OVP: The Irishman (2019)

Film: The Irishman (2019)
Stars: Robert de Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel
Director: Martin Scorsese
Oscar History: 10 nominations (Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor-Joe Pesci, Supporting Actor-Al Pacino, Production Design, Visual Effects, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Scorsese.  De Niro.  Pacino.  Pesci.  Keitel.  The Irishman is the sort of film that feels, as you peruse its trailers, like the kind of movie that both should have existed already and that could never exist.  How could you possibly shove this many legends into one film-how is it possible that this many icons of 1970's cinema are still alive decades after they emerged as almost godlike figures in movies, titans of a certain kind of filmmaking?  These are all questions you should have going into The Irishman, and about ten minutes in you'll forget them.  The Irishman is meant to be seen on the big-screen-it's titanic, gargantuan filmmaking that one should at least appreciate Netflix for making (though it's hard to imagine another studio would have turned Scorsese down), but perhaps should be more appreciative that it's in theaters despite that hurting Netflix's cache.  It's also a movie of great scope, magnitude, the kind that isn't made anymore, and the kind that even Scorsese himself has struggled to create despite a 21st Century filled with masterful ambition (Silence, The Departed) and middling effect (Gangs of New York, Shutter Island).  The Irishman is, to use an overused phrase, "an instant classic" but it's also a movie that serves as a career capper for so many people-a sign that giants of the movies, despite wandering through the desert for years, could still pull off the roles that made them icons, but has a finality to so many careers you can't help but look at it with instant nostalgia.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film clocks in at 209 minutes, so trying to summarize the plot into one neat paragraph like we usually do is a bit of a stretch, but here goes.  Frank Sheeran (de Niro, playing one of many true-to-life characters in a movie that never feels like a biopic, but technically is one) is a truck driver who moonlights as a mafia hitman.  Initially he is the right-hand man of Russell Bufalino (Pesci), but Russ wants to assign him to be essentially the bodyguard & confidante of Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), the head of the Teamsters union and someone whose connection to the Teamsters pension fund frequently will be used to fund projects within the mob.  As the film progresses, we see these men, but particularly Hoffa, start to evolve, eventually going from a powerful leader to someone who is a shadow of his former power after prison-time, attempting to claw his way back to the top, back to relevance.  As the film moves, we see Frank have to choose between staying with the mob bosses who made him, or give himself over completely to Hoffa & his ambitions, a life more traditionally reputable for his family, including daughter Peggy (Paquin), who idolizes Hoffa and is distant to her own father.  Ultimately, Frank chooses the mob by assassinating Hoffa, which leaves him with a self-chosen family, but also makes his flesh-and-blood family view him as a distant killer.

The Irishman is possibly the longest film I've ever seen in theaters for the first time (Lawrence of Arabia, another biopic of a complicated man I saw in theaters last year, is slightly longer though it's aided by an intermission but I've seen that at least a dozen times), and it's one that I'm glad I saw in theaters, but particularly one I saw in one sitting.  The movie takes a while to develop-it's instantly engrossing (Thelma Schoonmaker will be winning her fourth Oscar for this movie-how anyone could make a 3.5 hour movie where you don't look at your watch once is beyond me), but it takes a while to see where Scorsese is going.  This is why it's a pity that Netflix is going to be the home to the movie for most of its lifetime since people will watch it in a binge-style like they would Kimmy Schmidt or The Crown (i.e. in pieces over a week) negating some of the build-up, though I'm thankful that they expanded the theatrical run of the movie for more people to enjoy it on the big screen.

This is because The Irishman is something special, and not just in the way that all of Scorsese's films are special.  Marty in many ways created a more accessible sister piece to Silence (my favorite film of his since Raging Bull), but one that comes closer to the movies that he has perfected over the decades.  I've read a lot of comparisons of this film to The Godfather, but in more ways it's really Scorsese's Unforgiven.  He takes a character that would have been a side figure in another film (The Irishman is essentially what The Godfather would have been if Clemenza had been the main character) and puts him front-and-center, showing both the romanticism of this world that we've glorified for decades on the big-screen, but in the process pulling it apart, slowly but steadily dismantling our idols within the world of mob movies.  Scorsese is probably the only person who could do this in the same way Clint Eastwood was the only person who could bury the western by creating a final, gargantuan bookend for the genre-he helped to create this world in the minds of so many filmgoers, and now he's putting his final stamp on the genre.  It feels like the last great chapter in a career of wise guys and dons.

Finality is what makes this movie so special, in my opinion, because while thankfully all of these actors are still with us, Pacino, de Niro, & Pesci haven't been this good in years, decades even, and show why they became icons in the first place.  De Niro gets the least showy role, but there's something so complete in his man who is hired to deliver death, someone who can't contemplate his life too hard or it shall destroy him, and he doesn't lean into any mugging to have us recall his lifetime of work.  The same can be true for Pesci, who frequently felt like a parody of his brilliant GoodFellas character in later work, playing Russ as a cool, silent villain-someone whom we understand has a double meaning to every sentence he states, and is always looking out for himself first, but is loyal because that's the best type of self-protection.  Lastly there's Pacino, who has seemed incapable of not mugging in previous efforts on the big screen, and probably hasn't delivered a performance this succinct since the 1970's.  Pesci & de Niro play subtler characters-Pacino has a megaphone on his Hoffa, and I honestly expected the worst considering he's spent most of my lifetime eating the scenery, but there's nothing of that in his Jimmy.  He plays him as a live wire, but someone who slowly realizes that his only way to stay in power is to coast on his own memory, weaponizing nostalgia as a tool to try to stay important...a strategy that fails to work as the picture carries on.  All three men are at the top of their game, and considering the showy nature of the character along with his legendary status, I wouldn't be stunned if Pacino waltzed to a second Oscar in the same way Gene Hackman did for Unforgiven.

The only complaint I really have about the movie (if you can't tell, I was enamored), is the de-aging and visual effects on display.  In a similar way to Captain Marvel earlier this year, Scorsese smartly avoids comparison between the de-aged versions of Pesci, de Niro, and Pacino with actors that aren't digitally-enhanced, giving us undoubtedly the best use of the technology so far on the big-screen, but the uncanny valley rears its ugly head in a number of sequences.  There are times where you're stunned that you see a young version of Robert de Niro on the big-screen, other times where he feels washed out (like the World War II flashback), and Pacino in particular doesn't do well with the technology, his face feeling flat or like his flashback sequences are just him with a facelift.  Pacino, so handsome in his youth, can't really recapture that same essence here onscreen, and because Scorsese uses actors who we know what they looked like at 30, 40, 50, etc, the comparison is too easy to make.  Unlike other films that have used this technology, it doesn't exactly pull you out of the picture, but it does invite confusion (the film is 90% flashbacks, and every time they switched time frames I had no idea when we were because I couldn't tell from de Niro's digitally-altered face).  I still think makeup or using a younger actor would have been better, but I'm not so much of a hypocrite to dismiss that Scorsese hits a new plane with this technology.  It's just that the real genius on display here is a master filmmaker that, at nearly 80-years-old, can still make one of his best pictures.