2019 Reviews – The Irishman

The Irishman is 209 minutes long! That’s nearly three and a half hours. Bloody hell. Have your bladder empty and your snacks ready.

Martin Scorsese returns with The Irishman, bringing Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino together. This is the story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran (Robert De Niro) as he meets Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), a man with his hand in all local dealings, head of the Pennsylvania mob. Frank starts to make a name for himself doing Russell’s dirty work, by shaking up and sometimes murdering unobliging associates. Russell then sets up Frank to roll with Union President Jimmy Hoffa during a time of immense pressure from rival political groups. When John Kennedy is elected President, and Robert Kennedy becomes Attorney General, Hoffa faces fraud charges, from helping out Russell and friends with their business ventures. What results with The Irishman is a pretty calm and respectful dispute over who needs to keep their mouth shut, with splattered blood and car bombings sprinkled throughout. The movie is based off true events.

I actually really enjoyed the last thirty minutes of the movie the most, where everyone else is dead or moved on, and Frank is left alone, suffering from the effects of old age. The men in this movie have lived rich and dutiful lives and Frank is trying to hang on to the mob code as it’s all boiling down to nothing. Franks’ nurse doesn’t want to listen to an old man’s wisdom, and she doesn’t even know who Jimmy Hoffa was, when only years ago he was a prominent public figure. Life moves quickly, he says, and you don’t realise it until the end. All Frank wants is to reconcile with his daughter Peggy (Anna Paquin), who was first to wise up on the violent actions her father took when he didn’t like what was going on. I really like the way Peggy is used, as we get her perspective through who she selects is a worthy man and who is dangerous; Peggy likes Jimmy Hoffa but she doesn’t want to speak to Russell or her father. We know that all these Union players are corrupt, but it’s interesting to see her young instinct on who is trustworthy and who is not; I think it influences our perspective on these men more than anything else.

The best scenes of the movie – the scenes between Al Pacino and Stephen Graham, who plays a rising figure within the Union. Poor Al; I thought he started out a little squirrely with his acting in the scene where Hoffa is going off at his men because it looks like he will be going to jail – his eyes are wild and the scene appears to be edited to cover up how many takes it took to come together. These megastars, Pacino, Pesci and De Niro, are old, and you want to believe that they can still bring it… not to worry because they can. I think Pacino becomes the movie’s genuine scene-stealer and his Jimmy Hoffa could be the most stubborn characters ever put on screen. De Niro is also terrific; he’s understated and doesn’t have to project outwards a lot, but he’s in nearly every minute of the movie and works as our guide through the mob’s organisation.

The movie hits on how Frank, and a few others, served in the military when they were younger, and shows the foreign conflicts the U.S. media is celebrating taking part in on the television through the years. I think the movie is trying to indicate how America has always nurtured a combative mentality and goes to explain how these men hold hostile minds towards rival factions in their civilian lives, especially those who served. Conversely, The Irishman also makes out that these mobsters can be no different to squabbling country-club women for the majority of the picture. If reality TV had been big back in the 1960s, they could have made a fortune off “The Real Housewives: Husbands of Pennsylvanian Unions”. I’d say the most used utterance in The Irishman has got to be “…he said that? Well fuck him! You tell him…”. Frank tries to calm people down out of heated situations just about as much as he is whacking people. I think the movie is aware of how excessively volatile its inhabitants can be and plays it up for sensation sometimes, especially evident in the scene where one of the mobsters is trying to understand why Chuck (Jesse Plemons) had a fish in his car.

Does The Irishman need to be so long? The runtime of 209 minutes makes The Irishman an experience rather than I movie, that’s for sure. There are no lulls and I wouldn’t want to be the one tasked with cutting it down, but I think The Irishman hits a marker of quality and holds the line for the longest time. It’s a lot of the same, where movies that are noticeably long usually change up their tone or location in a drastic way, as the narrative moves far away from its original starting point. Apart from Frank getting a new job with Jimmy Hoffa, nothing else really changes in the mobs’ day to day dealings. It takes about twenty minutes for Frank to meet Russell and then there’s about thirty minutes near the end where the characters are old, so that makes it around 2.5 hours of the movie where it’s mostly mob operation. It’s a quality movie, but I think Netflix has an advantage over cinema here, by having a pause function for pitstops; that might be sacrilegious to some. Scorsese is not unfamiliar with a long movie but this one absolutely takes the cake.

We knew from the trailer that The Irishman was to contain de-aging technology – sometimes it makes Joe Pesci look like a bobble-head and sometimes it’s seamless. This movie spans multiple decades; back in the day movies would have hired younger counter-part actors for the earlier scenes, but with de-aging, Scorsese can have his seasoned performers in every act. The movie uses a lot of prosthetics as well, to make actors older or uglier than they actually are. And I think Anna Paquin is supposed to be a teenage Peggy at one point, when the actress is clearly in her thirties. Consider age a relative concept in The Irishman or it’s something that will bug you if you get hung up on it – I would say its problematic making believe that these characters were once so young.

For me, The Irishman doesn’t have a high re-watch factor, but is the perfect production to watch some great actors come together again.

4.0