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critic’s pick

‘The Irishman’ Review: The Mob’s Greatest Hits, in a Somber Key

Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci star in Martin Scorsese’s monumental, elegiac tale of violence, betrayal, memory and loss.

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‘The Irishman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Martin Scorsese narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.

“I’m Martin Scorsese. And I made the movie, ‘The Irishman.’” “It is an honor for me to be here tonight to present this award to my dear friend, Mr. Frank Sheeran.” “We’re talking about a sequence that takes place in the Latin Casino. You have this wonderful reception for Frank Sheeran, who, really, it’s a highlight of his life. All the representatives of the power structure of that part of the country are there to celebrate him, supposedly. And it really is obviously— it’s for the union, it’s for Hoffa, and it’s to support Hoffa over Tony Provenzano. And it’s to show his support for Jimmy, and Jimmy’s support for Frank.” [APPLAUSE] “The highlight of my life. Thank you very— very, very much. And this man, James Riddle Hoffa, is the guy that gets the job done.” “Underlying all that, you have the darker elements, which are the men who are in real control of the situation.” “Any case, from the deepest part of my heart, I thank you all. Because I don’t really deserve all this. But I have bursitis, and I don’t deserve that, either.” “The structure of the scene is all about the looks. The dialogue doesn’t matter until you have this extraordinary moment, I think, between Russell and Frank, where Russell gives Frank this special ring that only three people have. And so for me, the playing of the scene had to be weaving all the sense of a celebration, so to speak, or family gathering, weaving all that around these beats, all strung together by the music: Jerry Vale.” ”(SINGING) Please—” “It has a very melodramatic tragedy to it. You know, a sweetness and a sadness at the same time.” ”(SINGING) Say you and your Spanish eyes—” “It’s like you go to an event, and there are factions. There are factions. And one faction may be polite, but they’re not going to be smiling too much. But they’re there. During that time, certain things are said. Looks are given, which are harder than words. But the main look’s Anna Paquin. A whole sequence revolves around Anna’s— Peggy, that is— picking up of the subtext of what’s going on. There is trouble happening. There are problems. And she knows— I mean, particularly even Anna Paquin said, when she did the dancing shot, and she looks over, and she’s says, I never saw looks like that from people. She said it chilled her as a person.” “Only three people in the world have one of these, and only one of them is Irish. I have one, Angelo has one, and now you have one.” “So really it’s about the balancing and the editing of the frames, which encompass medium shots— hardly any close-ups. Usually medium to medium close-up, like right below the shoulders up. That entails seeing a little more of the body language rather than giant close-ups. The reason for that is the atmosphere and the environment around them has to be present in the frame, because that affects them. And there you see them in that environment and that atmosphere. If it’s too close, I think you objectify it in a way. You push the audience away. But one of the hardest things to do was to get them in the frame in the wide shot, looking down, as Jerry Vale is singing in the background. They’re like the gods overlooking this world that they created in a way. There’s one shot— from their point of view, with a long lens— of Jimmy walking around and suddenly saying hello to Angelo Russo, played by Harvey Keitel. The reason is a personal reason. And that was that Harvey Keitel and Al Pacino were never in the same frame together in any movie.” “Things have gotten that with our friend again. And some people are having serious problems with him. And it’s at a point where you’re going to have to talk to him and tell him it’s what it is.” “Once I settled on the size of the frame and the size of the people in the frame, I know that, then, it was really myself and my editor, Thelma, in the editing room, playing with the dialogue and playing with the looks and the pauses— the pauses and the silences.” “These are the higher-ups.” “Well, he’s a higher-up, too. I mean, there’s no one—” “Not like this. You know that. Oh, come on, Frank. If they can whack a president, they can whack a president of the union. You know it, and I know it.”

