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The Irishman
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In the Still of the Night
There are certain passages in The Irishman – relatively rare passages, given the famous,
powerhouse style of director Martin Scorsese – when events start to fly,
bridging space and time, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing clicking over in strict
rhythm with the accompanying song tracks. These bravura montage sequences tend
to exhibit the same plot function they served in Goodfellas (1990) or Casino (1995): they show a parade of mobsters
and their hapless citizen assistants getting inexorably whacked, one by one, in
diverse public and private places. It’s the law of crime, of money, of politics
and power as dramatised in a large part of the director’s filmography: everyone
is fated to fall.
In a moment of distraction while watching one of this
these flipbook-like sequences in The
Irishman, I idly wondered: don’t these expert hired killers in high-tension
action movies ever get caught in traffic, or pause to take a piss? As if he had
read my mind, Scorsese proceeded to deliver amply on these contrarian musings.
Everyday situations of driving end up constituting much of the incidental
texture and even the central, motivating story mechanism here – especially when
the aggressive Tony Provenzano (Stephen Graham) shows up late for his meeting
with legendary Teamsters head, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).
As for toilet stops, the Irishman himself, Frank
Sheeran (Robert De Niro), informs us that, in carrying out a hit such as the
one he performs on Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) which recalls the finale of
the TV series The Sopranos (1999-2007), it is wise to first visit the bathroom – both to check out whoever
might be lurking there, and to “get comfortable” before carrying out the designated
murderous deed.
Such mundane details of irritation or comfort are
central to The Irishman for one, very
good reason: this is not a film about the glamorous life of crime. Sheeran is
not the type of guy who goes for the druggy highs enjoyed by Henry Hill (Ray
Liotta) in Goodfellas, nor even the
fleeting brush with Las Vegas wealth and showbiz royalty that lures “Ace”
Rosenthal (De Niro) in Casino.
Scorsese has often dramatised heroes (or anti-heroes – it’s hard to tell them
apart) who plummet overnight from the heights of lived fantasy to sudden
schmuckdom, becoming average nobodies who must eke out their last days in the
anonymity of suburbia.
Right from his origins, however, Sheeran is much
closer in temperament to that type of ordinary civilian. As he did in the army,
Sheeran follows orders (to kill), pays his respects, stays in line and respects
his elders – even when the time comes that he must choose between those elders,
and pledge his ultimate loyalty. Sheeran, in short, is not a typically driven Scorsese hero. Hoffa runs on
hubris and others around him grab for power, but Sheeran mainly wants to keep
the peace of the unstable system that he’s in, and maintain his own family life
– two goals that grow increasingly difficult as the years proceed. (Cinema in
2019 offered a fascinating close-comparison: Marco Bellocchio’s brilliant Cosa
Nostra chronicle The Traitor.)
When the central characters of Goodfellas and Casino fell, they felt peeved or puzzled, not easily able to adjust to ordinary life
without the previous overflows of cash, pills or sex. Sheeran faces a different
and more protracted final act. He has to struggle with guilt, the possibility
of remorse (which he finds hard to feel), and the difficulty of any clean
redemption or closure – in his lonely, invalid room, he literally likes to
leave a door open in the vain hope that his daughter, Peggy (played at various
ages by Anna Paquin and Lucy Gallina), will one day again speak to him.
Sheeran’s parental problem links up to a larger
thematic structure of family ties – just as Sheeran has two father-figures,
Hoffa and the benevolent Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci in a stunning return to
the screen), Peggy has two fathers, her own (who she rejects for his violence)
and Hoffa (who she misrecognises as a completely nice, loving, playful guy). As
sometimes occurs in Scorsese’s cinema, other family members – wives, the kids
aside from Peggy – tend to disappear into a fuzzy background, becoming virtually
interchangeable. On this point, too, The
Irishman can be networked with The
Traitor – as well as, on a more homely level of criminality, Clint
Eastwood’s The Mule (2018).
Scorsese’s characteristic cinematic style, too, gears
down for this essentially melancholic tale – in an echo of another epic crime
chronicle starring De Niro and utilising elements of the mystery of Hoffa’s
death, Sergio Leone’s masterpiece Once
Upon a Time in America (1984). Although there are some bravura camera
movements (like the virtuosic opening shot through a nursing home for the
elderly) and occasional whip pans in Rodrigo Prieto’s impressive cinematography,
transformations of crowded frames into ultra slo-mo frescoes of the grotesque,
and the aforementioned montage flurries, Scorsese is generally not out to
dazzle here. By subtracting the criminal glamour element, he leeches his own
storytelling manner of its frequent pyrotechnical excesses – because he no
longer has that attractive, unlawful drive to identify with as a creator, and
ally his moves (on every stylistic level) to.
