Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a sprawling, carefully calibrated, occasionally transcendent story about the role allegedly played by the Italian mob in the 1975 disappearance of the Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa. The film, adapted from the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt, begins with Scorsese’s homage to, well, Scorsese — a visual allusion to the legendary tracking shot from the Copacabana scene in Goodfellas (1990), which follows the mobster Henry Hill and his wife as they wade into a nightclub. But instead of being introduced to the glamorous nightlife of Goodfellas, here we are led through the quiet, lonely corridors of an old-age home until we arrive at the solitary table of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro. Sheeran is a cross between an unremarkable Pennsylvanian Everyman, a kind of Updikian character whose life story is woven together with current events, and Virgil from Dante’s Divine Comedy, a familiar figure who becomes our trusty guide as we venture into the lurid underworld of the Philadelphia mob.
In a narrative style reminiscent of Citizen Kane, Sheeran, speaking to an unnamed interviewer, tells the tale that will eventually lead to his involvement with Hoffa, all the while trying to make sense of Hoffa’s disappearance and his own possible role in it. From the contemporaneous scene in the nursing home, the movie flashes back to the 1950s, when Sheeran is working as a truck driver in the Philadelphia area, hauling frozen meat from butchers to restaurants. Soon enough, he meets Russell Bufalino, an Italian mobster played by a terrific Joe Pesci, who lacks the fierce edge and ungovernable vigor of his greatest prior performances but makes up for them in world-weariness and poignancy. Bufalino introduces Sheeran into the world of the local mob, for whom the tables at the best Italian restaurants in town are always available at the raise of a finger. They bond over some pane and olive oil. It is Bufalino who introduces Sheeran to Hoffa, setting in motion the wheels that will spin the story forward.
We first meet Hoffa (Al Pacino, appearing in his first-ever Scorsese film) during a phone conversation with Sheeran. His charisma is infectious from his very first words. “Nowadays people don’t know who Jimmy Hoffa is,” Sheeran tells us. “But back in the day, he was as big as Elvis; in the ’60s, he was as big as the Beatles.”
The film cuts back and forth between the old Sheeran in the nursing home, the young Sheeran in northeast Pennsylvania, and the aging Sheeran as he and Bufalino embark on a pivotal road trip from Philadelphia to Detroit in 1975. This final element of the film makes The Irishman not only a classic mobster film but a buddy road-trip movie, if a subdued and serious one, starring one of the greatest pairs of actors to ever grace the silver screen.
“Subdued” is indeed the operative word for The Irishman. Despite a few trademark Pacino rants and violent scenes, the movie is languid, with the gait and pacing of an old man hobbling on his cane to the kitchen. The manic energy that is the hallmark of Scorsese’s greatest films — Goodfellas, Casino, Mean Streets, The Wolf of Wall Street — is missing. But this is by design. Scorsese here is not as interested in portraying the more sensational aspects of gangster life, a field which he has already mined quite thoroughly. Yes, we do get our fair share of mafia violence, olive oil, scenes set in Roman Catholic churches, box-shaped cars, and more heads of slicked-back hair than the grains of sand on Atlantic Beach. But Scorsese wants to portray another side of mobster life and of life in general. And, as in his last feature film, Silence (2016), he is reaching for the profound.
There is something elegiac about The Irishman — a sense of mourning for a way of life and for cinema that is now in its twilight; the film’s mood evokes The Leopard, Luchino Visconti’s epic 1963 tribute to the Italian aristocracy. Who knows how many more De Niro-Scorsese collaborations there will be? How many more great Pacino performances we will be privileged to behold? And who knows how much longer old-fashioned cinema will last? This is a movie meant to be viewed on the big screen, and yet its theatrical release preceded its streaming release on Netflix by only a few weeks. Scorsese agreed to these terms in order to attain funding for this $150 million epic, but in his heart of hearts, he must know that sending one of his passion projects from the theaters to streaming services so soon sounds the death knell for the kind of cinema on which he was reared and which he has promoted his entire career.
There are several homages to that good old-fashioned cinema in The Irishman: to Citizen Kane, Goodfellas, The Three Faces of Eve, and other classic films. There are also meditations on old age, loss, loneliness, and death, which are as touching and profound as anything that Scorsese has put on screen before. The tenderness that Scorsese has for the aged versions of Pesci and De Niro, particularly during a scene late in the film in which Bufalino and Sheeran are sharing some of their favorite Italian bread during their old age, is truly toccante, as they’d say in Italy. De Niro’s reflections on the finality of death as he goes in search of a casket for himself evoke the gravedigger’s scene in Philip Roth’s Everyman. It’s as if Scorsese, De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino know that they, and classic cinema along with them, are nearing the end.
The Irishman is old-style filmmaking at its best. At the same time, as a result of its arrangement with Netflix, it is the first beachhead of the brave new world of streaming that is now upon us, whether we like it or not. It is Scorsese’s way of saying, mournfully but also bravely and without any delusions: “The old cinema is dead. Long live cinema.”
Daniel Ross Goodman is awriter, an ordained rabbi, a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and the author of the forthcoming book Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.. He has written for the Weekly Standard, among other publications.
