Family Reunion

The Irishman a film by Martin Scorsese.  With Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Anna Paquin, Ray Romano.  *****

Toward the end of The Irishman, the former union boss and mobster Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) is looking through some photos in a nursing home while a nurse takes his blood pressure.  He asks her if she knows one of the men, and she says no; he tells her it’s Jimmy Hoffa.  The woman is young, and pretends to know who that is, but doesn’t really.  Sheeran shakes his head.  There was a time when everyone knew who Hoffa was.

Indeed there was.  He was as identifiable as anyone in public life.  When Hoffa suddenly disappeared in 1975, there were as many jokes and stories about that as there were ethnic jokes in those days.  Someone once told me, in all seriousness, that Hoffa’s body had been poured into the cement that made Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh (where I grew up).  So every time you sat there watching a ball game, you were in the presence of Hoffa’s corpse.  That was as likely a story as anything else.  I halfway believed it.

That was also a time when labor unions were ubiquitous and powerful, a real factor in national politics.  Getting the union vote got you a long way toward being elected.  And Democrats, in general, had the union vote (though that may have changed in 1980 with Reagan).

But in a way Hoffa is a background figure in The Irishman, based on a tell-all book dictated by Frank Sheeran when he was on his deathbed.  The real news of this movie is that it is a Martin Scorsese film, that it reunites Scorsese with any number of actors he has worked with before, most notably DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel, that it is the first movie to bring DeNiro and Al Pacino together in anything other than a brief scene, and that it is three and a half hours long.  Also notable is the fact that it was produced by Netflix[1], so it is available there after a brief theatrical release, and it utilizes a computer technique to change the ages of the characters.  What might normally have been done with makeup is done with computers.  In fact, I have little idea what the actors look like now.  The changes in their appearances are dizzying.[2]

I am an unabashed Scorsese fan; I think the man is one of the great filmmakers of his time, and that everything he did is worth seeing, even the productions that weren’t quite up to snuff.  It’s always worth seeing the work of a great artist.  In that way I’m suspect as a reviewer, but I thought this movie was brilliant, right up there with the best of the director’s work.  It has the feeling of a Swan Song, though I hope he continues for many years.  I’m not sure he’ll ever do anything else of this scope.  This is the longest movie he’s ever made.

Sheeran is a truck driver who as the film opens, in the Sixties, is only a little crooked; he delivers meat to mobsters in the hope of getting on their good side, then shows up at places that were expecting the meat with an empty truck.  He’s a family man who is very protective of his daughters, of whom there are eventually four.  But early in the film he encounters a notable but little known mobster named Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and soon begins working for him.  It isn’t long before, startlingly, he’s killing people for the mob; my wife felt that sudden transition in his career wasn’t sufficiently explained, and I’d have to agree.  Stealing meat or taking somebody’s life: it’s all the same to him.  (On the other hand, at the end of the movie, when a priest tries to get Sheeran to show some remorse, he looks into his heart and can’t seem to find any.  He may just not have had much of a moral compass.)

It is Bufalino who puts Sheeran in touch with Jimmy Hoffa, who is engaged in some difficult union battles and needs protection; Hoffa’s first words to the man are chilling: “I understand you’re a brother of mine,” and “I hear you paint houses” (a veiled reference to murder; painting houses refers to splattering them with blood).  Soon he is working as Hoffa’s bodyguard and more than that; eventually Hoffa asks him to run to be head of a local union, and Hoffa rigs the election so he wins.  How he was qualified for that position I do not know, though throughout the movie he’s presented as a negotiator and a mediator, and apparently he was a good union boss.

As superb as DeNiro always is, I felt that Pacino took over every scene they were in, just because Hoffa was so flamboyant a character.  He could whip up a crowd of union members, chew out a room full of his employees; he was a bully and absolutely uncompromising in what he wanted.  He was not much of a negotiator, and in that way needed someone like Sheeran.  After Hoffa was imprisoned for some crooked dealings, Frank Fitzsimmons—a much less flamboyant man—took over the union and made his own deals with the mob.

When Hoffa came out he wanted his old job back, and though he could have retired on a huge pension couldn’t see his way to doing that.  He was stubborn and didn’t care whom he offended in his quest to take over.  The mob apparently decided he was too much of a loose cannon, that he might actually disturb their agreement with the union, and that he had to be taken out.

The movie is structured around a long trip that Sheeran and Bufalino take with their wives; though they’re ostensibly going to a wedding, they’re actually on their way to deal with the Hoffa situation.  When that scene comes to a head, what follows is sometimes hard to follow and also almost unbearably tense, for a long stretch of the movie.  For a person my age, there’s an added level of suspense: we’re finally going to find out what happened to Jimmy Hoffa.  (Did he really get loaded into a vat of cement that was headed to Pittsburgh?)

Though there are lots of nefarious deeds in The Irishman, it is (thankfully) less violent than much of Scorsese’s work.  It is also in some ways slower moving, though that seems appropriate to the story (and somehow adds to the suspense).  It also continues well past the climax; there are another thirty minutes after we find out what happened to Hoffa.  By the end we realize it was Sheeran’s story after all, as the title suggests.

Scorsese throughout his career has been fascinated by violence and crime, also by music, also by spiritual life (this director of gangster films also made The Last Temptation of Christ and a movie about the Dalai Lama).  I can’t think of another of his movies where these things come together in quite the same way.  After the disappearance of Hoffa we see Sheeran trying to reconcile himself with his family, facing his own stay in prison, then—in picking out a coffin and a place to leave it, and in scenes with a priest—facing his own death.  In that way Scorsese’s whole career converges in this movie (including the fact that the music is done by Robbie Robertson, who was part of The Band featured in The Last Waltz).  This is in some ways an old man’s movie (both in who it’s about and who’s doing it), but it’s all the better for being one.  If it is Scorsese’s swan song, it’s a fitting end.

[1] According to Scorsese, many studios passed on the movie because they weren’t interested in yet another Scorsese DeNiro project.  I find that almost unbelievable.  It’s like saying you’re not interested in another Hitchcock Jimmy Stewart project.

[2] I would say that this technology is a limited success.  Sometimes the face on the screen looked young while the body did not, and though they apparently tried, the actors did always simulate bodily gestures that were appropriate to their supposed ages.  The faces on the screen sometimes just looked weird.  My wife thought that sometimes they had changed other aspects of the face, but the eyes still looked old.