In fact, there is a striking inversion at play in the
way that Scorsese and his longtime collaborators – including Schoonmaker,
composer Robbie Robertson and sound expert Tom Fleischman – have shaped the
material of The Irishman. Everything
here is pinned to the ultra-clean, direct recording of sound – and especially
to the voices. Conventional sound overlaps between scenes become ghostly
murmurs of repeated lines; the popular music tracks form a disquieting, droning,
ambient bed underneath all the incessant speaking. Political speeches,
whispered conversations, telephone calls (such as the crucial one made by
Sheeran to Hoffa’s widow), attempts at talking that get blocked and choked in
the throat – it is on this sonic plane that the film is most inventive and
expressive.
Arguments rage among American crime historians as to
the degree of veracity – or possibly very large fabulation – involved in the
real-life Sheeran’s “confession” as recounted in Charles Brandt’s 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses (those words
get a punchy, almost Godardian prominence, twice over, in the chunky graphics
of the film, as if to signal an alternative or preferred title option).
Screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, 1993)
has devised an intriguing framing structure in order to suggest that Sheeran’s
account is more a fantasy of reconstructed memory (shades again of Leone) than
pure fact: De Niro addresses his narrational soliloquy not to Brandt (who
doesn’t figure at all in the movie) but to the phantom camera; the effect is
appropriately haunting.
For the rest of what unfolds, Zaillian and Scorsese
hang the succession of scenes on the connecting thread of a road journey taken
by Sheeran, Bufalino and their respective wives – a leisurely scaffolding that
allows a concentration on the most quotidian details (such as the problem of
smoking in the car), while building inexorably to the most awful crunches and
reversals in the tested-loyalty intrigue. Zaillian is also good at sketching
the broadest possible socio-political map of the interconnections of criminals,
unionists, politicians and showbiz celebrities – at times giddily suggesting an
all-encompassing, ultra-explanatory conspiracy theory that embraces not only
Hoffa but also Castro and JFK!
The Irishman is, in many
respects, a paradoxical object. It feels like a minimalistic, purified,
deliberately emptied-out version of a typical Scorsese gangster picture – and
yet it cost a fortune to make, as the hundreds of names in the end credits testify.
Much of the budget, as is well known, went on the digital de-ageing of the key
cast members. Scorsese finds himself somewhat caught here between wanting to
pay a fond, miracle-worker homage to his faithful male actors (Harvey Keitel,
too, has a small but impressive role) – forever young, thanks to cinema! –
while maintaining the consistency (physical as well as emotional) of their
specific roles in this story.
The digital techniques – obviously painstakingly
applied from frame to frame – produce some curious results: there’s something
strange, some uncanny valleys swimming in the eyes of these performers, and the
younger versions of Pacino and De Niro look absolutely nothing like the still
vigorous, lean actors we saw a quarter of a century ago in Michael Mann’s Heat (1995)!
In general, though, Scorsese keeps a firm directorial
hand on all the levels and elements. Perhaps too firm: one senses that he
wasn’t willing to lose a single one of these 209 minutes (in marked contrast –
maybe deferred compensation – for the ironclad 167 minutes that Scorsese and
Zaillian had to contractually deliver to Harvey Weinstein at Miramax for Gangs of New York in 2002). Like many
filmmakers in their later years, Scorsese (now 77) seems to have become hyper-aware
of fashioning his own testament in cinema before fate or misfortune take away
any opportunity of him doing so; that tendency was already evident in the
solemn but slightly underwhelming Silence (2016), another of his long-nurtured projects.
Beyond the sound and fury of unions and politics, or
this or that historic crime wave or law enforcement crackdown, Scorsese is
shooting, a bit shakily, for a universal tenor and truth inside the story of The Irishman, in a mode to which he did
not aspire at the time of either Mean
Streets (1973) or Casino. In the
words of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane,
and as the frequent freeze-frame intertitles spelling out the eventual end of
characters remind us here: “As it must to all men, death came …”.
MORE Scorsese: The Age of Innocence, The Aviator, The Blues, Cape Fear, Bringing Out the Dead, The King of Comedy, Kundun, Rolling Thunder Revue, After Hours, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ © Adrian Martin 20 November 2019 |
