De Oirishman

I went to see The Irishman on Monday, a film it is no exaggeration to say I have been looking forward to for 24 years.

I first got into the Scorsese/De Niro axis of excellence in, I think, late 1994, when there was a De Niro season on TV – there was some slightly offbeat showings, like The Last Tycoon and Jacknife, but there was also Mean Streets, and, even now, that is one of my favourite three films in the world, a work of snappy, soulful perfection which would have made the director and its (co) star icons even if that’s all they’d ever done.

Of course, they made a lot more together, and most of it is held in the same high esteem. More than half of their collaborations are seen as all-time classics, with the exception of New York, New York, Cape Fear and Casino, which are still pretty great films if you ask me.

But after Casino, in 1995, that’s been it for the partnership. Not because of a break in the friendship, but, it seems … just because. Scorsese forged a new partnership, with Leonardo DiCaprio, and has continued to operate, mainly, at a high level. I’ve still tried to see nearly every film of his at the cinema.

De Niro … a slightly different story. It can be overplayed how much his career has declined since 1995 – there are good roles in average films, good roles in good films (Silver Linings Playbook, Joy etc), there is the fact he is genuinely funny in the hugely successful Meet the Parents and Analyze This, but, yeah, there’s a lot that’s come and gone with a sigh of despair. I’m afraid bigger De Niro fans than me will have queued round the block to watch Dirty Grandpa, Last Vegas and Killer Elite (from what I’ve heard …)

But I’d also heard that De Niro and Scorsese were always talking about a new project, and there have been reports of The Irishman/I Heard You Paint Houses for many years. When it was finally confirmed, I was excited but also had misgivings … will it be a bit of retread, a one-last-job self-glorification … Another gangster movie? I kind of went off gangsters a long time ago … (about halfway through Season 4 of The Sopranos, to be precise. I just don't care about these schmucks and more, I thought ...)

But as others have already said, this is a different film from Goodfellas and Casino … it’s funny and yes, it’s violent (though, I think, not as grotesquely so), but it’s primarily stately and melancholy … and there’s not all that much in the way of glitz and glamour.

Nor is there that much of a bad guy or a rogue element. The two possible rogue elements are Tony Provenzano (played by Steven Graham) and Joey Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco), but the latter is a small part really, and Graham’s Provenzano is shown to be not entirely sympathetic, not some kid of untameable destroyer (like Pesci in Goodfellas and Casino, or De Niro in Mean Streets).

The three leads all put in different kinds of great performances.

I think the film be remembered above all for Pesci, especially as, considering he hates making films and this is the first one he’s done in years, this might well be his last film performance.

I’ve actually never been a superfan, not to say I don’t appreciate his work but have always seen him as having just two modes, psycho and clown. To me, he’s never been the soul of a film before. But in The Irishman, he is different, and he is much, much more. He is quiet and restrained and just says everything he needs to with small movements, lowkey words, glances and sighs. It’s really the best film performance I’ve seen for a long time. His last scene with Pacino is really a thing of great beauty.

Pacino is brilliant, but you know, very much Pacino, bombastic and musical (and perhaps overly reliant on saying “cocksucker”.) He, of the three main actors, is the only one where I felt the de-aging technology didn’t quite work. His character Jimmy Hoffa died in his early 60s, so Pacino was playing him from 40s to 60s, but he always somehow seems, in the film, like an old man.

The de-agification, for me, worked really well for De Niro, I suspect because he’s a more robust 70-odd than Pacino (almost 80, after all). For the most part (one kicking aside), his face and body were completely convincing as a guy in his 40s, as he is for much of the film. His performance is great, thankfully.

His ebbing as an actor from the very height is an interesting matter. My simplest explanation is it was like the ebbing of a great sportsman – some actors have skills which allow them to stay great into old age, but De Niro relied so much on the physical, on the whole of his body, that he began to lose his greatest asset. He was never much one for accents, nor for theatricals. He inhabited characters by, one supposes, sheer hard work. Here, you feel that with the help of the technology, he’s able to relax into the long process of giving a seemingly irredeemable character life worth being interesting in.

His arc lasts the whole film. Through a lot of it, you barely notice him, he’s just there – he does the jaw thing a bit, but there aren’t that many other classic De Niro tropes here – but there’s the still and calm of Michael Vronsky in The Deer Hunter (it is no coincidence that that has always been my favourite De Niro performance).

His character is a post-Wire film criminal … a Slim Charles or a Chris Partlow (for me, always the most interesting characters in The Wire). It’s not about the glamour, the charm, the craziness, the awfulness, it’s not about implying he has some significant inner life (even in the “redemption” scenes at the end, we’re not kidded that he’s a man with great depth), he’s just a guy who can live a criminal life, do awful things without savagery or compunction, and knows which side his bread is buttered, until he realises too later that self-protection as a way of life leaves you empty.

Talking of empty, a lot’s been said of the lack of words for women in the film, particularly Anna Paquin as Frank Sheeran’s daughter Peggy … which is a true and fair enough, but at the end, that vacancy speaks loud and is a character in its own right with meaning … it’s quite hard to explain that without seeing it, but it almost feels the film is not just one where women are forgotten and neglected, but literally, in the end, about the absence of women and the damage that does.

So, anyway, I was not disappointed. The film never sags, it is very funny, brilliantly written, so detailed and precise. Scorsese’s really the best film maker there’s been … that’s my opinion … and this has gone right up there into my Top 5 of his films.