Netflix Month: The Irishman (Dir Martin Scorsese, 3h 29m, 2018)

The Irishman, surely, is the last waltz (to borrow from Marty himself) for Martin Scorsese as the great director of the Italio-American gangster epic; at three and a half hours, and over $150 million, it is also his grandest, collecting back his great muses, Pacino, De Niro, Keitel, Pesci, for one final story, one elagic finale in which the growth, and slow decline of the mob and the Teamsters, intertwine with the life of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), who goes from truck driver to hitman, to elderly retiree narrating the film from a nursing home. It is Scorsese's farewell to his regular cast, in a film that at once rolls back the years in often astonishing moments of computer-aided de-ageing, and feels like a send-off, the closing of an entire era of cinema, and perhaps Scorsese's final large-scale film.

But it is more than that; perhaps more than any other single outing in Scorsese's gangster cinema, it is a meditation upon American masculinity, upon the nature of American society, as Scorsese scythes through the 1950s to the early 1970s, chronicling the rise of Jimmy Hoffa, the Kennedys, the Nixon era, that forms a backdrop to the rise of Frank himself, from footsoldier to union man to hired and oft-used gun. It is a meditation, on a colossal scale, on family and the Family, on faith, on power, on the ending of an era, through the eyes of one of its most infamous figures. Whilst it may not be Scorsese's swansong, it is almost certainly the end of his relationship with the gangster and the last time he will make a film on this scale, even supported by Netflix, again.

At the centre of this film is Frank Sheeran; The Irishman begins with a typically Scorsesian tracking shot through not the backrooms of a restaurant or a crime scene or the red-tinged bar-as-underworld that introduced the world to Bobby De Niro, but a nursing home. This is not a film of the here and now but a world twenty-or-more years gone, receding in the rear-view mirror, a world of ghosts that haunt Frank, the last remnant and survivor, only compounded by the heavy usage of CGI to bring back the De Niro, Pacino, Keitel and Pesci of yesteryear, quite literally resurrecting ghosts of past performances to rejuvenate its central quartet.

This digital de-ageing is at points utterly spectacular. Whilst the film moves around in time, with its surrounding 1990s bookends in which we see an elderly and ailing Frank essentially narrate to camera, and later face his own mortality, and its 1970s spine, which shows Frank, and his close friend Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) travel, together with their wives to the marriage of a family relative, via car, during which Frank is sent to kill his long-time friend and colleague, Jimmy Hoffa, the film begins in the 1950s, and here, its frankly astonishing technical feat comes into play. Here, De Niro, Pacino and Pesci have entire decades taken off their appearances, and this visual feat, in a film where no markers, or other digital motion tracking was used, is not only perhaps the film's most remarkable move, but also its costliest. That this at no point inhibits the performances of men, at points twice their character's age is equally remarkable, and at no point does the film feel restrained by the age of its leading men.

Certainly, the film is carried by these three central performances; De Niro is absolutely its backbone, and he is the last survivor of this group-as the film unspools, from his introduction as a union truck driver, including his first meeting with Russell, to his slow entanglement with the Philadelphia mob, including work that slowly escalates from mere chores to contract killing, so we see Frank become a more powerful, more nuanced figure. This, however, is not merely the chronological narrative of something like Goodfellas or Mean Streets, not the linear growth to power and eventual downfall, but a film that we, like Frank, have hindsight of, see receding into the past, of a life that Frank openly admits is in its final chapter. Certainly, we see echoes of the violence that Scorsese's other anti-heroes mete out in a brutal beating that Frank inflicts on a local store owner for harassing his daughter, but there is something throughout the entirety of the film that feels like a split from how Scorsese has previously shot violence, so matter of fact is the violence throughout, from shootings to beatings that punctuate the film.

