What a strange experience it watching The Irishman. A bloated film, in keeping with late Scorsese, that has its high points and its low points. Which is woefully self-indulgent, but has moments of quiet genius. It was said that The Joker, which I have yet to see, was a homage/ pastiche of early Scorsese, but the same might be said of The Irishman. Much of the film is like watching someone doing Scorsese well enough to feel as thought they truly studied at the feet of the master, knowing that they could never quite attain to the standards he set. The same could be said for the acting; De Niro is too old to really carry the menace he once did, (although Pesci pulls it off), and Pacino has long since moved beyond being capable of being directed, treating acting like a party piece, which perhaps it is. We go not to watch great performances, but to watch the ghost of great performances. It’s not all that different from going to see the Stones or Dylan in concert. Perhaps the strongest acting comes from De Niro right at the end, when he’s confronting his weakness, and imminent death.
Indeed, this is an old man’s film. It makes one sorry in a way that the director didn’t follow the example of one of his idols, Kurosawa, and do a version of Lear. In the final half hour, when all the deeds have been done, De Niro is alone with his frailty and all of a sudden a tenderness, totally out of keeping with the rest of the film, creeps in. Something more honest, more homespun. Beyond the gratuitous budget-busting explosions and the ham-fisted violence. The scene with the nurse, whom he asks if she knows who Hoffa is, has a surprising pathos. De Niro finally laughs at himself, the wannabe who history has outrun. All his enemies and allies (who are all potential enemies) are dead, and he’s left isolated, philosophical. There’s a jarring scene with a daughter who has barely appeared in the script, the counterweight to the under-developed storyline of his relationship with another daughter, Peggy, who banishes him for his wicked ways. There’s a great scene with a coffin-salesman. Everything feels as though it doesn’t quite hang together, as though Scorsese wants to tell a hundred stories and he’s only got space for three or four, which is one or two too many.
However, this sequence is the film’s coda, which comes 200 minutes in. After a potted history of the mob with De Niro & co trying to act down their ages. Kennedy’s come and go. The same old story is played on the old joanna. If anything it makes one wonder why no-one has ever tried to film the political novels of James Elroy, who did all of this so much more convincingly. Maybe the novels defy the scripting process. The mobsters progress is ramshackle, predictable, melodramatic. Again, this seems more like decoration, a giant arena wherein the old timers can strut their stuff. We come for the Pacino grandstanding, the De Niro bum-rush or his little-man-caught-in-a-big-man’s-game-face. We come for Pesci’s squeaky well-dressed psychopath. We come for Keitel’s suave arrogant charm, but that is merely hinted at, as it feels as though his part must have been written out in the edit. People haven’t swooned over The Irishman because it’s a great film. They’ve swooned over the Irishman because it allows them to remember what a great film felt like, back in the day.
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