The Irishman

When The Godfather became the highest-grossing film of 1972, it spoke to something that weary Americans felt in their bones: that organized crime was just a parallel economy—no better and no worse than the “legitimate” one. The Godfather, Part II cut between Robert De Niro as a de-aged version of Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone, and Al Pacino, as Vito’s scion Michael, in middle age. That is to say, it cut between the historically contingent work of building an empire—at a time when crime was the only form of social mobility available to a poor immigrant kid—and how that empire, once established, lost its purpose. Power had become its means and end.

This critique helped secure the movies’ place in the pantheon, and gave an opening to a grandchild of poor immigrants: Martin Scorsese. His breakout picture, Mean Streets, was released in 1973, when the market was suddenly wide open for an autobiographical tale about small-time hoods. But part of the culture, beaten down by Vietnam, Civil Rights, and a sluggish economy, watched The Godfather and saw something else. Rather than thinking that a system comparable to the Mafia was one in need of reform, they idolized gangsters for wearing corruption better. Wiseguys fit right into sex, drugs, and wide lapels. They were corrupt without being ashamed of it.

Almost 50 years on, through the agency of “bad fans” like Roger Stone, this mob mentality of shamelessness has made deep inroads into mainstream corporate and political power—even as the mob’s actual power has waned. The eclipsing of that hard power, and the soft power of its cultural imprint, are both subjects of Scorsese’s The Irishman, which stars Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa and De Niro as his putative Judas. But even themes that large seem reductive in the face of this three-and-a-half-hour American tragedy.

De Niro’s Frank Sheeran looks like a bullfrog and acts like a toady. The opening shot is a Scorsese classic—the camera swaggers its way into the story, accompanied by a pop song from the director’s youth: “In the Still of the Night.” But it is not following flouncing pompadours or compliant tails into the sanctum of a club; we aren’t being led but finding someone who’s been lost, sitting in one wheelchair among many at a nursing home. And when we find Frank, he has been waiting for us, waiting to spill out the past that has been his companion across a desert of lonesome years.

Sheeran (1920-2003) was a real person but his tales were tall. The narrative is structured around the contours of his unreliability, and yet Scorsese and his longtime collaborator, the editor Thelma Schoonmaker, finesse it with the utmost restraint; but for Sheeran’s narration and the shape of how one decade comments on another, the story is told straight. Like those Greatest Generation yarns of men barging into the front office and, one handshake later, walking out with careers, Frank saw that his experience committing war crimes in Italy gave him opportunities for growth within the mob.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that being a Teamster truck driver opened that door for him: a revolving door, as it turns out. His close relationship to Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), whose cousin William (Ray Romano) was legal counsel for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, pulls him into the orbit of its president, Hoffa: a conduit between labor, crime, and the ruling class, and—consequently—one of the most powerful men in America.

If I’m stingy with the details, it’s because I would prefer to let Scorsese and the screenwriter, Steven Zaillian, fill you in. But part of this movie’s stealth genius is its sensitivity to the mechanics of recollection, both as a general component of the human condition and as run through the highly specific meat grinder of Frank’s reptile brain. Everything between World War II and Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975 is workshopped and rehearsed. From then on out, it’s raw material. Because it calls Frank’s prior life into question, even seemingly choice bits get shrugged out of relevance, like his first marriage: stories that do not comport with how Frank thinks of Frank. But, by his life’s austere end, these failed computations are all Frank has left.

This personalization of history comes at the expense of following up on Hoffa’s curse that a hit on him would lead to the demise of the Mafia. It is never made clear what happened between 1979 and 1981, though title cards throughout the film stop to show us that many of Frank’s associates came to an unnatural end between those years. The organized-labor movement and, by extension, organized crime lost its bipartisan political sponsorship around that time, but perhaps this big-picture collapse is one a small man like Frank would fail to piece together. He and his cronies all end up in jail on seemingly unrelated charges—that is the extent of his perception.

