2 November/3 November 2019 ★ † FTWeekend 13
Bob and
Marty’s
hit list
Film As Netflix’s ‘The Irishman’ arrives,|
NigelAndrews uds a quartet of mobla
masterworks featuring the incendiary
pairing of De Niro and Scorsese
W
hat on earth do you call
a quartet of films about
gang violence, made by
the same director with
the same star actor,
which forms a unique, rich, incalculable
art-blockbuster for our times? A bloody
masterpiece?The Wring Cycle strangu-(
lationbeingaregularfeature)?
Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro
are answerable for many films. But
there’s something deeply special about
their gangster dramas. This canon now
spans nearly half a century, fromMean
Streets(1973) toThe Irishman 2019),(
withGoodfellas 1990) and( Casino 1995)(
completing the tetralogy. (Credit Nicho-
las Pileggi too, source author and co-
scenarist of those middle films, whose
Mafia-buff expertise surely buffed up
theirauthenticity.)
We dare not expect a fifth mob mas-
terwork. De Niro and Scorsese’s com-
bined age is now 152. But then we didn’t
expectThe Irishman. That movie, soon
to reach all parts of Planet Moviemania,
shows no sign of dwindling craft, pas-
sionordramaticenergy.
Passion. That’s what in essence
they are, these dynastic-fraternal-
litanistic pageants of good and evil,
love and hate, fellowship and felony:
passion plays.Casino’s musicbegins and
climaxes with Bach’s St Matthew Pas-
sion. AddThe Irishman’s redeployment
of Peter Gabriel’s “Passion” fromThe
Last Temptation of Christ. Add, from ear-
lier days,Mean Streets’ “Munasterio ‘e
Santa-Chiara”.
Why are we beginning with music?
Because that’s what this cinema is:
music even when there’s no music.
Amid the visual bloodbaths abounding
in Scorsese and De Niro’s gangster
canon, t’s impossible to forget thati
Scorsese is, first, a Catholic — with all
the accompanying baggage of martyr-
dom themes and blood-atonement
motifs — and, second, a stylist steeped
intheaestheticsofmusic.
His camera is seldom still: it moves to
ballets of meaning. Look at those virtu-
oso tracking shots that make a dance
path for his characters through streets
or kitchens, through hell-lit casinos or
hotel corridors. Look at his montage
sequences too: those passages that con-
certina narrative to the sound of chart
favourites precisely evoking a place,
a time, a mood: from pop to rock to
God-slot-classical.
Those montages can be filled, simul-
taneously and competingly, with voi-
ceover narrative. But that is another
Scorsese idiom done with such rhythm
and flair that it can be called music.with an embrace. InThe Irishman, De
Niro holds close the head of Pacino’s
Jimmy Hoffa to fire the bullets into it.
When Joe Pesci kills the “Anna Scott”
characterinCasino,hecradlesthebleed-
ing head as it lolls into inertia. He seems
to want the blood to libate and purify
theground.
It’s a man’s world. Women don’t get
much of a look-in. They are wives or
girlfriends or mothers. Family business
with a small “f” is the female role. The
one exception is Stone’s part inCasino,
which may be the best part ever writtenRight, from top:
Sharon Stone
and De Niro
in ‘Casino’
(1995);
a scene from
‘Goodfellas’
(1990)
Universal; Warner Bros
for a woman in a gangster movie. It’s a
crash course through a single life con-
centrated into a particle-acceleration
hurtle through a single tragic marriage.
Scorsese portrays the legacy of love
deformed. Of love undone by money,
murder and the quest for power. Of love
undone because it seeks to express
itself, even sustain itself, through
money,murderandthequestforpower.
The Scorsese gangster world isn’t just
chastening and cathartic. It’s funny
too: funny-appalling. These are black
comedies to rank with Ben Jonson’sVol-
pone.Thegreatserio-hilariousscenehas
to bePesci’s baiting of Ray Liotta in
Goodfellas. “You think I’m funny? ” Our
terror goes to the edge; peeps over the
edge; gets vertigo; thinks it’s going to
die. Then the prick bursts the balloon:
he’s joking. (Pick your meaning of
prick.) Nearly everyone is that in these
films. But they’re pricks so grand or
uproarious, so complex or troubled,
that the achievement at best is not
Jonsonian,it’sShakespearean.
