Review: The Irishman (2019)

Never let it be said that Martin Scorsese is a filmmaker who does anything by half measures. The legendary director had been looking to adapt Charles Brandt’s book “I Heard You Paint Houses” for the big screen for 15 years, and once Netflix gave him the enormous budget needed to pull off his vision of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran’s story, Scorsese has delivered what is his greatest film of this decade, and arguably the crowning glory of his astonishing body of work.

The Irishman finds Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, spending the twilight of his life in a retirement home, as he recounts the major moments of his life. From his time spent in Italy during World War II, to finding work with the Bufalino crime family. To his friendship with infamous trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino. All of which culminates in a fateful road trip shared with Joe Pesci’s Russell Bufalino.

Sheeran, as he’s envisaged by De Niro, Scorsese, and writer Steven Zaillian, is a man almost without pretense about him. His descent into a life of crime never seems like a destiny borne of desperation or malaise, but the last link in a chain of events which begins with Sheeran having a chance encounter with Bufalino while working a legitimate job. Life in organised crime suits Sheeran though, and his talents with the dirty work to which he’s assigned arguably betrays a sense of newfound purpose within him. Perhaps like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, Sheeran sees in this an opportunity to realise a lifelong ambition to become ingratiated into a world about which he only has an outsider’s perspective.

Unlike Hill however, Sheeran is a character prone to quiet contemplation rather than manic, drug-fuelled paranoia. And De Niro’s portrayal of the title character evokes a serenity in contrast to his violent misdeeds across the decades. Although his role involves the quietest performance of the film overall, there’s never any suggestion that the character of Frank Sheeran is likely to fade into the background. That’s entirely down to the stellar turn from De Niro in what is by far his best performance for at least a decade.

It’s especially impressive when seen alongside the film’s most prominent supporting roles. Pacino is fully grandstanding as Hoffa, and he approaches the role with so much bluster and swivel-eyed pomposity that he often threatens to turn his take on the teamster into a broad caricature. It’s a clear contrast to the more sombre De Niro, but his presence on screen might be The Irishman’s weak link overall.

The same can’t be said for what Pesci brings to Russell Bufalino. Pesci is an actor whose repertoire has perhaps led him to be quite significantly typecast throughout his career. But he gives so much in every role he plays that even when he’s directed to go as broad as possible (a la Home Alone) he’s never less than completely committed to his character. With Bufalino, Pesci allows a quiet, intelligent malevolence to seep through every frame where he’s on screen, and it’s made abundantly clear why the man has come out on top. Even when breaking bread with professional killers, Pesci’s Bufalino is always the most dangerous man in the room.

The Irishman, like Scorsese’s previous crime dramas, is a film which is very much interested in the dealings of dangerous men. But this film is also quick to keep one eye squarely fixed on life’s greatest certainty. Death pervades The Irishman, from Sheeran’s profession of “painting houses” to the film’s introductions of its rogue’s gallery containing each mobster’s date and cause of death. As events move inexorably to the real-life Frank Sheeran’s account of the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa, and into Sheeran’s life after his involvement in this version of events, the spectre of his and his peers’ mortality looms ever larger as the years go by.In so many ways, the place where The Irishman’s story concludes feels like something ominously final.

Scorsese’s return to the world of guns and gangsters transcends the genre to become a carefully considered rumination on mortality and growing old in a business from which one cannot simply walk away. For all of the brutality and violence displayed on-screen, the worst fate imaginable in the world of The Irishman is one dealt by the sands of time, as its characters grow old, alone and left only with one’s guilty conscience for company until the very end.