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Martin Scorsese narrates a sequence from his film, featuring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.CreditCredit...Netflix
The Irishman
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Biography, Crime, Drama, History, Thriller
R
3h 29m

One of the all-time canonical moments in the work of Martin Scorsese — and, therefore, in all of American cinema — is the two-and-a-half-minute sequence in “Goodfellas” sometimes known as “the Copa shot.” In a single, unbroken take, the camera, gliding and swiveling to absorb every detail along the way, follows Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta) and his sweetheart, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), from Henry’s car, through the kitchen and into the hurly-burly of the nightclub, accompanied by the sound of the Crystals singing “Then He Kissed Me.” For Henry, an up-and-coming mobster — and also for the viewer, hovering in the limbo between bystander and accomplice — the arrival at the Copa is a pure and potent dose of gangster glamour. Life is good.

The opening shot of “The Irishman,” Scorsese’s latest long-form crime story (opening Friday in theaters around the country), evokes that earlier scene and turns it inside out. Once again, the camera floats down corridors and around corners accompanied by a radio hit from the past. This time it’s the tune “In the Still of the Night” by the Five Satins, and we’re in a nursing home. We make our way past doctors and orderlies, our attention finally coming to rest in a quiet, nearly empty room furnished with institutional tables and chairs. An old man is waiting for us. Like Henry Hill, he’s going to tell the tale of his unsavory associates and criminal doings — a meandering reminiscence that will touch on some notorious historical episodes, many of them involving murder.

But the mood is different this time around, even if we recognize a few of the faces (more on those faces shortly). The anecdotes, some of which are funny, some horrifying, are edged with a bleak sense of absurdity and shadowed by the rapid onset of oblivion. Death is close at hand. The next three and a half hours will feel like a long, final breath in fading light. The light is managed by the cinematographer, Rodrigo Prieto. The passing of time is handled by the editor, Thelma Schoonmaker. The movie is long and dark: long like a novel by Dostoyevsky or Dreiser, dark like a painting by Rembrandt.

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Joe Pesci, left, and Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s latest crime drama.Credit...Niko Tavernise/Netflix

The man, whose name is Frank Sheeran — he’s the Irishman we’ve come to see, and he’s played by Robert De Niro — has some information to share about something everyone used to care about, a piece of information that at one time could have gotten him and a lot of other people killed. Actually a lot of people did get killed. One of them might have been James Riddle Hoffa, better known as Jimmy, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

Nowadays, Frank reckons, the name Jimmy Hoffa doesn’t mean much anymore. Back in the decades after World War II, though, when organized labor and organized crime were mighty forces in the land, the name stirred fear and admiration in the hearts of politicians, racketeers and ordinary working stiffs. “In the ’50s, he was like Elvis,” Frank says of the man who was his boss, friend and eventual quarry. “In the ’60s he was bigger than the Beatles.”

In 1975, Hoffa vanished, and speculation about what happened to him was for many years the stuff of wild conspiracy theories and stand-up-comedy routines. Jack Nicholson played him in a 1992 biopic, written by David Mamet and directed by Danny DeVito.

“The Irishman,” with a blustering, showboating, disarmingly tender Al Pacino in the Hoffa role, isn’t competing with that movie, or trying to correct the historical record. There was a real Frank Sheeran, who really did claim involvement in Hoffa’s demise, though not everyone believes him. Scorsese, working from Steve Zaillian’s adaptation of a book by Charles Brandt (called “I Heard You Paint Houses”), assembles a kind of gangland greatest hits. The pun is intended: this is a history of the United States in a few dozen killings. Some are obscure, like the whacking of a guy named Whispers (not to be confused with a different guy named Whispers) who stuck his beak in the wrong birdbath. Others still have a garish tabloid glow, like the shooting of “Crazy Joe” Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan. Add the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the list, along with Hoffa’s disappearance.

But public affairs and Cosa Nostra chronicles aren’t really what this movie is about. Don’t get me wrong: there is plenty of grisly, crazy mob lore, blood and tomato sauce, guys with colorful nicknames, episodes that wander away from the main plot. Every so often the screen will freeze and a note will appear supplying the date and manner of a minor character’s eventual death. These aren’t facts for the final exam, but part of a deeper, sadder lesson that has to do with the inevitability of loss. The loss of life, yes, but also the erosion of meaning that accompanies the fading of experience into memory and memory into nothing.

