Elegy for a Genre: The Irishman

I don’t remember the last time I came close to tears over the sheer power of a performance, but I found myself deeply moved by what Robert De Niro accomplished in what is an astonishing portrayal of a man who, frankly, has no center. De Niro vanished. He vanished the way he used to vanish in roles in his prime. He simply was Johnny Boy, Vito Corleone, Travis Bickle, Jake LaMotta, and Rupert Pupkin. He simply was Jimmy Conway, Jack Walsh, and Neil McCauley.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to say he hasn’t turned in strong performances over the years, despite having snoozed his way through worse than substandard movies; but what he did here as Frank Sheeran was as mesmerizing as anything Brando did in “The Godfather” or “Last Tango in Paris”.

The other gem of a performance in a film filled with them is Joe Pesci whose turn as Russell Bufalino is a reminder that Pesci, too, is a master of the craft. And yes, there’s Al Pacino, working with Martin Scorsese for the first time in their storied careers. However, I have a quibble with Pacino’s performance.

When the scene called for Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa to share the screen with either of his co-leads, his innate acting genius showed through. That wonderful naturalism that solidified him so early on came back and these scenes were brilliant two-handers. His scenes with De Niro were deeply affecting on several levels, but when he had to take center stage, the tics and bug-eyed not-quite-mugging seeped in to undercut what had been built up. This might sound like more than a quibble, but it really is and I’ll explain.

Hoffa was a bellicose sonofabitch. He was also charismatic and charming and he knew how to play to his crowd and especially, his base. Therefore, it’s hard to say that Pacino’s choice in those moments wasn’t true. In many ways, he got Hoffa down both as a private individual and as a public figure of immense notoriety.

Still, this is Scorsese’s and De Niro’s movie. This is the Scorsese of “Silence” collaborating with Scorsese of “Mean Streets”…maybe even of “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” with all the top flight acting this implies, and even with similarities of cinematography as Rodrigo Prieta desaturates his palate and renders a faded world true to the eras the action takes place in. From the late forties to the middle/late seventies, the periods come alive in glorious 35mm.

There’s no pyrotechnics, no grand flourishes to distract from the tale at hand and every visual choice is made within the context that story. And what a story.

We see Frank rise in the ranks to a middle man for the mob in the post war years and finally positioned as a union president of a local under Jimmy Hoffa. Tied into this is the marriage between Labor, the Mob, and the changing politics of the times. Neither Scorsese nor De Niro seem interested in definitive answers to the whys and wherefores of the shifts in society; they’re more interested in depicting the change itself through the eyes of an unreliable narrator, the aged Frank Sheeran who has outlived all his cronies and doesn’t seem to realize that he’s not lived a virtuous life or ever come to understand that his daughters moved away from him (and in the case of daughter Peggy, quit speaking him on the fourth day of Hoffa’s disappearance, forever).

He terrified his daughters. They knew what he was capable of, as Marin Ireland as his daughter Dolores said, while on the verge of tears. His incomprehension is as muted as Jake LaMotta’s was raging. Here again, De Niro captures the moral void where there should be a heart.

None of this is to say that Sheeran didn’t care about his friends and one supposes, his family. But he was so disconnected from any sense of empathy that you get the feeling he only came alive in relation to the men he admired, and the two he admired the most were Bufalino and Hoffa. And those two were on an eventual collision course.

There’s no particular moment where anyone does anything flamboyant. The hits are executed quickly and definitively, as when Sheeran takes out “Crazy Joe” Gallo (among others) in a late night Italian restaurant in Little Italy, a direct reference in feel to Michael Corleone’s assassination of Sollozzo and Capt. McCluskey. Other hits were fast, usually to the head and with little emphasis on them. The violence comes quick and it’s over. It really is just business.

And we discover, too, that Scorsese has returned to the portrayal of such violence as ugly and soul-destroying. It’s hinted that Frank lost a lot of his soul in Italy during the war¹. He likened his work for Russell and later, for Hoffa, as like being in the war, just following orders. There was no moral arbitration involved.

The film is strewn with the bodies of finks and low-lifes and at the top of the heap is Hoffa, who built the Teamsters union into a force to be reckoned with. He saw the Kennedys as everything he despised; rich, entitled and up his ass. He gave Nixon a half million dollars for his campaign against JFK all the while Russell and other mob leaders were supporting Kennedy in the hope that the president would wrest control of Cuba from Castro and the casinos and offshore activities could resume.

