Pennsylvania, 1956. Frank Sheeran, a war veteran of Irish origin who works as a truck driver, accidentally meets mobster Russell Bufalino. Once Frank becomes his trusted man, Bufalino sends him to...
WHAT I LIKED: 'Goodfellas,' is Martin Scorsese's most emotionally violent gangster movie because it's about someone battling to reconcile their conscience on the way up through the tempting and torturous gangster game. 'The Irishman,' represents the solemn side of that same coin, as it's about a man who worked his way up without so many doubts, but who's now reached old age and is looking back on his journey with both nostalgia and regret.
It brilliantly opens with Frank (Robert DeNiro)'s rambling narration from the seat of his care home wheelchair, and with that continuing over his beginnings as a truck driver, his chance meeting of gangster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and his eventual enrollment as his hitman, the film effectively plays out via his bumbling memories. As such, we get to see decades of twists and turns as he swindles his first boss of produce to help Russell profit, assassinates Russell's enemies, and eventually gets involved in politics under Russell's Teamster friend Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Plus we also of course get all the obligatory meetings in dusky bars full of wisecracks, threats of violence and back slapping.
Crucially though, through that story telling, Scorsese builds the picture of a man looking back on a life of transactional relationships in which he diligently served his masters in return for a share of their riches and protection. And it's in that where the melancholy lies, as, after getting close to Jimmy and then being forced to betray him, Frank eventually realises it's actually those baseless friendships which really mattered to him.
That - along with the fact new characters are always introduced with a subtitle about when and how they died - adds a fascinating perspective which makes these big, tough gangsters seem more like sad, lonely men whose friendships are all built on hollow fountains. That realisation is both a testing arc for Frank and a fascinating central theme, and it's only confounded when we see the remaining gangsters crippled by old age and Frank meeting his daughters to apologise for his absence and life of violence.
All together, that makes for a surprisingly melancholy mobster movie, and though Scorsese's usual montage pace and physical humour is on show in abundance, there are appropriately less explosions of violence and dazzling lights, and the fact it's set in the suburbs of Philadelphia adds brilliantly to the solemnity.
WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: It does sometimes feel like you're trapped in a care home with a man telling you his life story, as a good chunk of the three and a half-hour runtime is devoted to mechanical intricacies which don't necessarily do much to develop the point.
VERDICT: 'The Irishman,' is a snappy but melancholy gangster movie about an old man looking back and realising that the baseless friendships he had were what really mattered.
