THE IRISHMAN (2019)
With The Irishman, Scorsese dips a brush into the American mob movie and splatter paints a piece that is at once as classical as it is abstract. Here we have a summation, a deconstruction and an evolution. All of the ingredients for narrative are there, yet we’re never in for the beginning or the end of most any sequence; we enter mid-action, linger for the punch and then we’re transported away before the coda. To Scorsese’s credit, this is energizing rather than fatiguing, and makes a film that floats just above the world of our characters, our audience perspective never allowed to cross into the scene enough to feel a part of it. To the film’s further credit, this plays as mirroring the central character’s experience as Deniro’s Frank Sheeran is not only an outsider to the worlds displayed in the film (earning his way into the insider position throughout the narrative), but is also a man trying to make his way through what he distinctly refers to as ‘trying to survive’. Sheeran is describing his experience at war, near-constant fear, he describes that any man who claims to have been unafraid is likely lying to themselves, but when the moment of combat arrives it is time to survive and that’s the long and short of it. Scorsese gives us a film from the perspective of survival mode, a film that moves so fast we can only react and rely on our loyalties to discern right and wrong; ties that bind as our only logic to make decisions by and know how to construct our own private narrative of what happened. Sheeran is not a man who attempts to construct some great narrative or self-image about himself, and neither so does the film. The best he does is cite loyalties as his reasoning behind his decisions (“for my family”, “for my country”, etc.), yet the film never truly demonstrates the truth, rather the hubris of powerful men shape the destinies of all those around them. Scorsese’s decision to de-age his actors and allow old men to play younger men, rather than the reverse, is essential. Rather than see traces of their younger glory days on the faces of old men, we see traces of their eventual downfall in old age on the faces of younger men; rather than seeing who they were, Scorsese never lets us forget who they will become. Frank’s tragic future is always in his eyes no matter what age the character is onscreen.
It’s the kind of pure cinema Scorsese’s been evolving into since The Departed, a kind of finger on the trigger narrative that pulls at a moment’s notice, launching us directly into the next sequence, only stealing away close-ups, glances and breaths as the film overall calls for (not the scene). It’s how a master of the craft constructs a film as a vast whole, not allowing any scene to run away with the film, and allowing the film to be more than the sum of its parts. By the time we reach the film’s final moments, the pace slows. As Sheeran’s body begins to slow down so does the film, and with Hoffa gone, his world loses its dramatic pull, now there is only the slow passage of time, watching and waiting as one by one your friends and relations burn out their flame and eventually so does your own. And what was it all for? There are few more shocking images in the film than Pesci’s shaking, feeble hand dipping a loaf of bread into a prisoner’s cup of wine so he can gum it down easier, no more haunting instant than Sheeran’s World War II vet eyes watching television news as American fighting continues through time; another series of events without a grand narrative, survival mode that lesser film’s try to assign a significance to. Significance comes upon reflection, when all is said and done. At the end of a life, all we’re left with are the pieces of what we have left, what we didn’t lose along the way. It is Scorsese’s rejection and embracing of narrative that gives The Irishman its depth. As time goes by, a young nurse doesn’t even know the name Jimmy Hoffa. The haunting truth of time, who holds all the cards during a hand is all that seems to matter, but when the hand is over, who remembers? How does a mind locked in survival mode deal with finality? It doesn’t really, and Frank’s last days are spent trying to find a way it can all end without it feeling so “final”. The film floats effortlessly on its moments and soundtrack for much of its runtime. The rejection of grand narrative leaves us with the ego and its own survival instinct as the one who occupies the driver’s seat of this mid-twentieth century tapestry. The ego can never back down, the ego takes ownership and possession, the ego is ever-hungry. Hoffa can neither stand to be kept waiting, nor let go of even the smallest infraction, for to give even an inch would seem to leave the door wide open to destruction. Once a desire is cemented, the ego must drill deeper and deeper at all costs; dig its heels in no matter how trivial. It could be an organization we run, a pension we’re owed, or the validation of a child we think is reticent to connect with us. In a fleeting film that rarely lingers, one of our few lengthy scenes takes place in Hoffa’s son’s car discussing a fish, a trivial matter yet no one will let it go. Scorsese’s deepest impacts come from his fatalism, constantly pulling us from the narrative to remind us that these characters and the real lives they were based on were headed for nothing but destruction and premature death. That one character was well-liked and dies of natural causes becomes a punchline. It’s this refusal to attempt a surprise moment, actively refusing narrative excitement, that so characterizes the hit man’s life. The target is ambushed, but the hit man knows it’s coming, every time.
Not a moment in the film is without closure or called back in some way, and it’s to Scorsese’s credit that he makes it look so easy. The film is completely bolstered by each scene weaving seamlessly with the others, the narrative pull driving relentlessly toward the inevitable climax. The true point of The Irishman, however, doesn’t occur until after the climax is over and done. Hoffa is dead, Sheeran and Russel drive off, and the film seems poised to cut to the credits, but Scorsese lingers. He lingers on long after; long after Russell and the rest are dead and gone, long after Sheeran’s attempts to reconnect with his estranged daughter Peggy have failed for the last time, long after he’s selected his own plot and casket. Long after all those would-be Earth-shattering moments have faded into dust only to be replaced by new Earth-shattering moments and new men like Sheeran just trying to find their place in it all. Men fall in and out of power, and the power plays reverberate through the lives of the other men. The courts beat the drum of justice, politicians beat the drum of patriotism, unions beat the drum of rights, while the mob beats the drum of family. At the end of the day, as far as life through Sheeran’s eyes, the hand that beats the drum is always money and power, and for every organization, there’s loyalties and leaders, and each one trying to move against the other when they get their chance. Sure, one hand can wash the other when it needs to; Hoffa donates to Nixon, Kennedy moves to lock up Hoffa, Nixon frees Hoffa, Russell and the mob eventually order Hoffa killed, it’s Frank who does the killing. The final shot, a door left ajar that a feeble and dying Frank can’t bear to see shut, is Scorsese’s final statement on money, power, influence, etc. No matter how much you got, it always comes to this.
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