Tuesday, December 31, 2019

IRISH AND ITALIAN


IRISH AND ITALIAN

          By now I am sure, anyone at all interested in current cinema knows about the release of Martin Scorsese’s new work, The Irishman.  In addition to all the initial publicity surrounding its appearance, on both Netflix and ultimately in theaters, most of the reviews appear to provide the usual Niagara of superlatives worthy of a Donald Trump rally speech, interrupted only by exclamation points, that generally passes for film criticism these days.
          Based on a book about a real person, Frank Sheeran, who worked for the Mob and allegedly killed Jimmy Hoffa, the movie features a whole compendium of the director’s typical methods, subjects, and themes.  Essentially a voice-over narrative, which Scorsese often employs, the movie proceeds from the reflections of the aged Sheeran (Robert De Niro), now in a nursing home, facing the end of his life.  Complete with a priest who sporadically visits Sheeran, the narrative then constitutes something like a confession, with the narrator returning frequently to his greatest regret, his estrangement from his daughter.  (Perhaps because of his Catholicism, Scorsese likes to use the device of confession, which also explains his attachment to voice-over narration).  Apparently to prevent the work from turning into one long, linear chronology, the director moves scenes and sequences back and forth in time as he follows Sheeran’s career from truck driver to thief to mob enforcer to the confidant and eventual assassin of the labor leader.
          Along with some of the director’s favorite techniques, the cast includes some of his favorite actors; aside from De Niro, who has appeared in so many of his films he easily qualifies as Scorsese’s alter ego, Al Pacino appears as Hoffa, Joe Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, and Harvey Keitel occupies a small role as Angelo Bruno, all actual mobsters in Sheeran’s life and career.  In keeping with its pseudo-documentary style, the film often freezes a frame, showing those men and other gangsters, complete with the dates and causes of their deaths, mostly of course from lead poisoning.
          Along with the frequent movements back and forth in time, the film applies state of the art techniques to alter the appearance of the characters, so that they look the appropriate age in a particular scene or sequence.  Typically, Scorsese also uses the appropriate popular music of each time period as a background and even a commentary on the people, places, and actions.  The clothes, the cars, the interior decoration all match those moments—Scorsese is famously meticulous in the look of his pictures.
          As for the picture itself, despite the hype and the praise, it is actually a very long, repetitive, intermittently dull movie not terribly different from a number of Scorsese’s films, though inferior to several of them; it takes a long time in its elliptical manner to tell its essentially simple story.  If it resembles any of his films in the gangster genre he frequently explores, it seems quite close to Casino, another long, repetitive, overpraised work based on a mobster’s reminiscences.  Its time scheme, its production values, its distinguished cast rescue it from what could have become crushingly boring. 
          Despite that cast, however, the performances generally disappoint, especially those of the two headliners.  De Niro naturally occupies the screen most of the time—it’s his story, after all—but he seems to play almost every moment the same way, with the same mostly impassive facial expression; he confronts almost every situation with a squint, a shrug, a downturned mouth apparently intended to show emotional engagement, but mostly suggests a kind of deadly neutrality.  Pacino, on the other hand, plays Hoffa with an occasionally exhausting excess, remaining on one note—anger—throughout and confined by the picture to a series of repeated scenes, in most of which he flies out of control.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most impressive person in the movie, the real star, turns out to be Joe Pesci.  Totally unlike the scary psychopath of GoodFellas  or Anthony the Ant of Casino, as Russell Bufalino he virtually exudes enormous confidence, even charm, as he attempts to instruct Sheeran in his understated way in various violent behaviors, including murder; somehow he retains a certain likeability throughout the picture, and somehow, with his quiet style he dominates the scenes he occupies.  He essentially outperforms every other actor in the movie, quite an achievement, considering his colleagues in the cast.
Scorsese’s apparent attempt to make the film a kind of epic, a reflection of an era with its own peculiar hero, ultimately fails.  His major figures prove only intermittently interesting, his plot meanders without a good deal of energy, and the focus of it all, Jimmy Hoffa, generally seems a hysterical clown.  Despite the gushing paroxysms of so many critics, great length does not automatically confer greatness itself; size provides no special grandeur.

No comments:

Post a Comment