What interests Scorsese — what he has always cared most about — aren’t facts but feelings. Like many of his other films, “The Irishman” spends some time mapping the structures of power and the codes of behavior that govern its particular slice of reality. Frank, making his living as a truck driver in Pennsylvania after serving in World War II, becomes a soldier in the Philadelphia mob, working mostly for a local capo named Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Russell, whose cousin (Ray Romano) is a mob lawyer, connects Frank with Hoffa. Through flush times and lean, the Bay of Pigs and Watergate, the two bosses command Frank’s loyalty for the next 20 years or so.

The business of graft, extortion and influence peddling occupies all these men, but “The Irishman” finds its emotional center in the vicissitudes of their friendship. This is Scorsese’s least sentimental picture of mob life, and for that reason his most poignant. Hoffa, for all his windy belligerence, is also petty to the point of neurosis. He can’t stand it when an upstart Teamster rival, Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham), shows up late for a meeting wearing shorts. Hoffa ruthlessly focuses on money and power, unless there’s the possibility of an ice cream sundae.

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Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa, center, flanked by Ray Romano, left, and Robert De Niro in “The Irishman.”Credit...Niko Tavernise/Netflix

I don’t mean that Pacino and Scorsese make Hoffa lovable, but rather that they render him at human scale. Russell and Frank, big shots in their own right, are small men too. In addition to checking in periodically on Frank in his lonely senescence, the movie repeatedly jumps back to a fateful road trip he and Russell took with their wives (Stephanie Kurtzuba and Kathrine Narducci), a journey as intoxicated with the banality of midcentury, middle-class married life as a John Updike story.

And it’s in those quiet moments that the elegiac power of “The Irishman” really takes hold. The forward motion of time leads to only one destination, but movies can make it run backward too. Scorsese has digitally “de-aged” his principal actors, De Niro in particular, and while the effect takes some getting used to, it doesn’t take you out of the picture any more than makeup or prosthetics might. De Niro’s face looks a little blurry when Frank is supposed to be in his 40s and 50s, but what’s more striking is that the body it’s attached to seems to belong to the actor’s present-day, 76-year-old self.

There is something beautiful and fitting about that incongruity, and also about the presence of so many actors we’ve seen in other Scorsese films. Harvey Keitel shows up, as does Welker White, who was Henry Hill’s babysitter in “Goodfellas” and is Jo Hoffa, Jimmy’s wife, here. Pesci, who has been mostly absent from movies for the past 20 years, is the revelation. He’s lost the strut and the shtick that used to define (and sometimes undermine) his performances, and does everything with his sad, watchful eyes and his lovely, walnut-shell face. When he and De Niro are onscreen together, you believe in the power of art.

But “The Irishman” isn’t sentimental about that, either. It’s a gift for cinephiles, to be sure — it will arrive in theaters on Nov. 1, on Netflix Nov. 27 — but also a somber acknowledgment of limitations. Alongside the story of Frank’s career runs another one, nearly invisible to him, about the price paid by the women in his life, in particular his daughter Peggy. Peggy (played as a child by Lucy Gallina and then by Anna Paquin), is fond of Hoffa and creeped out by Russell. Though she barely says a word, her silence delivers a damning verdict on her father and his world. It also represents a gesture on Scorsese’s part toward some of the stories he hasn’t chosen or known how to tell over the years. That’s another kind of loss.

To watch this movie, especially in its long, graceful final movement, is to feel a circle closing. This isn’t the last film Scorsese will make, or the last film anyone will make about the Mafia in its heyday, but it does arrive at a kind of resting place. Not an easy one, by any means, since what “The Irishman” looks back on is a legacy of violence and waste, of men too hard and mean to be mourned. A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid — and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.

The Irishman

Rated R. Everybody dies. Running time: 3 hours 30 minutes.

A correction was made on 
Sept. 28, 2019

An earlier version of this article misidentified an actress who appears in “The Irishman.” She is Stephanie Kurtzuba, not Kate Arrington.

How we handle corrections

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Goodfellas, Most Melancholy. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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