The tide turned with the U.S.’s failed invasion, Bobby Kennedy’s cracking down on organized crime, and Hoffa’s indictments on a variety of charges based on investigations into his dealings with the underworld. News of Kennedy’s assassination comes in an ice cream parlor where you can feel the shift in the narrative.

Hoffa is brought into court and finally sentenced for jury tampering. While he’s away, Frank Fitzsimmons (Gary Basaraba) takes on the role of president of the union and Anthony Provezano (a brilliantly annoying Stephen Graham) throws his hat into the ring for the office, as well. Fitzsimmons bows to the demands of the mob and plunders the workers’ pension freely. When Hoffa is released (via a pardon by Nixon), he goes on the attack.

There’s bad blood between Provezano and Hoffa stemming from the utter contempt Hoffa held Pro in from years before and underscored by Hoffa’s referring to Provezano’s Italian heritage as “you people”. By the same token, Provezano’s hubris and greed empowered his upstart shenanigans with some success.

In attempting to rebuild his position and seize the union presidency, Hoffa launches a campaign to wrest power away from the Mob. He rails against organized crime’s interference in the Teamsters and begins to irk Bufalino’s bosses and Russell himself.

Hoffa attempts a rapprochement with Provezano to gain his support. This fails and soon thereafter, Sheeran asks Hoffa to present Frank with an award at a testimonial dinner where Hoffa has words with Russell. The tide is turning.

Hoffa tells Sheeran that he has things on the mob. That he’s got documents so that if anything happens to them, they’ll all go down. The noose begins to tighten around Jimmy’s neck as the decision is made to take him out and Frank is the point man to do so.

He did his best to try to convince Jimmy to back off and lay off the mob but this only escalated his attacks in response. Scorsese uses a trip to Detroit in ’75 as a framing device for much of the narrative as we now and again visit the elderly Sheeran in a nursing home in the 90s.

It's on the trip to Detroit where Frank where Russell tells him that he will be flying to Detroit instead. For a moment, it almost feels like Frank will be whacked, but when we see him picking up Hoffa with Hoffa’s adopted son Chuckie and Sally Bugs (a deliciously weasely Louis Canselmi), a hit man of dubious quality (his strangling of a mobster in a car is another call-back to “The Godfather”), you know it’s not going to end well. Chuckie and Sally drive off and let Frank and Jimmy head into the house that is supposed to be the meeting for a summit to discuss burying the hatchet with Tony Pro and Frank shoots Jimmy several times. We learn later that the body is cremated.

As mentioned above, on the fourth day of the hunt for Hoffa, Frank’s daughter Peggy – who had been watching him since she was a little girl and did little to hide her antipathy toward him – pointedly asks him why he hasn’t called Jimmy’s wife Jo. This might be the most emotionally tense moment of the film. She knows what her dad did to his friend and supporter. Jimmy was her friend, too, and the look on Anna Paquin’s face is one of the most damning in film history.

Frank goes upstairs and calls Jo and makes empty promises about calling her and we realize that’s – in the words of the dons – that. Except it’s not. Not totally.

Sheeran and Bufalino and others are rounded up as suspects in the Hoffa disappearance and all wind up doing time for unrelated charges. We can assume that Hoffa was not lying about the documentation. The years pass, Russell dies in prison, Frank develops arthritis and upon release, is walking with a cane and then uses crutches and eventually, a wheelchair.

He makes arrangements for his casket and interment in a vault. We also see him interviewed by two FBI agents looking for a definitive closure to the Hoffa affair. Frank claims he knows nothing and they press him. Who’s left to protect? Everyone’s dead. He’s the last one standing. He says he has nothing to say and any discussion about Hoffa needs to be addressed by his attorney. Who, by the way, is also dead, the feds inform him.

As it happens, Frank has been telling his story to a priest. He’s looking for absolution and in his own way, attempting to make his peace with God with no remorse for the families he’s traumatized by his acts and no understanding for the gulf between him and his daughters.

The priest is a patient man and kind, obviously. He tells Frank he’ll see him after the Christmas holiday and Frank asks as if to confirm that it’s that time of the year. The priest says it is and before he leaves Frank’s room, Frank asks him to leave the door ajar. The camera gives us a look at Frank in his wheelchair alone, an old man with only memories and an empty life. So empty, that redemption can’t happen here.

