The Retrospection Of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest directors of all time and there’s no doubt about it. For decades he has consistently delivered iconic films that have shaped generations and quickly become classics, largely influencing Hollywood. From Uncut Gems to Joker, Scorsese’s touch can be felt all over the films we still see to this day and The Irishman feels like Scorsese revisiting one of his greatest achievements. The gangster film. Scorsese’s films helped define the genre and with the Irishman, he comes back to the genre and does something completely different with it. Taking a new angle and creating an epic that is going to be remembered as one of his greatest films. And he did all this at 77 years old.
The Irishman is a gangster film, unlike any gangster film I’ve ever seen. It’s a gangster film free of all the swagger of a typical mafia film and it is instead filled with the somber, retrospective melancholy of a group of men facing the ends of their lives. This film feels like the natural progression for Martin Scorsese and the gang films together.
They made us fall in love with the dangerous and sexy life of a “made man” in new york and now they’re showing us the dark truth of mafia life. The blood, the pain, the suffering. These feelings are front and center in this film; Scorsese does nothing to glamourise the lives of these horrible people.
One of my favourite things he does in this film is plaster the name and death of characters on the screen when they’re introduced. Bringing the audience to the realisation that anyone involved in this life or even connected with someone involved will most likely end up dead. Despite their efforts, a dark and painful death will almost always greet them at the finish line.
Visually this film is one of my favourite films from him. From the very beginning, you know what kind of film you’re in for because the visuals do such a great job at setting the tone for the entire experience. The colours are very muted and grey and the entire film has an air of age sprayed over it.
Very similar to our Main protagonist Frank Sheeran who narrates the film from his care home, years after the events of the film have passed, and everyone who he ever knew is now dead, in jail, or despises him. Scorsese created a great protagonist in frank because though we know he is a bad guy, we still feel a bit of sympathy for him, even if it is a tiny shred. Frank was just a guy who didn’t want to go this far into the life however he kept getting dragged deeper and deeper, eventually leading to him killing one of his only friends who didn’t hold any power over him but truly looked at him as a friend.
One of the biggest talking points around the release of this film was its length. This film is 3 and a half hours long and I’ll admit I was one of the people doubting whether the film really needed to be that long however after watching it twice I think the length is 100% justified and every scene in this film feels important. Not a second of your time is wasted in this film and you really don’t feel the film’s length. The perfect pacing of the film makes for an experience that flies by, leaving you wondering where all the time went.
This cast is full of killers. You have Robert De Nero, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, and Harvey Keitel to name a few and everybody brings their A-game. I loved every performance from the quiet, menacing demeanour of Harvey Keitel’s Angelo, to the loud and bombastic confidence of Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa. Everybody feels like they truly got lost in their roles and each brought a different kind of essential energy to this film.
In the end, The Irishman is an incredible film. It’s new yet also classic. Unique yet also pleasantly familiar and it’s a film that I’m sure will become a staple in the filmmaker's incredible legacy. I love Scorsese, I love this film and I love that companies like Netflix enable filmmakers like Scorsese to make films like this when nobody else would.
