The Irishman

THE IRISHMAN   ***1/2

Martin Scorsese

2019

IDEA:  Former hit-man and Teamster Frank Sheeran recounts his time working for Jimmy Hoffa and the mob.

BLURB:  The Irishman runs over three hours and spans some fifty years, but you rarely feel the passage of either its narrative or onscreen time. Like a memory, duration empties out of it; days and years blur together through Thelma Schoonmaker’s typically propulsive edits, shuttling us between events whose temporal thickness gets flattened in the accumulation of experience. Faces, smoothed over and detached from both their actors’ appearances and our historical knowledge of them, exist outside of time altogether. This is an unusual effect for a long, reflective story about the tolls of history, but rather than hinder the film by robbing it of narrative sweep or physical heft, the approach allows Scorsese to do something he’s never done before in his prior gangster films: to show, with a grave, rueful moral lucidity, the permeating hollowness and existential futility of a life lived without ethics. Even during scenes most obviously designed for excitement, The Irishman is punctured by the melancholy of Frank Sheeran’s present-day testimony, coloring all the violence and corruption with a sobering hindsight. We know what it all leads to; Scorsese even compounds the sense of inevitability through chyrons revealing the characters’ mostly ignominious deaths. The film, although one of the director’s least visually remarkable works, is always reliably absorbing, invigorated by a host of strong performances and a snappy script from Zaillian. And then, of course, there’s the ballast around which it all must return: the image of De Niro’s superannuated Sheeran sitting in a nursing home, frail and alone. Now mere fragments of the past, what have all the hits, rackets, car bombs, retaliations, and ruthless political maneuvers amounted to? Stories, Scorsese says, that become movies about men who, if they’re lucky, will grow into old age accompanied only by memories.