The Irishman ***** (2019, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci) – Movie Review

Director Martin Scorsese is on fire for his 2019 mob crime thriller The Irishman – and so is his screen-writer Steven Zaillian, carving out a really brilliant, scintillating screenplay from Charles Brandt’s book.

Even so, the scalding movie’s main triumph could be that of Robert De Niro, who gives his best performance in a couple of decades, oh so subtle and nuanced, as mob hitman and labour union official Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran.

Zaillian’s speculative screenplay has the old and sick Sheeran looking back on his life and his connection with Italian crime mobster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his crime family, and his part in the disappearance of his life-long friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), the Teamsters Union former president.

It’s a stretch to imagine De Niro or Pacino as Irish, though Pacino continually suggests it vocally, especially when their characters are involved with Italian crime mobsters. But, we’ll let that go. De Niro is superb, and a first-rate Joe Pesci is quiet, chillingly quiet as Bufalino. Pacino, by contrast, does his usual honking and hooting. Sometimes it feels like he’s acting in a different film, but the contrasting acting styles De Niro and Pacino of work well together. After all, Hoffa was probably a flamboyant character, just like Pacino suggests, and Sheeran the backstage quiet man, a mobster killer who didn’t care to draw attention to himself. Bufalino also likes to work quietly, and equally dangerously, more dangerously in fact.

The Irishman powers along relentlessly for three and a half hours. There is no sense of struggle or strain or faltering. You know it’s a long movie, but you want it to be as it moves in a non-linear timeline through five decades. It’s edited brilliantly, holding some shots a long, long time and others quick stepping. The trick is knowing exactly when to do it. And Oscar-winning film editor Thelma Schoonmaker does. At the end, the film performs a great trick. It both speeds up and slows down at the same time. It leaves you begging for more even after three and a half hours. The characters may all be sick and twisted, but somehow the director, writer and actors make you care for them. They are that memorable.

The film has a vivid, you-were-there feel that gives it a tense, eerie, doomy atmosphere throughout. It’s like something really bad’s about to happen, and then it does. Scorsese tends to keep the violence in the distance, and brief, but that somehow make it even more sickening and terrifying. Scorsese is showing the banality of evil, but still, both he and the viewer are attracted to it, as much as repelled by it. It’s a car wreck you can’t take your eyes off even when you know you should.

The Irishman looks great in Rodrigo Prieto’s eye-catching cinematography and Bob Shaw’s production design, and is very well dressed in Sandy Powell’s inspired and meticulous costumes. The score by Robbie Robertson helps it rattle along infectiously. It’s nice that Harvey Keitel is in the cast too, though he has precious little to do as Angelo Bruno. No one else gets much of a look-in either, though Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin and Stephen Graham have the best of what little is going, none of them very memorable.

With its look-back reflections on life and death, religion, family and God, it’s an old folks’ film. More or less everybody is old. But everybody is very much alive and kicking. These old folks can’t half teach everybody else a thing or two and life and the movies. It’s all here in The Irishman.

OK, then, on reflection, the movie’s main triumph is Scorsese’s It’s got to be.

The Irishman was nominated for five Golden Globes, 10 Baftas and 10 Oscars, and did not win a single one.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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