The Irishman
Starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Bobby Cannavale, and Ray Romano. Written by Steven Zaillian. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Opens Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox. 209 minutes. STC
The acid drip of expediency erodes a man’s soul in Martin Scorsese’s epic masterpiece “The Irishman,” a distinctly American tragedy where fact seems like violent fantasy.
There’s nothing unreal about the film’s quality. It’s a cinematic tour de force in form and substance, representing late-career high points for director Scorsese and his lead actors Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci. The film, screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox in advance of its Nov. 27 launch on Netflix, enters the season of gold as a major awards contender.
“The Irishman” is titled for the nickname of De Niro’s real-life protagonist, gangland hitman Frank Sheeran, who died in 2003 at the age of 83. That’s a very long life for a man of his grim calling — on-screen notes during the film keep a tally of the early demise of many historical figures big and small.
As the story goes in Steven Zaillian’s screenplay, based on Charles Brandt’s non-fiction book “I Heard You Paint Houses,” Sheeran is a Second World War hero turned postwar fixer. He graduates from stealing steaks to sealing fates over the course of his criminal rise working for the Mafia’s Bufalino crime family and the mob-connected Teamsters Union.
He’s also an unreliable narrator who imparts a matter-of-fact tone to the proceedings, which span multiple decades over its demanding but justifiable 3.5-hour running time.
Sheeran recounts — make that confesses — an alternate version of U.S. history in the mid-20th century. He cops to gangland involvement in signal events of the 1960s: the election and later assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and the subsequent Cuban Missile Crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Most dramatically in this film, Sheeran also provides graphic revelations about the 1975 disappearance and presumed murder of Teamsters Union firebrand Jimmy Hoffa, who is played — with scant resemblance but much brio — by Al Pacino. (Scorsese employs digital trickery to de-age his cast for flashbacks; the effect works well enough not to distract.)
In each of these events, organized crime plays a role as unseen catalyst; the acceptance of such claims requires a belief in conspiracy theories.
But no mental gymnastics are require to recognize the moral slide of Sheeran, a man who saw himself as a humble family guy — father of four daughters, from two wives — who did what he felt had to be done to get ahead, pursuing a version of the American Dream that ultimately soured.
Caught stealing sides of beef during an early job as a driver for a meat-packing firm, when he first meets the man who will become his mob mentor, Joe Pesci’s Russell Bufalino, Sheeran offers a bold defence: “I work hard for them when I ain’t stealing from them.”
Such entitlement and end-justifies-the-means logic is shot through “The Irishman,” but also the ultimate realization that you can’t outrun destiny.
To sin is to incur a karmic debt, all the more so if your sin betrays a friend. You can see this truth in the furrowed brows and hunched shoulders of De Niro and company, but also hear it in the gallows humour of their coded phrases — the euphemism “paint houses” is illustrated by a spray of blood against a wall. It’s the kind of paint that never fades, as Lady Macbeth discovered.
“It’s what it is” becomes the mantra for this picture, something akin to “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” from Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather.” There are right and wrong ways of doing things, even among gangsters, and Hoffa runs afoul of this basic fact when, fresh out of prison, he brazenly decides to reclaim the Teamsters Union presidency, after certain mob figures have decided it’s time for him to retire.
Pacino plays Hoffa with merry arrogance (“I’m always right!”) and a showman’s flair for pumping up an audience: “The day our trucks stop, America stops!” he tells cheering Teamsters.
But he also possesses the fatal flaw of a Shakespearean character who can’t recognize what his recklessness might unleash.
Always scarfing ice cream like a kid in a candy store, yet demanding about matters of attire and punctuality, Hoffa comes across as the most human of the characters in the film, if you can even use “human” to describe such men.
And the world of “The Irishman” is almost entirely male. One notable exception is Anna Paquin as one of Frank’s daughters, who prefers Hoffa’s braggadocio to her dad’s brutality.
Hoffa, who has grown to become Sheeran’s close friend and confidant as well as his employer, also notes the man’s taciturn nature: “Frank, you never reveal how you feel,” Hoffa says.
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Sign Up NowNo need to guess the affection Scorsese feels about his characters and actors, many of whom have populated his previous gangster dramas, “Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas” and “Casino” among them. “The Irishman” is not just a career high point for Scorsese but also a summation of sorts about a subject that has forever fascinated him, in the company of actors he loves and admires.
Scorsese returns time and again in the film to the 1956 doo-wop song “In the Still of the Night” by The Five Satins. The tune is first heard during an opening tracking shot that leads into the seniors’ residence where Sheeran is about to break his silence and tell his remarkable life story.
“So before the light/ Hold me again/ With all of your might/ In the still of the night,” the song goes.
In this context, it’s a poignant wish for human connection during the dark night of the soul that is about to unfold.
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November 07, 2019 at 07:11PM
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