was a little bit much for me. I swear like a sailor myself, but by the end I felt like I’d been…done in by excessive profanity, shall we say. (That movie did convince me that DiCaprio should play Hitler, though, in a serious biopic, and I still wish that would happen.)
Anyway, the three-and-a-half hours I gave to The Irishman just melted away. It passed in a blink. This movie feels so controlled, perfectly paced, never boring, never rushed. This is a really good, solid film. We watched it on Netflix the day after Thanksgiving while my ten-year-old was spending a couple of nights with my husband’s parents. (But you know what? She couldn’t have watched it. For a Scorsese movie about a hitman for the mob, this is extremely subdued. Yes, there is profanity, but the rate of the profanity is like…nothing. You get the F word maybe five times an hour instead of five times a minute like in The Wolf of Wallstreet. My husband mused afterwards that maybe being period accurate had something to do with this, or maybe it’s just the restrained nature of these protagonists, or the fact that women and children always seem to be around. Now make no mistake. They do say all the really juicy four-letter words. Just not that often. And for a movie about a hired killer, there is shockingly little violence, too. I mean, the violence happens, but it’s just like, pop pop, goodbye. Nothing like what Quentin Tarantino just gave us in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which was the least violent film of his I’ve ever seen, by the way). This violence is not graphic, and the director doesn’t appear to delight in it. All of it is either routine or vaguely sad.
“This is kind of like watching a mini-series,” noted my mother as we watched.
And she was right. It reminded me quite a lot of watching Scarlett with my grandmother back in the 90s. (Grandma would have loved this, by the way! She loved The Godfather films (even three), and she adored Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. As we watched, my mom kept saying wistfully, “My mother would have loved this.”
“She would have,” I agreed. “Too bad we can’t digitally de-age her so she can watch with us.” (That would involve a resurrection, so it would probably exceed even Netflix’s budget.) If this joke makes you uncomfortable, consider how disorienting it is to watch men who are almost eighty suddenly become forty again. It’s especially confusing when you can’t remember the last time you saw them. You start to question how old they actually are. By the end, I forgot how old I was!
The Good:
I love Robert De Niro. He deserves all his accolades. He’s a wonderful actor. I remember falling in love with his performance in the movie Sleepers when I was a teenager, then discovering his older work all out of order. I have never understood why some people loudly insist that he’s somehow damaged his legacy because he loves making silly comedies. That’s ridiculous. Obviously he enjoys making them. Not everyone has the same sense of humor.
I know De Niro put this whole project together, and I can certainly see why this story would appeal to him. Whether Frank Sheeran’s tale of how he killed Jimmy Hoffa is factually accurate or not (and I know many people have challenged his version of events), it is an extremely gripping, emotionally resonant story that perfectly fits the talents of Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, and Joe Pesci. It’s a movie about the Mafia that pointedly tells us not only how Hoffa died, but how everybody else involved (and everyone even tangentially connected to them) died, most of them violently. Maybe nobody ever found Jimmy Hoffa, but seems like a lot of these guys weren’t missed. Sheeran’s story shows that being a hired killer is ultimately a pretty sad life.
I’ve been in the dark about Jimmy Hoffa for as long as anybody. (I mean, I don’t know where he is! Do you? I’ve stopped looking, personally.) But I’ve also already heard multiple complaints that Sheeran’s deathbed confession seems highly spurious and might not be true. (Why a Catholic who had killed so many people would think it was a good idea to lie on his deathbed is anybody’s guess, but I can certainly appreciate that Sheeran’s story has a high likelihood of being at least partially false.) I don’t consider any of that particularly troubling. I approached this film as if it were about Richard III and the Princes in the Tower or something. Nobody can definitively prove (enough to silence the opposition permanently) what really happened there, but it’s still fun to read different versions of what might have happened. Maybe Sheeran’s story is false. But it might also be true. It seems highly likely that at least some of it is true. True or false, the story is well told and so superbly acted that it’s fun to watch. (Of course, scholars of the period with a deep investment in Hoffa’s legacy might be annoyed, admittedly.)
Watching The Irishman is kind of like watching Shakespeare–especially because Pacino’s Hoffa keeps Julius Caesaring his way through the entire film. There really is something delightfully Shakespearean in Pacino’s over-the-top yet endearing portrayal of Hoffa. People keep telling him over and over again, “Hey, beware of the Ides of March, Jimmy,” and he’s like, “I am constant as the Northern star. Nobody could ever kill Jimmy Hoffa, especially not my most trusted friend.” This really does play out an awful lot like Julius Caesar, with De Niro as the stoic, noble Brutus, and Pesci as the scheming Cassius (who basically gains nothing from his power play).
Here’s how you know the film is well made. It is three-and-a-half hours long and never boring. So many films make me long for the sweet release of death after just three-and-a-half minutes! But this one just proceeds in a measured, controlled fashion, and it’s all-too-easy to get comfy on the couch and watch the whole thing slowly unfold. (In fact, do that. Relaxing on the couch is the best way to watch.) The film uses all that time for careful character development and precise story building. It never feels slow or boring. And again, it’s three-and-a-half hours long. That in itself is an impressive accomplishment.
