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character’s future death. (“Phil Testa—
blown up by a nail bomb under his
porch. March 15, 1981.”) Scorsese, like
many of his fellow-masters, from Welles
to Almodóvar, has grown ever more
interested in the passage of time; in
how that passing can be slowed, or in
how a simple cut can bridge the chasm
of the years. (Leone originally wanted
Noodles to be played by Richard Drey-
fuss, with James Cagney as his older
self.) In the course of “The Irishman,”
this quest is aided by technology, with
actors digitally rejuvenated and aged.
Such tricks are both dazzling and
creepy, and, in stressing facial change,
they tend to neglect the other, no less
telling ways in which we are gradually
transformed. When Frank, supposedly
still limber and youthful, clambers over
rocks to a shoreline, where he can toss
away used firearms, his motions betray
the tentative and unmistakable stiff-
ness of an older man. Reboot his fea-
tures all you like; the body does not lie.
If I had to define “The Irishman,” I
would say that it’s basically “Wild Straw-
berries” with handguns. Like Bergman’s
film, from 1957, this one is structured
around a road trip. To be exact, Russell
drives Frank from Kingston, Pennsyl-
vania, to Detroit. Both of them are el-
derly, and, as they halt near a truck stop,
with a Texaco sign beside it, they real-
ize that they first met there, decades be-
fore, when Russell helped Frank start
his engine. With that, we are tugged
back into the past.
But there’s something else about the
journey to Detroit. Frank’s wife, Irene
(Stephanie Kurtzuba), and Russell’s wife,
Carrie (Kathrine Narducci), who is de-
scribed as “Mob royalty,” go along for
the ride. Their dramatic function is lit-
tle more than to kvetch about being for-
bidden to smoke en route, and, when
they do get out for a cigarette and a
chat, we don’t hear more than scraps of
what they say. More flagrant still is the
movie’s treatment of Frank’s first wife,
Mary ( Jennifer Mudge), whom we
barely see before he ditches her for Irene.
It’s almost as if she’s being introduced
in order to be erased, and we are re-
minded of the grave lack of women at
the heart of Scorsese’s work, and of how
rarely—with the blazing exceptions of
Ellen Burstyn, in “Alice Doesn’t Live
Here Anymore” (1974), and SharonStone, in “Casino”—they are granted
the freedom to occupy center stage. More
often than not, they dwindle into scolds.
Is Scorsese’s place in the pantheon not
compromised by this shortfall? Can you
imagine Bergman, Ophüls, Cukor, or
Mizoguchi accepting such a curb?
To be fair, we have Peggy—Frank’s
daughter, Russell’s goddaughter, and, as
it were, the conscience of “The Irish-
man.” Wonderfully played by Lucy Gal-
lina as a child and by Anna Paquin as
an adult, she trains her fierce, accusatory
gaze upon the male tribe around her,
and, after Hoffa’s disappearance, refuses
to speak to Frank. The problem is, again,
one of gender: Peggy comes and goes
like a ghost, scarcely giving utterance to
her thoughts, without a single scene to
call her own. She is clearly aware that
her father is a brute, and as guilty as hell,
but the movie leaves us wondering: does
she also regard him, for all his prowess,
as a loser? If so, she’s not wrong. In real
life, Frank Sheeran was a thug and a
blowhard, and it’s likely that his confes-
sions, as related to Brandt, were inflated
with hot air. In 2005, when police exam-
ined the house where Sheeran boasted
of having shot Jimmy Hoffa, they did
indeed find bloodstains. But the blood
was not Hoffa’s. Nice try, Frank.
At seventy-six, and after more than
fifty years in the business, Scorsese is
still, to some extent, the hyper-smart kid,
cradled in the cinema stalls, and lost in
awe at the lives—so much tougher and
nastier than his own, and so thrillingly
uncultured—being led up there onscreen.
If “The Irishman” feels sadder and slower
than anything he’s done before, it may
be because, at last, he’s seeking to reckon
with that reverence. Hence the wistful
sequences, at the back end of the story,
with a decrepit Russell confined to a
wheelchair, in prison. Even here, how-
ever, amid the creaking pathos, the di-
rector can’t quite bring himself to cast
doubt upon the credentials of his heroes;
the clear implication remains “How are
the mighty fallen,” whereas someone like
Peggy would question how mighty they
were to begin with. That’s the thing with
wiseguys. They don’t grow any wiser.
They live and die, like the rest of us, just
a little before their time. “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984),
he was Noodles, who led a gang of Jew-
ish pals through a lifetime of scrapes
and misdemeanors. I love that movie,
despite its faults, and have to be swept
off the floor after every viewing; you
can’t blame Scorsese for not trying to
match the warmth of Leone’s emotional
clutch. “The Irishman” has wider hori-
zons in mind.
For one thing, it keeps glancing out-
ward, to the world beyond the streets of
Philadelphia. “Would you like to be a
part of this history?” Hoffa says to Frank,
as if he knows that they’re all in a movie,
and there’s a touch of Zelig in Frank’s
peculiar talent for being around when-
ever a crisis looms. He drives a truckful
of arms to the men who are headed for
the Bay of Pigs, and his contact at the
handover, in Jacksonville, is “a guy with
big ears, named Hunt”—E. Howard
Hunt, whom Frank later recognizes on
TV, during the Watergate hearings. Then,
we have the Kennedys. The movie en-
courages dark thoughts about organized
crime and its links to political homicide,
and Frank is present when Hoffa orders
the Stars and Stripes, flying at half-mast
after the death of John F. Kennedy, to
be hauled back up the flagpole on the
roof of the Teamsters’ headquarters.
As a conspiracist, however, Scorsese
is far less full-throated than, say, Oliver
Stone, and the quieter and more private
moments of “The Irishman” offer a sense
of relief. Hoffa and Frank are such boon
companions that they share a hotel bed-
room, and, as the nation’s most power-
ful union boss stands there in pajamas,
brushing his teeth, the two men seem
less like purveyors of menace and more
like a nice old married couple. Don’t tell
the Bufalinos, but deep inside this movie
lurks a sitcom. There is comedy here,
but it springs from the rat-a-tat rhythms
of Mob talk, veering toward Damon
Runyon: “They told the old man to tell
me to tell you, that’s what it is.” More
than once, Frank is cautioned with the
words “No, not that.” Translation: “Don’t
rub him out just yet.”
Now and then, in “Mean Streets,” the
names of the characters flash up on the
screen—“Johnny Boy,” “Charlie,” and so
on. The same thing happens in the new
film, but with an extra chill: the action
freezes for each name, and it’s accompa-
nied by the date and the manner of the
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.