BEST OF 2019: The Walking Dead of THE IRISHMAN
This review is an in-depth, spoiler-filled discussion of the film.
From its opening frames, it is clear that The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s foray into the zombie genre. We begin with one of those great tracking shots the famed filmmaker is known for — like the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas. Only this time, the tracking shot doesn’t seem to have the same vitality and thrill we felt when we followed Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco’s characters. It’s slower, more meandering, moving about in a nursing facility. I could hardly fault someone from wondering just mere seconds into the movie if maybe — just maybe — Scorsese lost some speed on his fast ball.
Scorsese’s fastball is just fine. Too many people make the mistake of assuming all of Scorsese’s films are fast-paced movies about organized crime, as if movies such as The Age of Innocence, Kundun, The Last Temptation of Christ, Hugo or Silence didn’t exist. His 2014 entry, The Wolf of Wall Street (on my list as one of the 11 best films of the decade) is one of the greatest comedies of the last 30 years and it moved at the breakneck speed appropriate for a film about excess. His 2016 entry, Silence (also on my list as one of the best 11 films of the decade) is more artful, slower and lacks much in the way of humor. They are two masterpieces that move at very different paces. The Irishman is just using other pitches from his arsenal that he doesn’t typically use in one of his crime films. And the opening tracking shot announces to the audience: This is a knuckleballer’s movie.
The shot lacks the energy of the Copacabana shot because that sequence was about two people who were starting the rest of their lives together and thought maybe they’d live forever. It was about the excitement of beginnings. The Irishman is a film about endings and the passage of time. It focuses on men whose time is coming whether they know it or not; men doomed by the choices formed from their own hubris. You could call their lives tragedies, were they not so complicit.
Frank Sheeran, the character at the center of The Irishman is not among them yet. He spends his life on the peripheral plane — haunting the edges of wise guy life. Everybody loves Frank because he knows his place. He’s an outsider in a world dominated by Italians and he is careful to respect not only his wise guy friends but also their enemies… until he has to kill any one of them.
Sheeran has two wives and four children, but if you view his life through the lens of what is given the most narrative focus, his family is mostly an afterthought. His relationship with Russell Bufalino (a wonderfully understated Joe Pesci exhibiting quiet power) is the foundation of criminal life, but there is an extended middle chapter that is the films greatest focus — his relationship with Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, hilariously stealing the movie from out almost everyone). We feel Frank’s deep closeness with these two men in a way we never do with his daughters. Russ is like a father figure and protector, while Jimmy is like a wife (there is a lot of comedy milked between Frank and Jimmy’s relationship).
I must say, I’ve watched The Irishman three times and I simply don’t understand Frank Sheeran. I’m not clear that I’m meant to. Earlier in the film, Frank and Russell (or, as he refers to him, Russ) meet for the first time at a gas station when Frank is just a blue-collar teamster. His truck has broken down and Russ comes over and gives him mechanical advice on how to fix it. It works, jump-starting not only their friendship, but Frank’s life in the criminal underworld.
With most of his attention paid towards painting houses for Russ (a term used for whacking guys), Frank feels his loved ones start to pull away. At one point, he admits to Russ that his daughter, Peggy, is at times afraid of her own father, oblivious as to why that could be the case. Russ tries to communicate the importance of family, but Frank makes excuses saying “She’s just shy.” He listens to Russ when it comes to fixing his truck, but ignores him when it comes to fixing his own relationship with his daughter.
I mentioned hubris earlier and it’s exemplified in Pacino’s Hoffa, a man so blinded by his own ambitions and anger that he can’t see the curtains being drawn by the stagehands in plain view. One of those stagehands is Anthony Provenzano aka “Tony Pro”, an up-and-coming wise-guy-turned-union-leader whose popularity is a thorn in Hoffa’s side. Pro is played with simmering anger and goomba charm by the superb Stephen Graham, previously seen playing Capone on the Scorsese-produced Boardwalk Empire (I mentioned Pacino almost steals the movie from under everyone. The exception is Graham, who goes toe-to-toe with the legendary actor in each scene they share. It is no surprise then that these scenes are among the film’s best and most entertaining).
The other stagehand is Hoffa himself. A man of stubborn principle, he is too proud to admit wrong or eat shit to get what he wants. Pacino plays the famous union leader as a man who believes he’s building a legacy but is in fact digging his own grave.
