Thanksgiving, or so the jokes go, is a time when families gather and get into ugly political arguments, particularly when one older uncle gets a few drinks into him. My family more or less agrees with each other on that sort of thing, so the closest I had was a brief disagreement I had with my brother over Martin Scorsese. I happen to think Scorsese made some good points in his criticism of the rise of superhero flicks, but at the same time I do enjoy many of those movies. My brother, on the other hand, thinks Scorsese is a hypocrite who only makes “mob movies,” listing what he thought were Scorsese’s filmography and including The Godfather.
I gave up rather quickly after a minute or so when I realized he was too stubborn to realize Scorsese has a much wider filmography than The Departed and Goodfellas.
But now there’s he’s got another mob movie called The Irishman, reuniting him with his original acting muse, Robert De Niro.
De Niro stars as Frank Sheeran, a Philadelphia area truck driver and teamster who, due to some random encounters, makes friends with mafia wiseguy Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and agreeing to basically run errands for Russell and his mob friends and superiors. That includes the occasional murder.
Frank also manages to befriend Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), a man with some mob ties of his own who mostly seems to want to do right by his union while enjoying an ice cream. If that means loaning the mob money, at least there’s a good return on investment there.
This puts Frank square between his two powerful friends, Russell and Jimmy. Even a cursory knowledge of history tells the viewer Hoffa is a doomed figure, but The Irishman is based on an account the real Sheeran gave to a writer on his own role in Hoffa’s disappearance. That account has been highly disputed, but that’s what we’re dealing with here.
De Niro plays Sheeran as a simple guy. When either Russell or Jimmy complain about someone, Frank’s first reaction is to ask if either of his friends want the guy killed. They rarely do, but that’s his go-to offer. If the violence ever bothers him personally, he never really shows it. His biggest problem is seeing where his loyalty lies, trying to get his two friends, both of whom are inclined towards violence and sensitive to disrespect from others.
Hoffa may actually be the worse of the two there..
But as the movie goes on and the decades pass, Frank’s friends can’t see eye to eye anymore. Symbolically, that comes with JFK’s election and how Frank’s daughter Peggy takes to both Russell and Jimmy. Russell and Frank both spook her while she adores Jimmy.
As narrated by Frank, the story is arguably about how one man, just trying to get by by being friends with other powerful men, ends up where he does. Does Frank have any regrets? Maybe, but those come more from the results of his actions and not the actions themselves.
De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino all give great performances here, and really, this is their movie. Other familiar faces pop up here and there, and in the case of Harvey Keitel (as the head of the Philly mob) and Anna Paquin (as adult Peggy), they only seem to have one scene where they get to talk. Heck, Paquin may only speak about a dozen words in the entire movie and spends the rest of it just glaring at De Niro. Those aren’t really complaints, just an observation.
If anything, the three and a half hour runtime seemed a bit much. Could Scorsese tell this story in a shorter form? I don’t know, but who was going to tell him otherwise?
As it is, while not quite Scorsese’s best, it is a good movie worth a look, especially for his fans. This isn’t a glamorous look at a life of crime so much as it’s a look at one guy who could have done without but did anyway.
Grade: B+
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