# Film critic harlan Jacobson reviews Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman: Video, Photo

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/11/19/film-critic-harlan-jacobson-reviews-martin-scorseses-the-irishman-video-photo/
- Published: 2019-11-19T21:21:18+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**DeNiro, Pesci, Keitel, Pacino. Old home week for the Mob in Martin Scorsese’s 
much awaited and acclaimed _The Irishman_, which had its debut at the NY Film Festival
last month and is now in theatres. **

Almost all of the great, old fashioned mafia men have reassembled for a reunion 
in Marty Scorsese’s _The Irishman_. It is the rage of the blogging world, sparking
controversy for all the wrong reasons — its gender inequality, as in why aren’t 
there more speaking parts for women? That truly is the wrong issue here. The _Irishman’s
_American workplace values of self-made men is suffe. used with ethnic survivalism
and given dark aristocracy to arrive at you are however many guys you can kill. 
As In that’s the way it was.

Based on former DA turned crime novelist Charles Brandt’s 2004 book, _I Hear You
Paint Houses_, _The Irishman_ centers on Frank Sheeran, a hit man who rose through
the ranks of the Italian mob, became president of a Teamsters local, largely on 
the strength of his likability and his efficient manner of splattering inconvenient
obstacles’ blood on the walls of their domiciles. Hence the house paint was always
blood red.

I saw it with a friend of mine, a short guy who works as a wolf on wall street, 
who emerged from the very comfy Bow Tie theater in Stamford that boasts a big screen
and Barcaloungers and said to me, ”Well I guess that’s the end of a genre.” Whoa,
wait, that’s my turf. I’ve never said to him “Time to get short,” not simply because
I don’t want to pander, but because I don’t presume to talk about his game at the
game level.

But there it is, the end of a genre, end of a generation, the Scorsese generation
that wrestled with the question of values, fraternity, ethnicity and the authentic
reading of America. Completing the full arc of Scorsese and Coppola mobsters who
traverse this landscape from young to now old, DeNiro narrates the story in flashback
from a wheel chair in a nursing home as the lone surviving mob guy, Frank Sheeran,
an Irisher. Joe Pesci returns from a 20-year golf game as mafia chief Russell Bufalino,
Bobby Canavale plays a hood named Skinny Razor, Harvey Keitel inflates his cheeks
like a blowfish as mobster Angelo Bruno (one in a series of rub outs here), Ray 
Romano plays a mob mouthpiece, and the cherry on the sundae, Al Pacino swings from
his heels as Jimmy Hoffa — Hoffa who joined Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, and DB
Cooper as the four horse people of the apocalypse who went missing in the 20th Century.

As a kid growing up in the same geographic area as the mixed German Dutch-Irish 
American Hoffa, I remember him as having a flat, mostly thin Midwestern voice, a
real tough guy kisser with wolf eyes and a chopped white temples, sideburn-less 
haircut. He looked fierce. As the drama unfolds, Pacino plays Hoffa increasingly
as an Italian goombah out of earlier Scorsese films, speaking a sonorous Italian
that Steve Zailian’s script pauses to note Hoffa picked up in the nabe. Here’s Pesci’s
Russell Bufalino introducing the kid Irisher Sheeran to Hoffa over the phone, brought
to the table by a waiter — the ultimate symbol of power in the 1950s.

That_ kid_? Most of the time, as old Hoffa, Pacino plunges around the ring here 
like this is all requiem for Old Rocky. But the choice to have all these hall-of-
famers play themselves as kids on the way up when they were young in the 1950s, 
aided by _Benjamin Button_ style CGI cinema tricks to age them down, is more than
disconcerting — it is derailing. But Al-Di-La, there’s somebody doing Jerry Vale
songs in a supper club (odd there is no credit for a Jerry Vale character), and 
somebody else doing Don Rickles. I guess you had to be there. The Irishman is a 
reunion of actors I like—or have liked. While I agree with Scorsese’s much publicized
remarks that Hollywood now makes theme park rides instead of films, The Irishman
ironically felt like 3.5 house spent in Jurassic Park, watching the triceratops 
circle the legs of the tyrannosaurus rex, protected by the brontosaurus lawyer, 
while the baby condors – Jesse Plemons as Hoffa’s son, Stephen Graham as Tony Pro
Provenzano, Jack Huston as Bobby Kennedy in his sheriff days – all buzz around the
ears of the stumbling doomed.

In fact, the most real moments belonged a little too patly to the women actors in
the film: briefly and first to Katharine Narducci, playing Pesci’s mob wife born
into the job as mob royalty from Sicily, who says nothing and simply gets rid of
his bloody clothes when he comes home late from a house painting job. And later,
as a cliché of lost innocence, Anna Paquin, who plays Peggy, one of Sheeran’s grown
children, who watches DeNiro as her dad, Frank, at Hoffa’s wake, and wordlessly 
conveys to him and to us, that she gets it. She finally gets who her father is, 
and what he does, and how he does it, and how he lives it. Aunt Kay from _The Godfather_
could’ve told her that. God knows, she told us.

Does _The Irishman_ solve the mystery of Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975? Scorsese
followed Zailian, who followed Brandt’s 2004 book, and filmed Brandt’s version of
Hoffa’s hit and cremation. Myself, I like the myth that Hoffa ended up in Japanese
steel for a Datsun. It’s a Scorsese, so the film is built with quality contributions:
Robbie Robertson, Scorsese’s love man from The Band and _The Last Waltz, _scored
the film, and ace Mexican cameraman Rodrigo Prieto (_Brokeback Mt_, _Babel_, _Wolf
of Wall St) _did the camerawork, so it looks immaculate.

But that begs the what and why of _The Irishman_. To paraphrase Sir Edmund Hillary,
and with thanks to Netflix, because Marty could. Is it better on a gargantuan screen
in a Barcalounger? Sure. So’s life. Netflix prefers the streaming model. And I’ll
watch it again on my reasonably-sized flatscreen at home. But I don’t think the 
film will substantially diminish from its well-crafted pointlessness. The takeaway:
_The Irishman_ comes out on Netflix Nov. 27. Until then, you probably have other
turkeys to deep fry.

![](https://i0.wp.com/mediad.publicbroadcasting.net/p/wbgo/files/styles/large/public/
201911/the_irishman.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

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