The film also features three almost-octogenarians playing (for most of the runtime) decades younger men. I won’t say the digital de-aging goes unnoticed. It’s definitely weird and off-putting, but it never makes us unable to believe the story. Watching Pacino, I never once thought, “He’s seventy-nine!” Instead I was busy thinking, “What are you doing Jimmy Hoffa? Haven’t you heard about your notorious ‘disappearance?’ Why do you keep blowing off not-even-veiled death threats from the Mafia?” Seriously, he negotiates like my four-year-old, who recently has taken to ending temper tantrums by denying everything and screaming furiously, “You must be having a dream about that because that did not ever happen in my reality,” and then running away up the stairs in a blind rage of tears.
Honestly I spent most of the movie wondering what on Earth Hoffa was possibly thinking and yelling incredulous questions at him over and over again. (I’m sure my family appreciated that. But that is one advantage of watching at home on Netflix.) I seriously spent 90 percent of the movie yelling at Pacino and the other ten percent yelling at De Niro. (“You don’t know who owns the rest of it? REALLLY????? You don’t know????? Because I know, and I’m just some idiot sitting here on the couch!”) I was too scared to yell at Pesci.
After seeing this movie, I have decided that Scorsese does better work with De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci than he does with DiCaprio.
This is definitely mature work. The film’s emphasis on consequences is perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole thing. (Live violently, die violently. Smoke, get cancer. Kill your friends, die alone.) I also find the movie surprisingly timely and topical. This idea that Sheeran is trained in the military to follow orders and kill, and now he follows orders and kills is easy enough to understand. De Niro’s scenes at the end of the film are extremely compelling. I wish that section of the movie started sooner, so we had more time to ask the questions raised there and explore the answers.
Best Scene:
My favorite moment in the film is a late conversation between De Niro’s character and one of his adult daughters. I’ve also seen their exchange in an online Netflix ad, so I don’t consider mentioning it here a spoiler. He pleads with her that he knows he did horrible things, but that he just wanted to keep his family safe. She scoffs, “Safe from what?”
I like the possibilities teased by this conversation. I can’t decide if it shows that Sheeran indeed made a mistake turning away from the mainstream and into a criminal subculture, or if, in fact, he accomplished his goal of keeping his daughters safe. He did it so well that his daughter does not even realize the danger she was in.
Best Scene Visually:
The story in this film is so captivating that I had a hard time thinking about visuals. Possibly part of my problem was that I was watching on a TV. I liked one scene of walking down a long dock, and I enjoyed watching taxis explode. (I mean, bold colors, bright lights!)
One visual flourish I did enjoy was the way little blurbs of factoids about various characters’ grisly deaths would pop up next to their faces as they were introduced.
Best Action Sequence:
Sheeran’s first big job after the mix up with the laundry (another scene I loved) is pretty exciting and also contains heavy foreshadowing.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Joe Pesci:
All three stars could easily get nominated for their work here (and probably will), but if I had to pick only one, I’d choose Pesci. His performance made the biggest impression on me. My husband feels that way, too. We talked immediately after the film and are in perfect agreement that Pesci’s is the most powerful performance (or at least the most surprising). I’ve never seen Joe Pesci like this before, subtle, understated, quiet, soulful, unnervingly sympathetic (yet scary). And listen, I like the loud, over-the-top, comic version of Pesci just fine. My family has always loved My Cousin Vinny (so if you want to rail about how Marisa Tomei didn’t deserve that Oscar, don’t do it here). I never thought that there was anything wrong with Pesci’s usual screen persona. But he’s so different here (so different!), and he came out of retirement to make this movie (after being asked like fifty times). Something really special is going on, and I’d love to see him honored for his work. All year I’ve been quietly rooting for Brad Pitt, but I’d be happy to see Joe Pesci win, too, after watching this performance. (The same thing happened to me while watching The National Dog Show this year. I was in love with the Golden Retriever the whole time. Then I saw that bulldog! What a face!)
Weirdly, I like Pesci’s character’s awkward conversation with Peggy in the bowling alley best. But I also think his final scenes in the film contain a degree of difficulty that Oscar voters might eat up.
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Al Pacino:
Unlike Pesci, I’ve seen Pacino give a performance similar to this a thousand times and totally knew he was capable of it. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good work. Pacino is electric and larger-than-life as Hoffa, and that means that we see both his charisma and flaws writ large, too. In some ways, I feel like De Niro and Pesci are doing heavy-hitting, subtle drama in a superbly crafted mini-series while Pacino is doing Shakespeare on the stage. Whether Pesci’s character or Pacino’s kept me more spellbound depended largely on who was on screen at the time.
Hoffa’s meeting with Tony Pro (the meeting on the outside, in Florida) nearly gave me a heart attack. I could not believe his inability to adjust his behavior to his own advantage. He clearly never learned how to ask for a favor. He’s really too much. Shakespeare’s pre-Ides Caesar is the perfect comparison. It’s so apt, in fact, that I’m sure the director, screenwriter, and actor must have made the comparison themselves. Pacino does Shakespeare all the time. (As far as I’m concerned, he’s doing Shakespeare in this movie.)
