66 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2019
THE CURRENT CINEMA
THERE WAS BLOOD
“The Irishman.”BY ANTHONY LANEABOVE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET
W
hen you are old and gray and full
of sleep, what will you talk about?
Your grandchildren? The far-off scents
and tastes of your own childhood? Your
first love? Or that time when you walked
into Umberto’s Clam House and shot
Crazy Joe, only you didn’t whack him
right, so he runs outta there, more like
stumbles, and you follow the guy and
finish him off on the sidewalk, you know,
pop pop, close the deal? The sorry fate
of Joe is one of the many events recalled
for us by Frank Sheeran (Robert De
Niro), in “The Irishman,” as he sits in
a nursing home and summons up re-
membrance of kills past.
The director of the movie is Martin
Scorsese, returning to the rich soil that
he has tilled and sown before, in “Mean
Streets” (1973), “Goodfellas” (1990), “Ca-
sino” (1995), “The Departed” (2006), and
the opening episode of “Boardwalk Em-
pire,” in 2010. The new film is adapted
by Steven Zaillian from a book by
Charles Brandt, partly based on con-
versations with the real Frank Sheeran,
who died in 2003, and titled “I Heard
You Paint Houses.” We see the phrase
onscreen, writ large in capital letters.
Apparently, it’s what you say to a hit
man when making polite inquiries into
his availability—a useful tip, though not
if you are genuinely concerned with re-
decorating your home.
The tale is told in flashback, either
in voice-over or to the camera, with
Frank looking directly—and disconcert-
ingly—toward us, as if he were being
interviewed for a documentary. To and
fro we glide, across the decades, tracing
Frank’s ascent, decline, and fall. We see
him as a hale young fellow, delivering
sides of meat, and then as a fixer for the
Bufalinos, who are not, as the name sug-
gests, the reigning monarchs of the moz-
zarella trade but a noted criminal clan
in Philadelphia. Frank, arraigned on a
charge of theft, is defended by Bill Bu-
falino (Ray Romano) and befriended
by Bill’s cousin Russell ( Joe Pesci), who
becomes a soul mate for life. Frank soon
graduates from fixing to whacking, with
Scorsese, as so often, eschewing gran-
deur for the downbeat detail—a gun
handed over in a brown paper bag, with
no more fuss than a sandwich.
The next step up finds Frank being
presented to Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino),
whose command of the Teamsters is
absolute, and who needs a bodyguard.
It’s instructive to compare Pacino’s Hoffa
with Jack Nicholson’s, in the underrated
“Hoffa” (1992). Pacino is leaner and
louder, with a wary stare in those haunted
orbs; Nicholson is more of a bulldog—
foursquare, wasting fewer words, and
thus, for my money, providing a more
tenacious bite. Also, Pacino fails to shed
the tic that has pervaded the second half
of his career. Whatever the role, he
stretches out a word of one syllable into
two, or even three, and declaims each
syllable at a different pitch. So, as Hoffa,
he doesn’t say “fraud.” He says “frahr-
aud.” Call it irritable-vowel syndrome,
and leave it at that.
Much of “The Irishman,” in its later
stages, is consumed by the Hoffalogi-
cal—too much, perhaps, what with the
added weight of speculation. Hoffa van-
ished on July 30, 1975, and left no trace;
rumors have seethed ever since, and the
movie, endorsing claims made by Brandt,
in his book, tags Frank as Hoffa’s mur-derer. Whether or not you buy the the-
sis, so calm and so remorseless is the clar-
ity with which Scorsese charts the events
of that day that you somehow yield to
them not as a flight of fancy but as the
reconstruction of an established truth.
Such is the method of the movie: patient,
composed, and cool to the point of froi-
deur. It runs for just under three and a
half hours, although, to be honest, it sel-
dom runs. Instead, it maintains a sombre
pace, like a mourner in a funeral cortège.
Whenever a town car—the hoodlum’s
transport of choice—passes before the
camera, it looks like a hearse in waiting.
As for Frank, when he’s not wielding
a weapon, he likes to stay on the side-
lines, keeping his counsel. It’s a joy to
see De Niro at his most watchful, after
too many films that have diluted his force
of concentration, though I could have
done without the tinting of his eyes. Gone
is the dark Italianate brown of De Niro’s
natural irises. New Blue Eyes is here.
Short of cladding Frank in shamrock
green, it’s hard to think of a less subtle
means of ethnic signalling. The movie
makes a brazen effort to explain the odd-
ity, by having Russell ask Frank, “How
did an Irishman like you get to speak
Italian?” To which Frank replies that, in
the military, he fought his way through
Italy, picking up the lingo along the way.
Yeah, just like all those thousands of G.I.s
who came back from the war against the
Nazis looking tall and blond and talking
in fluent German.
This is not the first occasion, of
course, on which De Niro has stepped
aside from his cultural identity for the
sake of a long and chronologically com-
plex gangster flick. In Sergio Leone’s