Within the limits of Frank’s perspective, however, Scorsese shows, with tragicomic clarity, how corruption enabled the midcentury consensus. He wore the next style of corruption resplendently in The Wolf of Wall Street, which was set right as corruption began to be arrogated exclusively to the top. The Irishman seems to have partly grown out of Scorsese’s attempt to understand what morality means to someone who wants to simulate it but can’t experience it. Frank is Jordan Belfort’s deathbed confession.

Unlike Belfort, however, Frank isn’t top dog. Sheeran has, in fact, two masters—Hoffa and Bufalino—who love him accordingly, and the movie ultimately tests how a man for whom love is a highfalutin form of loyalty reacts when he’s torn between the two homosocial loves of his life. De Niro passes this challenge, the old bullfrog slackens those bulldog jowls, but it would have been in vain had we not been soaking in a bromantic love triangle: an actors’ retreat hosted by the most ardent connoisseur.

Between his hollowed-out cheeks—that seem to defy whatever physical shape he’s in—and the bags under red-alert eyes, Pacino is always, at his best, a beautiful paradox: a worn-out dynamo. It’s hard to remember that Michael Corleone, the role that made his reputation, started out so small, sweet, adorable; for better or worse, Pacino burgeoned into a 5’6″ giant. His smoked voice breathes fire. Then again, his Hoffa (with that working-class W. C. Fields accent) is a dragon. Jimmy, unlike Frank, sees the big picture; he also, unlike Russell, takes everything personally. His determination to control his union suggests a bridging of the Corleone generation gap.

Pacino’s rapport with De Niro meets expectations. Despite their parallel personas, Pacino bursts out where De Niro folds in so these two roles are movingly congruent. Jimmy does not have what we now call a filter—not even alcohol can come between what he thinks and what he says because he doesn’t touch the stuff. Pacino understands that the key to charisma is transparency; thus his Hoffa plausibly appeals both to someone like Frank and someone like Frank’s skeptical daughter Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult). Pesci looks upon him as a foggy mirror; Russell has all of Jimmy’s vision but none of his impertinence.

I have to fall in line with all the critics before me who have singled out Pesci’s performance. Whereas Frank cannot grow, Russell develops, slowly and silently, into a man whose awareness of his own baleful power leads to a judicious restraint thereof, and this confers upon him a yogic dignity. Try, though he may, to buy off Peggy’s affection, he is always stung by her rebukes—but he never disputes her judgment. There is a logic to his dying senile, in prison; it seems, in equal measure, punishment and reward.

The same can be said for Frank’s much-longer coda, where Scorsese goes deep into the banal horrors of old age. Frank simply can’t reconcile Peggy’s rejection of him with his own behavior; it is a puzzle he cannot solve—can only talk around with impersonal nurses and priests. But he also can’t any longer believe in his own justifications for his crimes; to claim that he was protecting his family rings hollow, rote—like testimony a crooked attorney would coach him to say. Running down the clock—which ticks ever louder in silence—De Niro transmutes emptiness into benign blather. It is easy to denigrate the filmmakers for giving the female roles seemingly no voice at all, but Peggy’s silence is theatrical: a decades-long Greek chorus that has volumes more to say than the small talk filling this old man’s void.

Though Scorsese and David Lynch are two wildly different artists, The Irishman is on the same wavelength as the 2017 memorial service to Twin Peaks. Here are two men in their 70s using the advantages and freedoms of new media to reevaluate but revel in the work that is their legacy. (Both of them rehabilitated that fusty old Chance Gardner-Forrest Gump everyman, and both took the opportunity to reunite graying stock companies.) I think it speaks well of our culture that it gives our old masters these (expensive) chances to share their wisdom, and speaks well of these artists that their wisdom can be expressed with no hint of flagging vitality. (It doesn’t seem incidental that Netflix’s awards bid last year—Alfonso Cuarón’s sprawling Roma—was also a 20th-century social history.) The effects that restore these players to a facsimile of youth are only a cosmetic necessity.