Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Ray Romano, Anna Paquin. Dir. Martin Scorsese, Netflix, 2019
I've been addicted to movies ever since my parents took me to see Bedknobs & Broomsticks when I was five. I'm the kind of obsessive who went to the entertainment section of our local newspaper even before the comics when I was a little kid. I pored over the ads, reading the credits, learning the names of movie stars whose work I would not, in many cases, see until our street got wired for cable and we got The Movie Channel in 1982 (it was Warner Cable's never-worked QUBE Interactive back then.)
I have talked of these things before, but the most wonderful time for me as a fledgling movie-junkie occurred between ages 11 and 15, when I began to think more critically about what I watched, when I discovered I COULD think critically about movies, that they were more than disposable product, as my parents viewed them. Concurrent with learning to think differently about movies came the realization of a filmmaker's technique and style, that everything I saw onscreen represented a choice made by a director, and that different directors could make radically different choices in the way a film is shot, lit, performed &c and still produce cogent and coherent work.
Born in '67, a kid in the '70s, a teen in the '80s, my learning curve was made possible thanks in large part to free range parenting. Some of my friends seem to be at a place in their lives where they want to villify their parents for letting them see more adult-oriented movies when they "were too young for that to be appropriate." Not me. I will always be thankful my parents gave me such a free hand in choosing what I watched. Seeing films I was perhaps too young to fully understand did no lasting damage as far as I can tell. I've struggled with mental illness and being homeless much of my adult life, but seeing Taxi Driver at age 14 has nothing to do with those.
Martin Scorsese was one of the first directors whose work opened my eyes, helping me learn that film can be, should be, an intersection of art and craft. At the time I first saw Taxi Driver it was already a celebrated film, already something I intuitively understood I needed to see. So when it ran on Movie Channel, I sat right down and got my young mind blown wide open. I don't know that I understood it in the way I do today, 39 years later, but as a lonely, isolated, often unhappy teenager I responded to Travis Bickle at a visceral level. I remember being both fascinated and frightened of Bickle's admission to having "bad thoughts," because I had thoughts I knew had to be wrong and bad and which I could not seem to dislodge by an act of will.
Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas were the first directors whose names I learned, and whose work spoke to me on an intellectual as well as visceral level. At 14-15, I had no idea I had fallen under the influence of New Hollywood/American New Wave, I just knew their movies were far removed from the schlocky Disney fare of only a few years earlier. Once you see Star Wars and Jaws and Taxi Driver and Herzog's Nosferatu, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes and Freaky Friday no longer impress.
It is not as if I immediately learned Scorsese's name and began following his career, but by freshman year of college I had seen Mean Streets and After Hours and The Color of Money and those did turn me into an official Scorsese fan. Which I have been most of my 53 years.
Not, it ought to be said, an uncritical or even sympathetic fan, at times. While it's a threeway tie for me between Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Ford as far as my favorite filmmaker (with Spike Lee, Clint Eastwood, and Howard Hawks in hot pursuit), I'm not always the most forgiving of viewers. All six of these have made some of my favorite and some of my least-favorite films. Of my top picks, this is particularly true of Ford and Scorsese. If Fort Apache and Taxi Driver are revelatory, even life-changing films, On Wings of Eagles and Casino are not.
I have been especially concerned for Scorsese, whose work following The Aviator has been spotty, at best. I love Shutter Island, but Hugo did not even pique my curiosity and the best I can say of The Wolf of Wall Street is that Scorsese's stylistic template made a perfect launching pad for Adam McKay's visionary The Big Short, released one year later. Still, as soon as I heard about The Irishman, I was on board. Let's face it: while Scorsese has made great films that have nothing to do with organized crime, all of his mob pictures (including Gangs of New York) are the movies for which he will be most remembered.
Not a rich - or even financially secure - man, I don't have streaming services on my TV. I have other, significant issues with streaming, but I flat cannot afford to have Netflix and Disney+ and Paramount+ and CBS All Access and the Criterion Channel and on and on. I have to admit to feeling a sense of betrayal when Scorsese made The Irishman through Netflix. I felt as I did when the Neil Young Archives series was initially released, a project which seemed targeted only to fans with plenty of disposable income. I had seen most of Scorsese's movies. I was a big fan, but going through Netflix caused me to feel as if one of my favorite directors had abandoned me.
Fortunately, curiosity and fandom and the Criterion Collection helped keep me from despair. Though The Irishman was released on my birthday last year, I wasn't able to get it until one of my best friends sent it to me yesterday. Having had a four hour nap from 4:30 to 8:30, I was wide awake and ready when I sat down at 10 p.m. to watch it.
