As far back as Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) could remember, he didn’t want to be anything, let alone a gangster.
A soldier in World War II, he became a truck driver — “one of the thousand working stiffs” — till he began “painting houses”, a reference to blood splattering on the wall, when he shot his target in the head. Martin Scorsese’s latest, The Irishman, a Netflix release, opens to Frank in a nursing home where he, holding a stick and confined to a wheelchair, starts recounting his story. It is not a confession, mind you — even though years have passed, and “everybody’s gone” — rather an amoral flashback: a case of what happened, not why.
Frank’s telling — helped by buoyant background music and an overall joie de vivre feel — makes his journey celebratory and fatalistic. To achieve the former, Scorsese becomes an accomplice, taking us through the dense mafia network, depicting the sure ascent of a nobody to a somebody. It feels fatalistic because things, well, just happen. Frank first meets Russell (Joe Pesci), the head of the Northeastern Pennsylvania crime family, by chance, at a gas station.
A mutual acquaintance introduces Frank to a local gangster, Skinny Razor (Bobby Cannavale), for whom he commits theft, gets caught and, in a bid to be bailed out, meets the attorney Bill Bufalino (Ray Romano), Russell’s cousin. One chance encounter leads to another — the web both deepens and spreads — and Frank, propelled south by the downstream of destiny, keeps accelerating, as if he’s the Chosen One.
Fate plays a significant role in his life in indirect ways, too. His contract at the meat packing store, which protects his rights as a worker, is possible due to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) — the fabled head of a powerful union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters — whom Frank meets later, and their lives get entwined in intricate, dangerous ways.
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Scorsese captures Frank’s rise with impressive economy — Frank knows somebody who knows somebody and so on, leaving us to connect the dots — and there’s an undeniable element of perverse thrill, as we see him succeed. There’s also clever self-justification, doubling up as social commentary, when Frank, after his first murder, likens the job of a hitman to a solider: “It was like the army. You followed orders. You did the right thing. You got rewarded.” And like the army, it was “never for money but as a show of respect”.
Further, the movie’s span of time — from the ’50s to the mid ’70s — denotes a parallel story of the American middle class, a period marked by rising wages, a fair tax system, strengthening of the union, the protection of workers’ rights, and dwindling income inequality: all of which got systematically dismantled from the late ’70s onwards. But even in that prosperous period, as The Irishman shows, there was darkness amid light. Jimmy, the purported saviour of the workers, is no less corrupt, or vicious, than the moneyed elite he often decries. Besides, the fights among and within the unions are intense, quickly escalating to violence.
Frank’s last stop is Jimmy, who is close to the Washington notables, making the erstwhile truck driver the president of a local union: the circle of life for Frank — from an ignored commoner to a respected leader, via criminal means — seems to be complete. There’s no stopping him, and he and his cohorts — year after year — flourish and get away. So Scorsese, a director whose movies are often imbued with the spirit of Catholicism, decides to step in, now alternating between an accomplice and the Hand of God. Different mob men are introduced with texts announcing their ultimate fates (“Angelo Bruno — shot in the head, sitting inside the car outside his house, 1980”), undercutting their swagger and might.
The equivalent of that text, for Frank, is his daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina, Anna Paquin). Right from her childhood, Peggy is able to see through Frank: someone who is not a father but a gangster, who roughs up people in the street, bumps them off (she finds out by reading the newspapers), carries weapons in his briefcase while going to work.
Frank knows that Peggy knows — they live under the same roof, exchange many uncomfortable glances — and regardless of his attempts (trying to be funny, friendly), he knows that his daughter, feeling betrayed and disgusted, has drifted away. No matter what time of the day, what year of the century, Frank will always lose in front of Peggy. She’s not just his daughter but also his punishment: his eternal damnation.
None of these, though, are separate from the story itself — which is to say, they don’t make the movie a paean to morality. Scorsese does a stunning job of balancing opposite forces — the amoral and moral, horror and humour, characters and director — that slowly transforms the essence of The Irishman: from comedic to contemplative, baleful to pitiful.
Scorsese is dealing with an ambitious palette here — sketching the fine lines of an expansive canvass, involving many players — and he does take time, a total of 210 minutes, but the film never sags or overstays its welcome, instead becomes progressively riveting, as it darts across characters, subplots, and milieus. That is primarily so because of Steven Zaillian’s masterful screenplay and Scorsese’s interpretation of it, making The Irishman unfold in three parallel layers — each revealing critical information about the protagonists, themes, and story.
Then there are the actors. Pesci essays Russell with the soul of a chameleon — a guy who changes tone and shades, so quickly and so inconspicuously, that it is impossible to stay ahead of him: someone who will make you sign your death warrant by selling the cleansing powers of Heaven. And when Russell insists, you will sign your death warrant, while being grateful to him.
Frank is trapped in the prison of his own masculinity: someone fixated on being a committed underling and a caring patriarch, of not straying too far from the herd and, endowed with powers of self-deception, being stubborn. De Niro wears Frank’s toughness like an ill-fitting robe at first — too tight, too flashy — until, slowly but surely, the clothes come off, leaving him with nothing but his own self. But, by far, the star of the film is Pacino — a man who rules each frame like a lion, cusses like a sailor (the slur “cocksucker” rolling out of his tongue like an urgent invocation), wears his heart on his sleeves for so long that, you suspect, his arms are about to give up. The thing is, Jimmy is fun, and Pacino plays him exactly like that — even his threats are laced in a schoolboy-like conspiratorial tone.
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The Irishman’s last half hour, however, is easily the most enjoyable part of the movie, where Scorsese plays god with a capital-G, towering over the criminals in their twilight years, showing us what they’ve become: a crumbling, fumbling mass of bones and blood, struggling with basic bodily faculties: eating, going to the loo, sorting out medicines.
This is not a regular crime drama; this is a gangster movie with a quasi-divine intervention. Because, at the end of the day, Frank is left with himself, alone, asking the hospital warden to keep the door ajar, like Jimmy used to sleep, perhaps waiting for that one last visitor — perhaps Peggy — or hoping that that gateway is his way out, his Deliverance. Scorsese looks at Frank, through that door, for one last time: at a man, adept at destroying others, who doesn’t know what to do with himself.