Most Oscar Worthy Moment, Robert De Niro:
Robert De Niro is one of my favorite actors. I require no convincing that he deserves an Oscar nomination. I don’t even need to see the performance. I know what he’s capable of delivering. He won me over permanently a long, long time ago.
That said, I would be stunned if he won the Oscar for this. It’s not that he isn’t great, but there’s too much competition this year, and too much of De Niro’s performance is restrained. Perhaps if he aged faster (if he got to the scenes of Sheeran as an old man sooner), the performance would be more impressive. Still, it’s hard to imagine what he must have felt while making that phone call, the willful cognitive dissonance it must have taken to continue calling as promised. I have a feeling that on a second watch, De Niro’s performance would seem more brilliant. Sometimes it helps to know the whole story first.
The Negatives:
I do think the digital de-aging looks a little strange, a little stiff or something. And De Niro’s intensely altered blue eyes make him look less Irish than like a spice addict in the 1984 Dune. They’re a little creepy. I kept expecting him to start spouting prophecies. Andy Serkis’s Gollum eyes looked more natural. What’s really strange is that the de-aging of Pesci and Pacino is far less conspicuous than the de-aging of De Niro, and I have no idea why that might be. Part of it may be that I hadn’t seen Pesci for so long that I had no idea how old he really looks or what age his character was supposed to be at any given moment. Pacino, meanwhile, seemed shockingly ageless, not young, not old. He was like some cosmic being to whom age did not apply.
Scorsese’s comments about Marvel movies not being cinema have been greatly sensationalized and often a bit twisted. In context, what he meant was clear enough. It is true that Marvel movies are fundamentally different from films like The Irishman. And it’s true that Marvel movies are so consistently what they are that audiences don’t feel paying to see them is risky, and so theaters play them constantly, often at the expense of non-Marvel movies. (But I mean, come on. It’s also true that theaters are more likely to show your movie if it’s not three-and-a-half hours long.)
I agree with Scorsese to a degree. It frustrates me that so many excellent films are choked out of mainstream movie theaters, that often blockbusters and art films aren’t playing at the same theater.
But by standard definition of the word, Marvel movies are cinema. And it does look really weird for Scorsese to criticize effects-heavy films when his own film uses special effects so heavily to digitally de-age its stars. For me, the de-aging thing didn’t work particularly well. It often made me forget that these guys are almost 80, but it never made me believe that they were young. Of course, it’s a bit like watching a young actor wearing tons of make-up to look older at the end of a movie. Either way, you know the age in question is an illusion, but you still enjoy watching the same actor play the character.
I thoroughly enjoyed this film, but I just re-watched Once Upon a Time in Hollywood earlier in the week, and I have to admit that’s still my favorite of the year. After re-watching that film, I felt elated. This one made me sad. (That’s not a bad thing, but even though I think I like Scorsese better than Tarantino as a person, I like Tarantino’s film better. And after watching a second time, I actually think DiCaprio is more impressive in that film than De Niro is in this one. I love both of them, mind you, and I could easily imagine neither of them winning. I wouldn’t even be shocked to see either of them not nominated!) (In fairness, too, on an initial watch, I wasn’t terribly impressed with DiCaprio’s performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I could watch De Niro again and be totally blown away.)
Before watching this movie, I had read several suggestions that Anna Paquin and Margot Robbie were giving similar and comparable performances. After seeing The Irishman, I can only say, “What?!!!” Robbie gives easily my favorite performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Despite her few lines, I would be happy to see her win Best Supporting Actress for her kind turn as Sharon Tate. (I will write more about that later and explain myself thoroughly.) Anna Paquin, on the other hand, was barely in this movie! I agree that the character is important and the actress is talented, but she hardly even has a part here!
There are few significant female characters in this movie. Somebody may find that problematic. I don’t. Paquin’s Peggy (usually played by someone else) is extremely significant. But we aren’t getting much from a woman’s point of view. That’s because this is a movie about politics and the Mafia in the 20th century. So I don’t consider that a problem. (I just re-watched Hustlers this week, too, and for me that film improved hugely on a second viewing. There are no significant male characters in that, and hardly any women in this. I don’t consider either particularly problematic.) I don’t expect 1917 to be crawling with female characters, either. Obviously everybody should be represented in movies, but I don’t think each individual movie needs to be about everyone. It’s far better to make authentic movies telling real stories, and let everybody make them. Let all stories be heard. But no one movie needs to be everything.
Since I watched at home with my parents, I know some viewers will have slight confusion about just which of the three leading men is supposed to be the Irishman. Also, the situation with Sheeran’s ex-wife is a bit confusing. She does appear to be with his second wife all the time. My mother kept asking about this. I have no answers. I suppose if my ex-husband murdered people for a living, I would get along famously with my children’s new stepmother, too.
Overall:
Watching The Irishman was far less taxing than I expected. In fact, it was easy to watch. The daunting runtime honestly just melted away. It’s a well-told, engaging story with a great cast, and it will probably get a bunch of awards nominations in the coming weeks. If you have Netflix, set aside a few hours and watch it. Why not?