Short and sweet: The Irishman got robbed at the Oscars last year. That's not a reflection on Parasite or any of last year's winners, most of which I have yet to see, it's simple astonishment that Pacino and Pesci give career-defining performances and went home emptyhanded. The Academy appears content to have finally given Scorsese his long-overdue Best Picture for The Departed, and now to revert to nominating and ignoring the bejesus out of each successive release. Oscar may well be a popularity contest with an established track record of rewarding crap like Crash and Out of Africa, but it's mindboggling to me that John Ford won Best Director six times to Martin Scorsese's one.
The Irishman stands out among Scorsese's mob-related movies and not just because it runs 3.5 hours and probably cost $300M to make, his longest and most expensive film ever. Mean Streets and Goodfellas and Casino and The Departed are energetic, fast-paced mob pictures with an inherently rock&roll sensibility. The Irishman isn't, and it's all the better for it.
The Irishman's opening shot, pushing down a long hallway in a retirement home to Frank Sheeran's room, where the former union head and organizer has decided at last to unburden himself of what really happened to Jimmy Hoffa, for whom Sheeran worked, sets an immediate tone for what is to come. Sheeran looks like Pacino's Michael Corleone at the start of Godfather Part III, ravaged by time, sickness, and grief. Bound to a wheelchair and ready to die, Sheeran is no longer an intimidating presence, no longer a man of fear and respect. He's simply the sole survivor of his times, once a major player in the political and economic life of the US but now a sad and broken man waiting to die. It's a long way from Jimmy the Gent slipping young Henry Hill a 50 for bringing his drink, an even longer way from the rail-thin street punk of Mean Streets.
We're all older and sadder. Scorsese is in his late 70s. Pacino is 81. Pesci and DeNiro are both 78, 76 when The Irishman was released, but Scorsese's audience is older, too. The sadness and regret Sheeran feels is something to which much of that audience can relate. At 53, I certainly can. That's key to The Irishman's success, I think. It's hard to imagine relating to a Goodfellas-level of flash and style in a new picture. It would cheapen, even trivialize, the film, rendering it yet another indication that one of our greatest directors has gone past his sell-by date, the way Eastwood seemed to have until The Mule suggested he still had something to say, the way John Ford's films following The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance steadily declined.
The original lede on this writeup reflected that it may be too soon, that I might need to watch The Irishman a couple more times before I have anything of substance to say about it. I feel that most acutely at this moment, as I suddenly struggle with what more to say. My interest in working through the plot is nonexistent. If anyone reading this doesn't know the story of The Irishman, Wikipedia has them covered.
It would be inaccurate to say Goodfellas or Casino or even The Departed glamorizes the mobster lifestyle, but all of those are at least sexed-up and hyperkinetic. The Irishman, on the other hand, is Scorsese's clearest statement of how empty and deadend that life really is. Everytime a new mob character appears, his name and his grisly fate are spelled out onscreen. This one died when a nail-bomb exploded under his porch, that one took six bullets in the head, that other one died in prison. The message is clear: these men died as they lived - not well.
Even without those details, the "crime doesn't pay, kids" message comes across loud and clear in virtually every scene, every shot. Karen Hill's observations of mob wives in Goodfellas kept occurring to me: bad fashions, too much makeup, everyone looks kind of beat up, but now it applies to the men, as well. I found myself reflecting on Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog (The Way of the Samurai), in which all the mobsters are sad and stupid old men who sit home and watch cartoons and mind-numbingly bad TV shows. Not glamorous, not sexy, not exciting, just working-class losers trapped in a life they created in the foolishness of their youth. Jimmy Hoffa ran the Teamsters Union nationally, his mob associates helped put JFK in the Oval Office, yet these men of respect and influence don't look healthy or especially happy. Their families fear and resent them. They have no true friendships, as most will have to betray and murder one another at some point. The colors are muted, everything feels drab and tacky and cheap. I would seriously question the mental health of anyone who walked out of The Irishman thinking, "Yeah, that's what I want, that looks like a good life."
My faith in Scorsese, not always rock-solid, pays off in The Irishman. Three and a half hours long, the movie so engrossed and absorbed me I found myself surprised it was 1:30 a.m. when the credits ended. When I first finished Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, I exulted that Quentin had finally made the movie I'd waited for him to make ever since Pulp Fiction. When I finished The Irishman this morning, I realized Scorsese had made the movie I had no idea I was waiting for from him. If Quentin never makes another movie, I will be satisfied he went out on top. If Scorsese never makes another movie, I think I will feel robbed. May Martin Scorsese still be making movies at 100, ten years after his death. It almost never gets better than this.
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