Directed by
MARTIN SCORSESE
Starring
ROBERT DE NIRO
AL PACINO
JOE PESCI
Released
8 NOVEMBERANTICIPATION.
Well, duh.ENJOYMENT.
Still got it!IN RETROSPECT.
A new American classic.ou’ve seen it mean and mohawked; raging
and rouletted. You’ve seen it clean-cut
and cut up; burnt, bloody and bedevilled.
You’ve seen it mad-eyed and monocled; black-
and-white and black-and-blue. You’ve seen it
shark-like and stoned; Mary Shelley-ed and
silver-lined. But you haven’t seen Robert De
Niro’s face quite like this.
In Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, one of
the best mugs in the business is given a high-
grade makeover courtesy of VFX supervisor
Pablo Helman and his team at Industrial Light
& Magic. De Niro stars as Irish-American labour
union official and part-time contract killer
Frank Sheeran, whose dealings with notorious
Pennsylvanian crime boss Russell Bufalino
(Joe Pesci, acting like he’s never been away) arerecounted here in extensive flashback, requiring
the 76-year-old actor to play the same character
in his late twenties, mid fifties and early eighties.
We’ve always known Bobby’s got range, but this
is something else entirely.
Hollywood has been dabbling with this
technique for some time now, with mixed
results achieved by early adopters X-Men: The
Last Stand, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
and Tron: Legacy. But the hype surrounding
Scorsese’s long-awaited return to the mob
movie fold, coupled with his reputation both
as a staunch custodian of cinema culture and
an uncompromising traditionalist, has placed
this cutting-edge youthification process under
increased scrutiny.
Scorsese has even spoken of his own
initial skepticism, the director going so far
as to reenact the Christmas party scene from
Goodfellas – originally filmed when De Niro
was 47 – in order to convince the cast, crew and
himself. The experiment worked, but Scorsese
wasn’t fully satisfied. It bears repeating that
De Niro’s face has been a fixture of American
cinema for more than half a century. Down
the years we’ve become intimately familiar
with those expressive chestnut eyes, and know
exactly how it feels to be fixed by that stern,
silent glare. We know that broad, squinty smile;
that unmistakable, much-mimicked frown.
Hell, I probably know that mole better than half
my extended family.
The point is, we’ve witnessed De Niro in
his irrepressible prime, and watched him grow
old gradually and gracefully for the most part
(cf Dirty Grandpa). The real question as far as
the The Irishman is concerned is not whether
it’s possible to make him look young again but
whether he can still act young. Due to its self-
reflective narrative structure, we spend a
significant portion of The Irishman’s near 200-
minute runtime carefully studying De Niro’s
de-aged face – skin smoothed, hairline restored,
eyes turned a brilliant shade of blue – and the
experience is at once poignant and uncanny in
unexpected ways.De Niro remains a fine actor, and it’s mightily
impressive to see him carry such a heavy dramatic
load looking, moving and sounding like a man
half his actual age. But there’s no getting around
the fact that he’s not the livewire presence he
once was. Still, the grim inevitability of Sheeran’s
drawn-out demise is by no means intended as an
analogy for De Niro’s late-career malaise. This
immaculately-crafted tale of power, corruption
and lies, told from the perspective of an elderly,
less-than-reliable narrator reckoning with a
lifetime of regrets, speaks to a greater universal
truth. Whatever path we choose in life – regardless
of our successes and failures – we all meet the
same fate, one way or another. It doesn’t matter
who you are: as long as you’re breathing you’re
afraid of dying. Seeing De Niro miraculously
returned to a state of youthful vigour not only
brings back memories of all those sensational
moments in Mean Streets, The Godfather: Part
II, Taxi Driver, The Deer Hunter, Raging Bull,
The King of Comedy, Goodfellas et al, it serves as a
sobering reminder of our own mortality.
Per Charles Brandt’s 2004 biography ‘I Heard
You Paint Houses’ (mob speak for soliciting
someone to carry out a hit) and Steven Zaillian’s
adapted screenplay, Sheeran was a veteran of
World War Two, a high-ranking member of the
Teamsters union, a husband and a father. He
claimed to have participated in the slaughter
of German POWs, and that he knew who really
shot JFK. Yet his legacy is ultimately defined by
his relationship to union president Jimmy Hoffa
(Al Pacino, served with an extra scoop of gusto),
whose disappearance in August 1975 Sheeran
is widely believed to have been responsible
for. When De Niro is gone, it won’t feel really
like it because we’ll still have Travis Bickle and
Jake LaMotta and Rupert Pupkin and the rest.
Sheeran, meanwhile, having lived long enough to
see himself become the villain, will continue to
live on in infamy. Sometimes the grave is the only
place a man can go to find solace. The existential
fear at the heart of The Irishman, then, is not of
growing old or being forgotten, but of not being
allowed to die. ADAM WOODWARDThe Irishman
Y
062 REVIEW