[7.6/10] Martin Scorsese has been accused, not entirely falsely, of glamorizing a life of crime, and the mob in particular. The likes of *Goodfellas* and *The Departed* and even the indulgences of *The Wolf of Wall Street* are not, in the end, terribly flattering as to the end results of those lives. But Scorsese’s eye for the rise before the fall, his ability to craft a scene and suck the viewer into the allure of these worlds, can sometimes do the job too well. It’s easy to remember the glamour and forget the ignoble close to so many of these tales.
*The Irishman* feels like a tonic to that. It’s not without its beauty and glory. Scenes set in a lavish celebration of the title character, or in well-appointed Italian restaurants with delicious bread and wine, or with big speeches delivered to adoring crowds engage in some of the same myth-making that Scorsese’s prior mob flicks do.
And yet, this feels like the most matter-of-fact of any of those movies. It is uglier, visually and spiritually, than those prior iconic films. It’s a film about the mundane cruelty of doing this job, about how it alienates you from family and friends, and ultimately leaves you with nothing. It’s a long-form tragedy, encompassing how a good soldier did everything he was told by the people who seemed to have his interests at heart, only to leave him picking out his own coffin alone.
It also could have used an editor. The biggest knock against *The Irishman* is that it’s more than three hours long and doesn't need to be. It tells the story of Frank Sheeran, a truck driver who, through keeping his nose clean and following orders, works his way up from the local mob to being the bodyman for Jimmy Hoffa. The film traces his journey into and out of the organization, the intersection of mob and union politics, and the friendships both genuine and of convenience that emerge and wither away along that path.
And you will feel every minute of it. There are good ideas in *The Irishman*, good performance and good themes and good direction. But it is also a logy, lard-laden film, that feels like it includes everything that was shot because Scorsese and company couldn’t bear to part with any piece of it. Individual scenes stretch on and on and on. Smaller moments generally connect to the whole, but often come off as superfluous texture in a movie already straining to contain everything. What’s more, the pacing is downright abysmal, with the march of years happening in fits and starts without a real sense of progression or momentum.
At times, that approach works. Sometimes Scorsese slows down the film to capture the awkward, fumbling, human interactions from the wiseguys he once turned into larger than life figures. There’s a grasp toward realism here, where people have long, rambling conversations and only wrap around to their eventual points in the most oblique terms. Sometimes the languid pace forces you to live with some choice or impending unpleasantness in the same terms and on the same timeline the characters do. But for the most part, it leaves the viewer wishing Scorsese had either been more judicious in his cuts, or shaped this into a mini-series to keep the scale but maintain more structure and direction over the course of the story.
Still, the themes of the movie resonate. There’s a deliberate connection drawn between Frank’s time in the military and his time in the mob. In both organizations, Frank and those like him believe that if they follow orders properly and do their jobs well, they’ll be rewarded. The film makes those connections explicit, right down to Frank unwittingly delivering weapons to the CIA for use in the Bay of Pigs invasion. If there’s anything that characterizes Frank, it’s the good soldier, somebody who doesn't think but does believe that whoever’s giving him orders must have his best interests in mind.
The crux of the movie, and the bitter, de-glamorizing irony at the center of it, is that this isn’t true. Frank never gets disillusioned exactly, but in the end, he’s estranged from his family, forced to kill someone who loves and trusts him, and finds himself sad and lonely and still keeping secrets for no one at the end of his life. There’s a sense of “What was this all for?”, of broken promises and a numbing of the soul.
The most noteworthy little flourish in the episode is how many characters are introduced, big and small, with small chyrons that talk about their ignominious deaths. Some are blown up on their porches, some rot in jail, and some, like Frank, live long enough to see the wasteland they’ve created. For all the friendship and supposed family and solidarity promoted, *The Irishman* presents the mob as a bunch of gossiping, thin-skinned guys who kill one another for, well, not nothing, but not very much either.
The hardest part of that is when Frank has to kill Jimmy Hoffa. There’s the sense of Jimmy as a good man, one who, in his own way, didn’t believe in going all the way with the mob. The film uses Frank’s daughter Peggy as a talisman in that regard, warming to Jimmy in a way of innately understanding good that he does in direct contrast to her fear and coldness toward “Uncle Russell”, Frank’s original mob connection and mentor through the world of organized crime, and eventually her father himself.
There’s a dual tragedy there. One comes from Jimmy (at least the Jimmy of the film), losing his life out of an unwillingness to play ball and a desire to hold onto something that he feels he built, at the hand of his closest confidante no less. The other comes from Frank seemingly picking the wrong side, or not feeling like he has a choice, and the resulting conflict between his loyalties and his self-imposed duty to follow orders kind of breaking his brain.
The emotional high point of the film comes in Frank’s phone call to Jimmy’s wife Jo, where he’s almost too good to lie to her, but can’t quite face her or himself in having to console her over an act that he himself committed. The piercing understanding of his eldest daughter, and the way she implicitly understands and condemns the evil that her father participated in, levels a damning criticism of what this life gets you, even for people who seem more like dutiful followers than criminal masterminds.
*The Irishman* wastes a great deal of time in making this point. It indulges in different ways than Scorsese’s glitzier mob movies, hitting familiar beats and giving the audience every possible angle on event when twenty-five percent of that perspective would have done just as well. A more exacting edit, a sharper view toward pace and structure, could have preserved the overarching ideas of the piece, while trimming the heaps of fat that otherwise way this picture down.
Despite that considerable flaw, Scorsese still lured his mafia movie heavyweights back to the set for one last melancholy go-round, and each brings their A-game. If nothing else, *The Irishman* makes for a satisfying-if-depressing end to the unofficial series of organized crime flicks made under the famed director’s watch.
So many of these familiar faces have more lines on them. So many of the moments that inspired awe or excitement or luridness are rendered in a cold, unflattering light. And so much of the thrill of mob life is stripped away in an admittedly overextended but still hollowing third act where each bit of joy and glory is slowly but surely stripped away from Frank and everyone he knows.
If *The Irishman* is Scorsese’s final word on this thing he’s chronicled over the course of so many films across so many eras, then this lasting message seems to be, “It was never worth it.” It’s doubtful that this idea will dissuade any idolizers anymore than it dissuaded Frank, but by god, Marty can still try.
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