Pi@LFF: The Irishman
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Pi@LFF is a series of reviews made by the Pi Culture team attending the 2019 BFI London Film Festival. In this article, Kirese Narinesingh reviews the latest Scorsese film.
I had the mind-blowing opportunity to attend a press conference, following the screening of The Irishman, where Scorsese made a remark that his latest film was meant to represent a revitalisation of films from the 70s and 80s. It’s somewhat inevitable that a director like Scorsese, with a lengthy career of producing modern-day masterpieces, is bound to turn around at some point, take a long hard look at his career, and revitalise it. In effect, The Irishman is a story about reflection, or reliving the vicarious past. It’s similar to Goodfellas, in that it renders you with a bittersweet taste that doesn’t leave, just as the final, lonely shot of our protagonist, Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, lingers like a hauntingly tragic image, consuming himself, and us, in nostalgia.
But I’m getting to the end too quickly. This is a long film. Three and a half hours. In simple terms it’s a crime epic, or “mob story”, if the phrase isn’t too limiting, that’s told from Sheeran’s perspective as an old, sickly man in a nursing home. If the sense of nostalgia isn’t already present, the music certainly concretizes it: the score is like one of those light-hearted 50s songs that recalls “better, easier times.” We know better that this is never the case with a Scorsese film. With reflection, there are always flashbacks. With Scorsese, the flashbacks are complex. The film is made of three narratives: besides the present-Sheeran, we have his two younger selves. One features de Niro digitally de-aged - a bit uncanny at first, but nonetheless made natural by De Niro’s perfectly pitched performance - and the other featuring an older version, who is noticeably more heavily invested with the mob. He was already an aggressive man with a penchant for violence: at one point, he throws a vendor out of his shop for slapping his daughter, but there’s something off about the nonchalant manner he kills as an older man.
De Niro’s performance is unequivocally one of the best of his career: as an old man, he is uneasily unrepentant yet with a sincere desire to be forgiven, as a young man, he is “one of the guys,” a stoic, macho, everyman who wants to buddy up with the gang. His performance enriches the slow progression of younger Sheeran into the remorseless, handy-man killer he becomes. At first, his crimes are hardly worth notice; it’s quite humorous to see him get away with theft and even more humorous when we’re introduced to the different flavours of characters in the mafia. There’s Joe Pesci, who plays a subdued role as Sheeran’s boss and friend, as well as Harvey Keitel, who are “the big leagues of the Philadelphia mob.” Funnily enough, sprinkled under all the names of characters in their introduction are their respective manners of death. Keitel’s character, is memorably “shot in the head in his basement in 1980.”
Eventually, the two flash-back narratives merge. Do not forget that these are real people (there’s even a subplot with Robert Kennedy!) and the subsequent emotions are truthful and exact. Sheeran befriends Jimmy Hoffa, a huge figure of the 60s and 70s with ties to the mafia and even closer ties with Sheeran and his daughter, Peggy (Anna Paquin). This is probably the crux of the story. I’ve long been awaiting the comeback of Pacino. It’s been rewarding. Hoffa, brilliantly played by Pacino, in all of his stubbornly erratic, comical and sympathetic glory, brings out the deeper themes in The Irishman, as the figure that propels the downfall of the mob and Sheeran’s relative prosperity. After deliberation (or exasperation?) by the mafia leaders, he is forced to kill Hoffa, and commits the act, brutally and sharply, no questions asked.
The film’s tone until then had been almost easy-going in spite of the quickly shot deaths. There was depravity, but it was playful, with colourful scenes that did not warn of any long-lasting consequences. I felt a deep sadness when Hoffa was murdered. It is swiftly done, with the marks of a mature director who is cognizant of the desensitization of the mafia’s mundane killings and still manages to bring out a sensitization to this unique murder. I almost expected a reversal of events, where Sheeran’s character would prove heroic and set aside his mafia duties for his friend. Could I have been more wrong or naive to hope for a happy, noble ending? Instead, his relationship with Peggy, who says so little but expresses so much in her moral judgement of her father, is irretrievably lost, just as Hoffa’s body is never found.
What we have in this film is the depiction of the “brawns” of the mafia, one of its pawns in a vicious, savage game that leads to nothing, only estrangement from family and an empty sense of loneliness. In fact, all of the members of the once prosperous group slowly die out and Sheeran is the last man standing. It is a deeply profound film - I may even call it a masterpiece - which for the first time reminisces on what actually happens in old age to such people; to a group of men who commit violent acts. By the end, it’s sadly fitting that the final shot is Sheeran in his wheelchair, left for only us to pity him.