With ‘The Irishman‘ Martin Scorsese makes an explicit statement that he considers his illustrious career as a director and a producer to be far from final. Besides, Scorsese is not only at the fourth feature film in this decade (plus some musical documentaries, another passion of his), but he is working deep in pre-production phases in two other films that promise to be events in the coming years.
‘The Irishman‘ is an interesting combination. It’s a film about the mob, a genre in which where Scorsese has already offered us memorable movies like ‘Mean Streets‘, ‘Goodfellas‘ or ‘Casino‘. The director does not hesitate to leave the big studios in Hollywood and works with the new channels of film production and streaming distribution, specifically with Netflix. He uses computer graphics – he already has done it in ‘Hugo‘ but here it uses a process of ‘rejuvenating’ the actors in a story that spans the whole second half of the 20th century. Most than all he brings back together the great actors who are Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, along with other well known actors such as Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, all (as Scorsese) in the second half of the eighth decade of their lives. They are all happy to prove that they are still here, and that they can add memorable roles to their already impressive records.
Frank Sheeran, the hero of the movie, the Irishman in the title is a real character in the histories of the trade union movement and of the American mob of the second half of the 20th century. Inspired by a ‘true story’ book, the film can be regarded as a docu-drama. Sheeran (played by Robert De Niro) lives the last months of his life in 2003, on a wheelchair in a retirement house and tells his biography – from a truck driver transporting meat to the slaughterhouses in Chicago to leader union and paid killer for the Mafia. Scorsese builds a specific American historical drama here, but he also takes a place in the series of directors who rewrote on screen the modern history of America, such as Oliver Stone did in ‘JFK‘ or Robert Zemeckis in ‘Forrest Gump‘. We can see on the screen a gallery of more or less well-known historical figures, from union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) to mafia bosses and their corrupt lawyers. Most of them are introduced with the date and reason of death, and none died in his bed. For American viewers this gallery probably speaks a lot, but for those less familiar with the history of American organized crime, the character lineup becomes at some point repetitive and we do not differentiate them from each other, at best through the actors who interpret them.
The pleasure of seeing De Niro, Pacino and those around them on screen is one of the reasons why I was nailed in the chair for three and a half hours. The atmosphere of the ’50s,’ 60s, ’70s and the blood-stained kitch in witch the mob chiefs lived are very well rendered. The process of ‘rejuvenating’ the characters using CGI technologies, however, works only partially in my opinion. Its use may bring some technical prizes to the Academy, but neither De Niro‘s Sheeran nor Pacino‘s Hoffa seemed credible and authentic to me in the scenes in which we have to believe they were of age. 30 or 40 years. There is still work left in this area.
I don’t think that ‘The Irishman‘ is the last of the great mob films in American cinema. The genre is already well-rooted, and as with westerns I believe that it will continue to give birth to new productions and variations in the future. The combination with the genre of docu-drama works well, and the film, without being a masterpiece, is a solid and interesting creation from many points of view. A film that shows Scorsese refuses to grow old and for good reasons.