Netflix just released the Thanksgiving movie (I guess?!!?) The Irishman, the latest – and super expensive – gangster movie from Martin Scorsese. He brings back Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci and uses Al Pacino for the first time. The film was so expensive (estimated upwards of $200 million) due to extremely good de-aging effects done on the cast who play characters in their 20s up to their 70s.
So Irishman tells the allegedly true (but hard to confirm) story of a truck driver turned house painter (ahem… hitman) played by De Niro. He gets involved with a kind of mob boss – Pesci – and soon he meets up with Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). There’s not much uniting story here…. this is more like an episodic movie where various gangster and gangster-related things happen. It does, in it’s second act, follow pretty extensively Hoffa and his shenanigans though… but this is also a 3 1/2 hour movie so any consistent storyline – even if it’s an hour of film – is still just a portion of the flick. The movie hits upon a bunch of American history and the mob conspiracies around them… like what happened to Hoffa, the mafia involvement in the Bay of Pigs and the JFK assassination, and other things. I gather this is based on a book that makes all these claims but that nobody can confirm.
The one main interesting thing about this very long flick is that it doesn’t seem to be celebrating the mafia lifestyle. A lot of the things these guys do – a lot of the acts of violence, arm-twisting, and leg-breaking – just feel like something you might do in your day to day if you were mobster. Acts of violence (mainly gunshots to the head) are done straight-forward and without a lot of drama… bang and walk away. I think that’s this movie’s goal though… to turn the shine off of the big-roller escapades of previous gangster movies (including Casino and Goodfellas). Beacuse even if those movies had a comeupance at the end, they didn’t end with the defeatist “what was the point” feeling of this movie.
And the film, partly due to its length but mainly due to its timespan, is able to tell a complete life story with a somber, defeatist end. The film takes place over many decades and features all the same actors aged both up and down to fit their time periods. It starts with some traditional old age makeup on DeNiro as he recounts his life but then flashes back decades to the same actors in some astonishingly good de-ageing technology. This is DeNiro as we remember him from the 70s, for example. But not really Pesci from his youth… he looks very different from when, for instance, we was a Wet Bandit. But at no point did any of this not look convincing… I was studying the faces, looking for the digital seams and I don’t think I saw any. Remarkable work.
Now, this is a devilishly long film so is it worth the sit? That’s harder to say since I’m not a big fan of mobster movies. They just aren’t my bag. But I wasn’t bored necessarily in this movie… but they were definitely taking their time in some scenes and the tone of the movie, by necessity, didn’t offer up a lot of intense whiz-bang spectacle or drame. But it’s on Netflix so when I’d get my fill, I’d take a break and watch some YouTube and then feel compelled to go back to the movie. That compulsion tells me that, even though this wasn’t an action-packed movie, I was still into it. So that’s fairly decent recommendation.
Score: 82