I still can’t believe, four decades on,
thatIoncewenttodinnerwithanAmer-
ican couple who ran a chain of London
cinemas and whose other guest was a
voluble, short-statured, thirty-some-
thing Italian-American film-maker —
then barely known — who had a bad
dose of asthma. This must have been in
1973, maybe 1974. He kept inhaling a
puffer. He talked too fast. I suspected he
would burn out by 40. He was going on
about some movie he was distantlyplanning with a young actor, also barely
known, in which a psychotic taxi driver
roamsNewYorklookingtosettheworld
torights...
That was my first meeting with Mar-
tin Scorsese. He is still here. So is De
Niro. AndTaxi Driver ives on as anl
unsurpassablependanttoagreatscreen
gangster saga. Which proves that the
world is as unpredictable, exciting and
miraculously maladjusted as these two
men have set out to show in their crime
films. Sometimes that world just lucks
out. And we all benefit. Especially if we
likegoingtothemovies.‘The Irishman’ is on release in the US now,
has its UK release on November 8 and is
streamed on Netflix from November 27(Count the bad thrillers by other direc-
tors which have drowned in the prosy
useofvoiceover.)
We could addThe DepartedandGangs
of New Yorkto the gangster grand oeu-
vre. But they don’t have De Niro and
that’s the difference. The Bob-and-
Marty teaming lights a whole other fire
under screen storytelling. DiCaprio,
Damon and Day-Lewis are all good tin-
der. But De Niro begins his roles at
crackle intensity, then sustains it, while
neverburninghimselfout.
It’sanironyIhavealwayslovedthatin
his first film for Scorsese,Mean Streets,
De Niro played Joe Pesci, in effect, to
HarveyKeitel’sDeNiro.TheyoungRDN
as “Johnny Boy” gets the volatile, nitro-
glycerine character — the hellion
responding with violence to every prov-
ocation — while Keitel is the suavely
smoulderingcapo agoniste.Keitelplaysa
younger version of the role that his co-
star came to make his own inGoodfellas,
Casino nda The Irishman. De Niro saw, by
intelligence or instinct, that a steady-
state protagonist was more interesting,
more multivalent, more “dangerous” in
his withheld incendiary threat, than the
big-bangshowmandelinquent.
What is the heart of this great filmic
four-pack? It’s the theme of love
deranged; of what happens to love when
it is frustrated, denied or corrupted.
Everyonewantstoloveeveryone.That’s
the core andcuore f Scorsese’s Ital-o
ianate-American world. But love here is
ontheborderlineofsanity.Whenitgoes
mad, it becomes fanatical, fissile, parti-
san and loyalty-obsessed, and the Mafia
is born. (Not just the Mafia. The Mur-
phia inThe Irishman. Kosher Nostra in
the Jewish modulations ofCasino.) You
can’t love everyone; so those you can’t
lovegetthehate.
Trust is the creed and criterion. Four
consecutive times, outnumbering St
Peter’s cock-crow catechisings, De Niro
asks Sharon Stone inCasino: “Can I trust
you?” He can’t. Exit love; enter hate.
Which in these stories includes love,
since the final tribute paid byfamigliari
to their foes is to hug them to death.
Count the times mortality is deliveredClockwise from
main: Robert De
Niro directed by
Martin Scorsese
on the set of
‘The Irishman’;
Ray Liotta,
De Niro,
Paul Sorvino
and Joe Pesci
in ‘Goodfellas’
(1990); a scene
from ‘Mean
Streets’ (1973);
De Niro and
Scorsese filming
‘Taxi Driver’
(1976)
Eric Kowalsky/
PacificCoastNews; Warner
Bros.; Getty Images;
Steve Schapiro/Corbis via
Getty ImagesNOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 31/10/2019- 17:33 User:matthew.brayman Page Name:WKD13, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 13, 1