“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” says Irish-American mafioso Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) at the beginning of 1990’s Goodfellas. Almost twenty years later, The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s latest spotlight on that anomalous breed in mafia operations: a mick. Considering the contentious relationship Irish and Italian immigrants of the East Coast had with one another in the germinal phases of each ethnicity’s respective diaspora, one might be surprised by an alliance like Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) with Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci, dragged back out from his decided retirement for a chance to re-create another instant classic in Scorsese’s epic crime film canon). Yet, ultimately, thanks to each party’s discrimination by the U.S. government and its “pure” denizens believing them to be unfit to be American citizens, a more peaceful, collaborative dynamic flourished in the years following World War II. After all, they were both Catholics that tended to treat having large families as one’s sole purpose on earth. Other than taking the money and running.
Which is precisely what Sheeran does to commence his long-standing career as a mafia lackey, skimming off the top as a truck driver by squirreling away entire meat carcasses (or hindquarters, if you will) to furnish heavy hitters of the Philly-based mafia with. But before we get to how his life of crime all began, Scorsese commences with one of his enduring signatures: the long tracking shot. Taking us through an elderly community filled with those essentially abandoned by society the way mafiosi had to be in order to become part of such an organization. And also in keeping with the Scorsese film language is use of a song that comes back again to reverberate in the viewer’s mind–in this case, The Five Satins’ 1956 hit, “In the Still of the Night.” 1956, incidentally is where Frank’s first flashback begins. Similar to the wistful way in which Henry Hill describes his first foray into gangsterhood, Frank muses from a wheelchair (presumably to writer Charles Brandt, but maybe to the resident priest) in his nursing home, “When I was young, I thought painters painted houses. What did I know?” Describing himself as “one of a thousand working stiffs” for the Local 107 of South Philly, Frank’s disillusionment with being another underpaid cog in the wheel manifests into how he ultimately came to “paint houses” in the mob sense of the phrase. Of course, his flirtation with the Bufalino crime family starts out innocently enough, with one goombah/patron of a bar and restaurant directing him to Skinny Razor (Bobby Cannavale), insisting, “You’ll make a lot of money with him.” So it is that the floodgate is opened to the puppeteer of Philly mafia operations, Russell–not to mention crime boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). Though the two have encountered once before by happenstance at a gas station, it is after Russell’s cousin, Bill (Ray Romano), wins his case against the labor union lawyers for accusing him of stealing that their rapport intensifies. For, when Frank refuses to incriminate any mob members by naming names with regard to his clandestine deliveries, he proves he has the silence-oriented loyalty required of the Cosa Nostra. That he served most of his time in World War II in Italy, therefore can speak enough Italian to be impressive, also helps his cause of entering a different kind of brotherhood than the one he already knows in the form of the teamsters union.
Finding comfort in at last having military-like orders to carry out, Frank remarks of his “errands” (that frequently pertain to taking a hit out), “It was like the army: you followed orders, you did the right thing. You got rewarded.” What he isn’t rewarded by, however, is the judging and stoic countenance of his daughter, Peggy (played by Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin). The effectiveness of her holier-than-thou aura is a direct result of her constant silence–though leave it to the media to accuse Scorsese of creating a character from a misogynist bent by only giving her one line of dialogue (“Why? Why? Why haven’t you called her?”), harkening back to another film from earlier this year from a director equally as known for his machismo-centric plotlines, Quentin Tarantino, with Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and his use of Margot Robbie in the role of Sharon Tate. Yet in the cases of both women, it is their silence that cuts to the core of the narrative–particularly in Peggy’s case, who is aware from an early age of her father’s criminal activities, and the murderousness that goes along with them.
When Frank is tasked with serving as a bodyguard/multi-purpose “house painter” for the leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the Midwest, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), it is Peggy who takes a shine to him as though he is her own father more than the one she got saddled with. She sees his values–what he stands for–as something pure and honest with eyes that she could never view her own patriarch with. She bristles, too, whenever Russell comes around, tries to buy her good graces with trinkets like ice skates and cold hard cash. In short, she bears the integrity and judiciousness that is in direct opposition to the man she was spawned from. Maybe that’s exactly why, out of all four of his daughters, hers is the approval Frank seeks the most. But no matter how much he seeks it, he can’t change who or what he is. Or that a large driving force for him to increase his activity within the mob stemmed from having more children–begging the question of Peggy, “Bitch, do you wanna find a fuckin’ better way to feed all these fuckin’ mouths?” Naturally, as is the case with most men who fall in with the mafioso’s line of work, the thirst for the kill is just as much about asserting control and dominance as it is money. As the timeline progresses into the early 60s, this soon applies to America’s own “undercover” mafia family, the Kennedys. In one of the more overt calling outs to the fact that the mafia both secured JFK’s presidency and was likely responsible for its not so pretty end, Scorsese highlights Hoffa’s contempt for the family, particularly Robert F. Kennedy, appointed to Attorney General and overseeing the McClellan Committee’s investigation of improper conduct within the labor unions (including, say, Hoffa helping the mafia to finance the building of most of Las Vegas with some creative accounting using union members’ pension funds).
What began as his greatest asset for rising to the top–his outspokenness and refusal to comply to any other authority other than his own–is now sure to be his undoing, a character flaw rendered with pitch perfectness by Pacino. Sheeran’s closeness to Hoffa enables him to see this flaw while simultaneously turning a blind eye to it for fear of its eventual implications. Their frequent time together also imbues Frank with the habit Hoffa has of never closing his door all the way–a gesture that will be of bittersweet poeticism at the end of the film.
Adapted by Steven Zaillian (who wrote the script for Scorsese’s Gangs of New York) from the book, I Heard You Paint Houses, the sweeping scope of the narrative, indeed, requires its epic length (clocking in at about three hours and twenty odd minutes). And although Scorsese continues to make innovations (in this case, being the first to employ CGI of this kind and caliber for use in making his lead actors appear younger or older at different points throughout the film) in an industry he helped reshape in the 70s, it’s clear the auteur has reached that point in his career where, like Woody Allen, he can generally only direct narratives that exist in the past, at a time when he was still young, therefore shaped by the period–one that has clearly left an indelible imprint on his work. To that end, a roundtable discussion between Scorsese and his lead actors called The Irishman: In Conversation finds the director noting, “It just seemed to fall in place with our age. It’s so intimate and personal.” Yes, it does seem kismet that The Irishman would finally come together at this point in their careers to reunite “the old gang” of De Niro and Pesci, with Al Pacino somewhat shockingly never having worked with Scorsese prior to this film.
As much as the movie is a reflection on how the mafia once pretty much openly ran the U.S. (and still does, for all intents and purposes, but now “undercoverly” via Russian puppeteering), it is a rumination on time. How its elasticity can make you feel like everything is moving too fast at one moment and all too slow at another (a pendulum swing of pacing most eloquently conveyed by the scene in which Frank is tasked with killing “Crazy Joe” Gallo [Sebastian Maniscalco] at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy). And in that sense, the story of the great American mobster with European roots is accented all the more as something out of the past. Something that can never be re-created in an epoch that is so heavily monitored and policing of moralism. Perhaps that’s why the dark web had to be created in lieu of the more pronounced and tangible illegal goings-on of Cosa Nostra families. Though one can be sure, the death of Jimmy Hoffa could’ve been arranged through this medium as well–there being no uncertainty about the fact that he was doomed to be offed in any era.