It is at this point that Jimmy Hoffa appears in the film, and whilst De Niro's Frank is the protagonist, this is very much Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa's film, with Pacino practically disappearing into the union boss from the very first scene, the portrayal of one of the most famous figures of the 1960s at points absolutely uncanny, and the CGI perhaps at its best with Pacino's performance, the voice mannered and perfectly capturing the union man, the performance perhaps the single best of his career, in a towering figure of ultimate power. Perhaps the film's strength, though, is in Pacino making Hoffa the emotional centre of the film. We see Hoffa relax with Frank's family, and his friendship, and doting upon Frank's daughter. Peggy, whose relationship with her father is utterly destroyed by Hoffa's murder, as we see late in the film. We see Hoffa embattled by the forces of the Kennedys, and their positive witchhunt for him and his subordinates, and the power-struggle at the heart of the International Union of Teamsters with Tony Pro (Stephen Graham), and his subordinates, best seen in a tetchy and ultimately violent meeting between Pro and Hoffa, not to mention the increasingly icy relationship between Hoffa and the mob, represented by Russell and the other dons.

We see him go slowly from ultimate power, a figure, as Frank himself puts it, the most powerful man in the United States after the president, to an embattled and fragile figure, the slow removal of the digital deaging as the film slowly returns to more recent years leaving Pacino a frail and fragile figure, lonely and stripped of power, losing first his supporter in the form of Russ, and his friend in the form of Frank, before his ignominious death interactions between this central trio, as Frank becomes Hoffa's bodyguard, essentially push the film forward, and it is here that Scorsese begins to unveil his main theme, that of male relationships, and of male masculinity, in a radically different way from much of the rest of his oeuvre.
There is a sense of an era ending, especially in the film's final third and post the death of Hoffa, of male loss-we see Frank grieve for Hoffa, and utterly emotionless at the loss of his wife. In so many words, we are not dealing with men in the prime of life, but in their twilight, the use of increasingly cold colour tones as the film goes through the decades, the sequence that forms the narrative thread as Frank and Russ travel to Detroit with their wives shot in autumnal oranges and greys, as its protagonists enter the autumn of their lives, that slowly give way to cold greys as one by one, its main cast begin to die.

More than perhaps any other film in Scorsese, it concerns itself with mortality-many of its more minor characters are introduced with titles, and their eventual fates-whilst almost the final half hour of the film is taken up with Frank confronting his mortality, with the now wheel-chair bound hitman realising he is the last figure from this era left, and going as far as to buy a coffin and begin to confess his crimes to the nursing home's priest. It is a film in which Scorsese, now, together with his cast approaching their 80s, are beginning to consider their legacies, their mortality; it's difficult to consider Scorsese ever making a film of this scale again and this is almost certainly his sign-off to the gangster epic, on a grand scale in both time and cast, one final gathering together of Scorsese's muses, his great Italio-American gallery of heroes and villains and anti-heroes, before age and retirement takes them as it takes their characters.

This is not to say that The Irishman is perfect; it is, in places, astonishingly baggy, its middle third unwieldy and the film's often over-stuffed with characters, at this point in particular, and one could argue that the film's decades long narrative was, perhaps, better suited for the mini-series, for the chance to develop longer, and let its story flow better over a number of episodes. Moreover, though it arrives in the final third of the film, Frank’s relationship with his estranged daughter; indeed, with Scorsese suddenly meditating upon the bond between father and daughter, is underutilised-it's easy to understand why Frank feels bereft after the loss of his friend, but his bond with his children is altogether, and bizarrely underdeveloped, largely left for the overly sentimental ending of the film that drags itself over the finish line in an overlong orbit around its central concept of the end of an era. With a couple of edits, it could have been the very best film Scorsese ever made.

And yet, on every level, it is one of Scorsese's epics, an astonishing piece of cinema, its length, its scale, its strength as a film is undeniable, and it is stunning in both technical and narrative ambition, to bring back these versions of these actors from yesteryear, these digital ghosts to haunt Frank. The Irishman may well be the last dance for Scorsese's gangsters, but rarely has he produced a film that so perfectly encapsulates an era, and the ending of it before.

Rating: Highly Recommended

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