It's this last that Scorsese drives home with subtlety and nuance. This most Catholic of filmmakers has often interrogated redemptive arcs and in many cases, his antiheroes miss out. In some cases, not. But his moral underpinnings have always remained consistent and leant an authoritative weight to his work unlike any other director.

Perhaps not since “The Godfather” have we seen such a work. But if that film began a new tradition in filmmaking and specifically, in the mob drama genre, then Scorsese’s “The Irishman” is the climax, if not the finale of that tradition. No doubt there will be other crime family epics, but none will come close to what this one has accomplished.

As a rumination on aging and mortality, the movie is strong enough, but being that we are also witnessing the life of men who lived with no sense of the ramifications of their actions, we take a deep dive into a portrait of amorality. Some would say what these men did was immoral, but for it to be truly so, they’d have to have a sense of morality in the first place and this they do not have.

As we pull back to take in the scope of what the mob did, it truly boggles the mind. The lives lost, an underground economy that allowed so many to live beyond the law while also buying cops and politicians as needed. And when caught? Oh, it was everybody else’s fault. These men never seemed to grasp that not only what they did was wrong – and not merely against the law – but just plain wrong, a violation of the social contract out of neglect now and at other times, intentional,  because for them, the social contract only existed for the made men and their cohorts.

You couldn’t even say they were rotten. They had never flourished as human beings. If the film has a redeemable character, it’ s likely Hoffa, at least for a while. He did seem to believe in solidarity for the worker, but at a later stage, it’s less about the worker and more about the union. His union, as he reminded people later.

Also, Scorsese has done another fine job of using a period piece to comment on contemporary times. The hollow men behind the scenes are only more obviously rapacious in their disregard for human life and well-being than many of the power holders in the U.S. currently. They are equally greedy, though, in their desire to consolidate power and wealth over and above all else, the all else being concern for others and genuine love of their country.

Lastly, it’s a kind of farewell to a type of moviemaking that only one of the greats who was there could make. Marty has always stayed fresh. None of his films – that’s right, none of them – ever feel stale or come across like retreads. There are lesser movies that he’s done, but even those have a crazy life force running through them. But when he has looked back at an era, particularly one he was part of it, his capture is so vivid that you could actually be there.

I will see this again, perhaps several times. There’s too much here to catch all at once. Not so much in terms of content, but in terms of themes and what this movie is about. It’s not just a biopic about a guy whose recollections in his autobiography were contradictory or faulty. It’s about how do we get to a greater truth through the stories we tell.

How, in this post-truth world, where facts are dismissed as fabulous, at best, do we come to deal with emotional disconnectedness from our actions and from each other?

If we don’t approach these pains, these issues, then we die empty of meaning, empty of love and there is no redemption without that.

A word about the deaging: it was fine. The performances were so strong across the board that I didn’t really notice anything.

Footnote

1. Sheeran later recalled his war service as the time when he first developed a callousness to the taking of human life. Sheeran claimed to have participated in numerous massacres and summary executions of German POWs, acts which violated the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the 1929 Geneva Convention on POWs. In later interviews with Charles Brandt, he divided such massacres into four categories:

1.   Revenge killings in the heat of battle. Sheeran told Brandt that, when a German soldier had just killed his close friends and then tried to surrender, he would often "send him to hell, too". He described often witnessing similar behavior by fellow GIs.^[12]

2.   Orders from unit commanders during a mission. When describing his first murder for organized crime, Sheeran recalled: "It was just like when an officer would tell you to take a couple of German prisoners back behind the line and for you to 'hurry back'. You did what you had to do."^[15]

3.   The Dachau massacre and other reprisal killings of concentration camp guards and trustee inmates.^[16]

4.   Calculated attempts to dehumanize and degrade German POWs. While Sheeran's unit was climbing the Harz Mountains, they came upon a Wehrmacht mule train carrying food and drink up the mountainside. The female cooks were first allowed to leave unmolested, then Sheeran and his fellow GI's "ate what we wanted and soiled the rest with our waste". Then the Wehrmacht mule drivers were given shovels and ordered to "dig their own shallow graves". Sheeran later joked that they did so without complaint, likely hoping that he and his buddies would change their minds. But the mule drivers were shot and buried in the holes they had dug. Sheeran explained that by then, he "had no hesitation in doing what I had to do."^[13]

Source: Wikipedia, “Frank Sheeran”.