“One of the common knocks against Martin Scorsese's The Irishman* is that it's just another Scorsese gangster movie; he isn't doing anything he hasn't done before in Mean Streets or Goodfellas or The Departed. But that's exactly the point: The Irishman is every Scorsese movie, the culmination of his career up to this point. This movie has everything: mobsters with funny nicknames, gangland hits, '60s doo-wop, institutional corruption, David Ferrie...
“What this film demonstrates is that as much as Scorsese's career has been about depicting his Italian-American heritage and men who feel inarticulate frustration and guilt, it has even more been about chronicling the moral history of the United States in the postwar era, and our common inability to reckon with said history. If you met Frank Sheeran socially, you would probably think he was a stand-up guy, a hard worker, a devoted husband and father, a staunch union man. But the rot is in plain sight for anyone who wants to see it: Sheeran is also a war criminal, an adulterer, a corrupt Teamster official, the murderer of one of his best friends.
“Robert De Niro's Sheeran is all of these things totally, inextricably, as a result of the simple, circumstantial, day-to-day choices he finds himself making over the course of the movie's 60 years. And his inability to understand what exactly it is that has happened in his life, the terrible things he's been responsible for and the numerous lives he's impacted, matches our own collective lack of understanding, intellectually and emotionally, for where we are in the world today and how we got here. The movie's slow pace and deliberateness are the traits of a film made by an old man, but the boiling rage underneath, the desire to grab Frank Sheeran, or Travis Bickle, or Henry Hill, or Jordan Belfort, and yell at them ‘WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU?’ is the consistent anger that has driven Scorsese's career.
“Of course if you want to send a message you go to Western Union, which is why Scorsese's other great talent, as an entertainer, is on full display in this film, with a rollicking screenplay by Steven Zaillian, perfect editing by Thelma Schoonmaker, and peak performances from De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, among others. You could be forgiven for calling it a bloated whale of a film (during its 209 minutes you could watch both Boxcar Bertha and The King of Comedy and still have time for The Big Shave), but it's the kind of carefully crafted epic that few other filmmakers could or would make today, and in its subtle accumulation of guilt and regret it's one of the greatest American films of the decade.
“*One could say that the correct title is I Heard You Paint Houses, and I would politely disagree.”
~ Jeff McMahon
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