Much of the last act consists of Frank trying — in vain — to convince Hoffa that he needs to swallow his pride and kiss and make up with Johnny Pro. And when Frank tries to make it clear to him that he’s in danger of getting whacked if he keeps it up, telling Jimmy, “It’s what it is.” Hoffa responds — in one of my favorite of Pacino’s deliveries — with incredulous hilarity, “They wouldn’t dare!” You see the emotional toil this has on Frank, who loves Jimmy and is trying to play peacekeeper. It weighs on him. Yet he doesn’t seem at all troubled with the way he is continually distancing himself from his daughter Peggy.
As she comes of age, Peggy is often seen staring at her father. In the beginning it’s curiosity. That curiosity turns into the forming of opinions and theories. By the time she’s older (and played by Anna Paquin), her stares are daggers of judgment and fistfuls of anger. Much has been made about how little dialogue Peggy has in a three hour film, but this is a clear case of less is more. Her power is in the way she suddenly shows up and acts as our avatar.
I mentioned in my review for Uncut Gems that Eric Bogosian does tremendous work with just his eyes. The same can be said for Paquin. Frank seems to float through life without any thought as to the damage he’s inflicting upon his family. It is only in these quiet moments when he catches her looking at him that Frank seems to feel any emotion at all. At first he seems to be defiant, but eventually that liquefies into shame and regret. When Hoffa — one of the few people in Frank’s life that Peggy connected with — is taken out, Peggy stares at her father, searching for a sense of humanity. Hoffa has been missing for hours. She asks her father if he’s called Jimmy’s wife yet. When he responds he’s going to, she’s reasonably outraged. Why hasn’t he called her yet?
What follows is De Niro’s greatest work in the film. Frank calls Hoffa’s wife Jo and is a stumbling, muttering, incoherent mess. His obvious guilt is saved only by Jo’s understandably desperate, emotionally heightened state. More importantly, his call with Jo is pathetic and cowardly.
Frank is emotionally stupid. He only processes emotions as they apply to his work and those friendships that stem from his criminal life. The call to Jo was personal. His relationships at home are personal. And he can’t interpret them. He can’t report or translate them. He can’t understand why he was able to murder his friend. He doesn’t have the faculties. I mentioned above I don’t understand Frank Sheeran. I think this is why. He’s barely human.
Frank is cursed with a relatively long life. His family mostly abandons him. His friends are all dead, mostly whacked at one point or another. Russ dies in prison and when he goes, Frank really falls apart because he’s truly all alone. His body breaks down to the point he needs someone to take care of him.
In his loneliness, he tries to make amends with his daughters. But it’s hard to make amends because he doesn’t truly feel shame or guilt (even when he tries to find religion in the end, he admits he can’t feel much regret… except for how he handled that phone call with Jo).
Here is what he does feel: He feels need; he feels helplessness. And he’s still oblivious as to the pain he’s caused his children. In his mind, he was a good father because of what he tried to hide from them. This distortion represents an unreality of which his daughters do not identify. He believes he was trying to protect them from the world, but he denied them everything because his criminal life was everything to him.
He was the phantom father who only became real, became flesh when he left the house and did violence upon his fellow man. The phantom they didn’t know at home became real on news reports. He’s not quite a ghost — he appears to have no soul. Or at least he lacks one that isn’t utterly paralyzed.
With no real family and his life of crime over, his haunting is over. He’s only the body now, all lost and wandering; a zombie. Now his family are the ghosts. And he’s haunted by their absence.
Earlier in the film, Frank and Jimmy are staying in a hotel suite. Eventually, Hoffa heads to bed, leaving his bedroom door open a crack. We see it from Frank’s point-of-view. And then Scorsese cuts to a medium shot of Frank, Jimmy’s eventual assassin, looking at the cracked open door. In the film’s closing moments, Frank echoes Jimmy’s action, asking a priest making his exit to leave the door to his nursing home room slightly ajar. Who looks at the cracked open door this time? Death is literally watching Frank. Scorsese cuts to black.
It’s hard to feel any emotion for Sheeran. But The Irishman makes you think about your own ticking clock. It comes for all of us. None of us want to go out alone. It’s something instinctive, whether you are full of love in your heart; or whether you are a soulless being; it comes for both those who are beloved and those who are despised. Frank sought love from the wrong crowd.
If you enjoyed this post, please be sure to hit the APPLAUD ICON below as much as you wish!
And feel free to follow me on Twitter!
