The Irishman 2019
This movie has been mentioned in a lot of places as one of the best movies of the year. I was still pretty leery because I feel like the director, Martin Scorsese, hasn’t been doing his best work in a while while still getting a lot of acclaim. The Wolf of Wall Street to me was a classic example of Scorsese letting actors go and producing a movie much longer than necessary. With this movie weighing in at three and a half hours, I was wondering if that would be the case again. While I believe Scorsese loves making movies and is able to get great performances and wonderful period sets and props from the sixties and seventies, I think he pushes storytelling to the back. This movie could definitely be much shorter. But also, the narrative turns out mostly to be about Jimmy Hoffa and in particular the relationship between Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) and his mafia muscle man, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), the titular Irishman. As shown in the movie, Sheeran told of his exploits and many murders before he died and we all know Hoffa was killed by the mafia. So the movie spends a long, long time talking about Hoffa and his souring relationship with the mafia, while we know the end result. Sheeran is portrayed mostly as a loyal mafia foot soldier who will kill anyone he is asked to. It’s an interesting character, but Hoffa isn’t that relevant anymore, Sheeran was probably lying about a lot of things, and we already know the ending. I’m not sure you get to know or care about the characters necessarily, since they are all criminals, including Hoffa. Joe Pesci is great in a subdued role as a mafia executive with his hand in just about everything. But the good part of the movie plays a little like Goodfellas including the Irish guy in the Italian mafia, only everyone is much older. Because the story is told in flashback, De Niro is digitally de-aged in most of his scenes with uneven results that sometimes take you out of the movie. This is a good movie, with some great acting, but the story and execution are weak and it is mostly dark and depressing. It is still worth seeing and definitely has its merits, but I’m giving it a B+ because instead of being great entertainment it becomes a bit of a chore and that’s not good for any movie. It is interesting to see Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood also getting acclaim while I also saw it is bloated and without much narrative. It is great that these directors are given free rein to make the movies they want to make, but I feel like they are making vanity projects more than entertainment. Plenty of people like the movies though, so what do I know?
Written: 23 Dec 2019