"The Irishman": review

"The Irishman" is a 2019 movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino. It is based on a nonfiction story called I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, who has worn the hats of prosecutor, defense attorney, and homicide investigator. The book relates the confessions of Frank Sheeran, who worked for the mob for years. The story of the movie is about an Irish-American—Frank—who served under Patton in World War II, learned Italian while in Italy, then eventually became a mob hitman as well as a union president. The movie has a running time of 209 minutes, and the other major bit of trivia is that Joe Pesci was unofficially retired from acting when he was convinced to come back to play this one last part. While I'll talk critically about the movie later in this review, suffice it to say that Pesci pretty much steals the show, even from fiery Al Pacino. The movie flows along at a slow pace, but in typical Scorsese fashion, there are scenes that build in tension over several minutes before there's a paroxysm of violence. There's a great deal of overlap between the cast of "The Irishman" and the cast of "Goodfellas"—a topic I'll also discuss in depth in a bit. It's very tempting to make this into a spoilery discussion, but the closest I'll get to real spoilers is to say that the movie (again, based on the testimony found in a book) purports to solve the mystery of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, who dominates the final two-thirds of the film.

The story is told in flashbacks by an aging Frank Sheeran (De Niro) who relates his life's details to an unknown listener (presumably Charles Brandt). Years earlier, Frank was a war vet who made the acquaintance of Russ Bufalino (Pesci), a carefully understated mob boss in the Bufalino crime family. Russ took an immediate liking to Frank; this resulted in Frank's taking on bigger and bigger jobs for the Bufalinos. As time goes on, and as Frank makes more connections, he catches the attention of none other than Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), head of the Brotherhood of Teamsters, a huge union. "I heard you paint houses," Hoffa tells Frank over the phone before their first face-to-face meeting. Painting houses was a euphemism for splattering someone's brains all over a house's walls during a hit. As with Russ, Frank becomes close to Hoffa, and for a while, this seems to be the ideal existence. But Hoffa proves to be a temperamental guy, and his explosive outbursts begin to irritate, then anger, certain mob bosses. This causes a huge dilemma for Frank, who is loyal to both Russ Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa but must now choose one or the other.

We see scenes from Frank's family life as he tries to keep his violent activities secret from his wife and daughters—especially his daughters, but middle child Peggy, who is quiet and observant, is able to put two and two together about who and what her father really is, and a rift forms between her and her dad. Meanwhile, John F. Kennedy ascends to the Oval Office, and he installs his brother Bobby Kennedy as Attorney General. Bobby immediately begins an anti-mob, anti-corruption crusade, much of which focuses on Jimmy Hoffa. Frank, one of Hoffa's closest lieutenants, does his best to be a calming influence on Jimmy, but Hoffa proves to be a hard man to talk to. Things are eventually going to come to a head.

That's the general outline of the movie, which is populated with all sorts of colorful minor characters. At 209 minutes, the film is essentially a sprawling saga that spans several decades, which brings us to the much-talked-about issue of the de-aging technology that was used to make our principals look less old, in some eras, and almost young in others. Keep in mind that De Niro and Pesci were both in their mid-70s in 2019, and Pacino was just about 80 (he's 82 as of this writing). While de-aging the actors might make them look younger, there's no hiding the fact that, without body doubles, the actors all move about like old men. This is painfully obvious in a scene where a supposedly young and vigorous Frank arthritically curb-stomps a local grocer who had harassed Frank's daughter Peggy. The de-aging itself is somewhat fake and off-putting at certain moments, especially for De Niro's Frank. Young Frank (whom Russ bizarrely calls "kid" even though Frank doesn't look that young) looks positively fake, and in the years since the movie came out, several Deepfake videos have appeared on YouTube that purport to do a better job of de-aging De Niro. Some critics say that you stop noticing the fakery after a while, but that wasn't true for me, and every time young De Niro appeared, I was taken out of the movie a bit.

That question of special effects aside, "The Irishman" is basically "Goodfellas" with almost the same cast, the same themes, and the same Mafia-related tropes. You get the same familiar goombah dialect you've heard in countless gangster flicks, and as in "Goodfellas," there's plenty of lying, ambient paranoia, and overconfident people who end up getting shot in the head. Gangsters speak in threatening euphemisms ("It is what it is"). That said, the story could at times be riveting, and all the actors—major and minor—do excellently in their respective roles. "The Irishman" might be "Goodfellas" with an older cast, but bringing Joe Pesci back to play Russ Bufalino was a stroke of genius. Pesci played the volatile, doomed Tommy in "Goodfellas," but in "The Irishman," his Russ is arguably more quietly menacing, and far more powerful. Russ is the axis around which the Philadelphia Mafia turns; a few words from him can bless or curse your future.

What was also a marvel to me is how the movie had been so well received despite what it had to say about the filthiness of the Democrat party, labor unions, and pretty much anything else cherished by today's left. For leftist Hollywood to put out such a left-critical film is both puzzling and fascinating. The movie pulls no punches in associating labor unions with corruption and manipulation, and the Teamster-Mafia connection is on full display. But Republicans don't escape criticism, either: the movie notes that Jimmy Hoffa, who went to jail for fraud, received a commutation of his sentence from none other than Richard Nixon who, last I checked, was no one's Democrat.

Ultimately, though, there is a basic difference between "Goodfellas" and "The Irishman." "Goodfellas" felt like a giddy glorification of the gangster lifestyle; Henry Hill's remembrances sound wistful as he recalls his glory days and how they contrast with his current shitty existence as a nonentity in witness protection. "The Irishman" is more mournful; it doesn't flinch from showing the sad, lonely life of gangsters who manage to survive after decades spent living that life, left in wheelchairs to marinate in the memory of past sins. So while there are definitely parallels between "Goodfellas" and "The Irishman," the latter movie is much more explicitly a morality play.

I ended up liking "The Irishman," overall, but it's a depressing watch, and it does dredge up all the old Scorsese tropes. It's a flawed movie, and probably not Scorsese's best, but it presents a fascinating story along with some tantalizing, I'd-love-to-believe-this-was-true information about the fate of Jimmy Hoffa. Of note is that this is only the fourth time De Niro and Pacino have appeared onscreen together. The first time was in the much-ballyhooed 1990s detective drama "Heat," which I thought was an abysmally stupid film. "The Irishman," by contrast, features the best De Niro/Pacino collaboration I've seen. It's also a movie with spiritual depth: because of the movie's morality-play aspect, one might even say that Scorsese, who normally separates his filmmaking into explorations of gangster life and the biographies of holy people ("The Last Temptation of Christ," "Kundun," "Silence"), might finally be knitting those two sides of his artistic self together.