Martin Scorsese's 'The Irishman' is more than just a Mob epic starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino—it's a late-career masterpiece for our most important American filmmaker. Read Peter Travers' five-star review
Meet Frank Sheeran , a real-life Mob soldier we encounter at a Philadelphia-area nursing home shortly before cancer brought him down in 2003 at 83. As the soundtrack swells with the Five Satins crooning “In the Still of the Night,” the camera tracks a feeble, wheelchair-bound Sheeran ready to keel over like Michael Corleone inAll alone — his family keep their distance — Sheeran fills us in on his career as the “Irishman” in the last half of the 20th century.
That’s the movie, a never-boring three-and-a-half-hour epic about a history of American violence, artfully shot by Rodrigo Prieto and with genius editing by Thelma Schoonmaker. Steve Zaillian’s probing script allows Scorsese to blend blistering action and comic takes on Mob rituals with raw emotion. It’s the shreds of humanity in monsters that scare us because they make us see ourselves in them.
Sheeran’s Mob baptism begins when the film flashes back to him in his thirties. De Niro plays him by way of a digital de-aging process that could hamper lesser actors. But these aren’t lesser actors. De Niro is monumental in one of his best roles, nailing every nuance as a World War II combat veteran whose killing skills find a home with the local criminal bigwigs. The “house painter” hits paydirt when he meets Philly capo Russell Bufalino, played by Pesci.
It’s Bufalino who connects Sheeran to crime boss Angelo Bruno — and, most crucially, to Jimmy Hoffa , the powerful president of the Teamsters Union. Pacino looms like a colossus in a tour de force that can be both hilarious and horrifying, as when Hoffa insists that being more than 10 minutes late for a meeting is code for “fuck you.
Did Frank Sheeran kill Hoffa in 1975 on orders from Bufalino? The film, like Charles Brandt’s biography of Sheeran,says yes. Some of the incidents have been discredited; Hoffa’s remains have never been found. But Scorsese is more focused on these criminal lions in winter, their bodies in disrepair, their deeds and names forgotten, their hearts and minds leveled by the march of time.
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