Mark Reviews Movies: THE IRISHMAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2019

At one point in The Irishman, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), making the case that he understands both the concept of unspoken orders and what working for mobsters will entail, tells a story about his time during the Second World War. His commanding officer only told him to bring the German prisoners into the woods. That was it. Well, there also was the last part: "Hurry up."

A younger Frank (made possible by some effective visual effects, which transform the faces of the older cast members into their younger selves at various ages) had the prisoners dig a hole. He couldn't comprehend it then, and talking to this mobster who has become a good friend and is about to become his boss, he doesn't understand it now. How can a man dig his own grave? What does he expect to happen? Frank jokes that the only thing he can figure is that, maybe, the condemned imagines the executioner will change his mind.

It's a short scene that really has nothing to do with the decades-spanning plot, but Steven Zaillian's screenplay (based on Charles Brandt's book), which is filled with seemingly more pressing issues of politics and crime and how the progression of time makes nobodies of all of us, still includes it. We don't need it to know that Frank is a killer. He proves that time and again throughout the film, including a montage of him throwing firearm after firearm into a certain section of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River—where, he imagines, if they ever drain the water, there'd be enough guns to arm a small country.

We don't need the scene to show that Frank is fine with killing, either. That's also the major point of his character, iterated and re-iterated all the way up until the man's final confession, sitting with a priest in a retirement home, where the now-elderly man recaps the course of his life for us. He probably doesn't want to tell anyone there. Beyond that, there's nobody who would really care to listen (except for the feds, although even they seem to have lost interest in Frank by the time we first meet him).

No, we need the scene for one single purpose: the notion of a man digging his own grave. It becomes the central theme of Martin Scorsese's latest opus, a 209-minute epic about Frank making the long, eventful trek to becoming a wheelchair-bound old man, alone and unloved and mostly forgotten in a nursing home.

Frank is digging his own grave, but so, too, is everyone else here. As the story moves around in time, Scorsese occasionally will pause a frame on a certain figure. It might be Frank's big boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), whose cousin Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci, coming out of retirement for his first significant screen role in 20 years) helps Frank get into the mob business. It might be some random thug or union leader, who doesn't really matter in Frank's story.

Each time, though, we get the man's name, and we also get a brief description of how he died. It's often violent (a certain number of gunshots to the head) and, in the film's timeline, will happen just a few years after the story of Frank's ascent to rumored infamy ends.

The film itself seems to be marking the end of era for Scorsese, as well, who tells this tale of the mob with a similar filmmaking energy as his previous ones, with a familiar cast, and with a clear-eyed understanding of how every deal and murder is just a pointed suggestion from happening. This isn't, as far as we can tell, Scorsese's swansong, but he definitely and definitively seems to be closing the book on his gangster films. After the filmmaker's archetypal movie gangster faces the long and dark night of being alone and forgotten, as the film's extended denouement portrays here, what else, really, could Scorsese have to say on the subject?

The main thrust of the story is Frank's relationship with Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), who loans out money from the union's pension fund to various mob interests, knowing that they won't leave his workers in the lurch. Frank becomes the union leader's right-hand man. He's a loyal bodyguard, who sticks with the man who basically becomes a part of his family, even as Jimmy begins the process of digging his own grave—mouthing off to the faces of mob bosses, ranting about the mob to the press, never quite getting Frank's repeated hints that he's making some important, dangerous people, not just concerned (which is code for "very worried"), but very concerned (which is code for "desperate").

There are three narrative threads being spun and juxtaposed here. The first follows Frank's rise as a hitman for the mob, his friendship with Jimmy, and his assorted criminal and political maneuvers along the way. In the background, we often catch long, intentional looks at Frank's daughter Peggy (played as a child by Lucy Gallina and as an adult by Anna Paquin), who stands silent when faced with men like her father and "Uncle" Russell, but beams with pride and maybe love at the sight of Jimmy. She sees and knows much more than Frank even bothers to notice, and her judgment at a key moment is perfectly summed up with a single-word question: "Why?"

The second follows an older Frank, as he, Russell, and their wives are on a road trip for a wedding in Detroit. It's so mundane—almost comically so, with Russell's order that nobody smoke in his car—that it's like witnessing an entirely different set of lives. This, perhaps, is what could have been, and as to where that trip actually goes, the destination only cements Frank's nature and destiny.

The third, obviously, is Frank telling his story in the nursing home, which, at first, only seems like a narrative device (Scorsese, signaling that this film is markedly different from his earlier gangster films, switches from voice-over narration—a trademark of his—to having Frank speak directly to the camera). With the extended ending of The Irishman, though, Scorsese reveals that the core of the film is in that section. "It's so final," Frank repeatedly says as he weighs the options of what's to be done with his corpse. Even in the face of death, he's looking for one last out, but the joke's on him: The executioner doesn't change his mind once the grave has been dug.

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