When you are old and gray and full of sleep, what will you talk about? Your grandchildren? The far-off scents and tastes of your own childhood? Your first love? Or that time when you walked into Umberto’s Clam House and shot Crazy Joe, only you didn’t whack him right, so he runs outta there, more like stumbles, and you follow the guy and finish him off on the sidewalk, you know, pop pop, close the deal? The sorry fate of Joe is one of the many events recalled for us by Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), in “The Irishman,” as he sits in a nursing home and summons up remembrance of kills past.
The director of the movie is Martin Scorsese, returning to the rich soil that he has tilled and sown before, in “Mean Streets” (1973), “Goodfellas” (1990), “Casino” (1995), “The Departed” (2006), and the opening episode of “Boardwalk Empire,” in 2010. The new film is adapted by Steven Zaillian from a book by Charles Brandt, partly based on conversations with the real Frank Sheeran, who died in 2003, and titled “I Heard You Paint Houses.” We see the phrase onscreen, writ large in capital letters. Apparently, it’s what you say to a hit man when making polite inquiries into his availability—a useful tip, though not if you are genuinely concerned with redecorating your home.
The tale is told in flashback, either in voice-over or to the camera, with Frank looking directly—and disconcertingly—toward us, as if he were being interviewed for a documentary. To and fro we glide, across the decades, tracing Frank’s ascent, decline, and fall. We see him as a hale young fellow, delivering sides of meat, and then as a fixer for the Bufalinos, who are not, as the name suggests, the reigning monarchs of the mozzarella trade but a noted criminal clan in Philadelphia. Frank, arraigned on a charge of theft, is defended by Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano) and befriended by Bill’s cousin Russell (Joe Pesci), who becomes a soul mate for life. Frank soon graduates from fixing to whacking, with Scorsese, as so often, eschewing grandeur for the downbeat detail—a gun handed over in a brown paper bag, with no more fuss than a sandwich.
The next step up finds Frank being presented to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), whose command of the Teamsters is absolute, and who needs a bodyguard. It’s instructive to compare Pacino’s Hoffa with Jack Nicholson’s, in the underrated “Hoffa” (1992). Pacino is leaner and louder, with a wary stare in those haunted orbs; Nicholson is more of a bulldog—foursquare, wasting fewer words, and thus, for my money, providing a more tenacious bite. Also, Pacino fails to shed the tic that has pervaded the second half of his career. Whatever the role, he stretches out a word of one syllable into two, or even three, and declaims each syllable at a different pitch. So, as Hoffa, he doesn’t say “fraud.” He says “frahr-aud.” Call it irritable-vowel syndrome, and leave it at that.
Much of “The Irishman,” in its later stages, is consumed by the Hoffalogical—too much, perhaps, what with the added weight of speculation. Hoffa vanished on July 30, 1975, and left no trace; rumors have seethed ever since, and the movie, endorsing claims made by Brandt, in his book, tags Frank as Hoffa’s murderer. Whether or not you buy the thesis, so calm and so remorseless is the clarity with which Scorsese charts the events of that day that you somehow yield to them not as a flight of fancy but as the reconstruction of an established truth. Such is the method of the movie: patient, composed, and cool to the point of froideur. It runs for just under three and a half hours, although, to be honest, it seldom runs. Instead, it maintains a sombre pace, like a mourner in a funeral cortège. Whenever a town car—the hoodlum’s transport of choice—passes before the camera, it looks like a hearse in waiting.
As for Frank, when he’s not wielding a weapon, he likes to stay on the sidelines, keeping his counsel. It’s a joy to see De Niro at his most watchful, after too many films that have diluted his force of concentration, though I could have done without the tinting of his eyes. Gone is the dark Italianate brown of De Niro’s natural irises. New Blue Eyes is here. Short of cladding Frank in shamrock green, it’s hard to think of a less subtle means of ethnic signalling. The movie makes a brazen effort to explain the oddity, by having Russell ask Frank, “How did an Irishman like you get to speak Italian?” To which Frank replies that, in the military, he fought his way through Italy, picking up the lingo along the way. Yeah, just like all those thousands of G.I.s who came back from the war against the Nazis looking tall and blond and talking in fluent German.
This is not the first occasion, of course, on which De Niro has stepped aside from his cultural identity for the sake of a long and chronologically complex gangster flick. In Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), he was Noodles, who led a gang of Jewish pals through a lifetime of scrapes and misdemeanors. I love that movie, despite its faults, and have to be swept off the floor after every viewing; you can’t blame Scorsese for not trying to match the warmth of Leone’s emotional clutch. “The Irishman” has wider horizons in mind.
For one thing, it keeps glancing outward, to the world beyond the streets of Philadelphia. “Would you like to be a part of this history?” Hoffa says to Frank, as if he knows that they’re all in a movie, and there’s a touch of Zelig in Frank’s peculiar talent for being around whenever a crisis looms. He drives a truckful of arms to the men who are headed for the Bay of Pigs, and his contact at the handover, in Jacksonville, is “a guy with big ears, named Hunt”—E.Howard Hunt, whom Frank later recognizes on TV, during the Watergate hearings. Then, we have the Kennedys. The movie encourages dark thoughts about organized crime and its links to political homicide, and Frank is present when Hoffa orders the Stars and Stripes, flying at half-mast after the death of JohnF. Kennedy, to be hauled back up the flagpole on the roof of the Teamsters’ headquarters.
As a conspiracist, however, Scorsese is far less full-throated than, say, Oliver Stone, and the quieter and more private moments of “The Irishman” offer a sense of relief. Hoffa and Frank are such boon companions that they share a hotel bedroom, and, as the nation’s most powerful union boss stands there in pajamas, brushing his teeth, the two men seem less like purveyors of menace and more like a nice old married couple. Don’t tell the Bufalinos, but deep inside this movie lurks a sitcom. There is comedy here, but it springs from the rat-a-tat rhythms of Mob talk, veering toward Damon Runyon: “They told the old man to tell me to tell you, that’s what it is.” More than once, Frank is cautioned with the words “No, not that.” Translation: “Don’t rub him out just yet.”
Now and then, in “Mean Streets,” the names of the characters flash up on the screen—“Johnny Boy,” “Charlie,” and so on. The same thing happens in the new film, but with an extra chill: the action freezes for each name, and it’s accompanied by the date and the manner of the character’s future death. (“Phil Testa—blown up by a nail bomb under his porch. March 15, 1981.”) Scorsese, like many of his fellow-masters, from Welles to Almodóvar, has grown ever more interested in the passage of time; in how that passing can be slowed, or in how a simple cut can bridge the chasm of the years. (Leone originally wanted Noodles to be played by Richard Dreyfuss, with James Cagney as his older self.) In the course of “The Irishman,” this quest is aided by technology, with actors digitally rejuvenated and aged. Such tricks are both dazzling and creepy, and, in stressing facial change, they tend to neglect the other, no less telling ways in which we are gradually transformed. When Frank, supposedly still limber and youthful, clambers over rocks to a shoreline, where he can toss away used firearms, his motions betray the tentative and unmistakable stiffness of an older man. Reboot his features all you like; the body does not lie.
