November 27th is the day everyone's an
IRISHMAN
Couldn't miss the chance to catch it on the big screen last week. An indulgent masterpiece, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Pips Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Joker for movie of the year.
The luxurious running time means Scorsese doesn't have the control and mastery of the material that he enjoyed on
Goodfellas or
Raging Bull. Then again, if you told me you had a three-hour edit of either of those films I'd slam your head in a car door until you turned it over.
This feels much more like
Wolf Of Wall Street; a series of wonderfully realised studies for a painting presented for exhibition alongside the finished piece because they have considerable merit in their own right. And the extra running time allows the story to avoid some of the glibness of those (incredible) movies.
Ray Liotta collecting his newspaper on the porch of his witness protection home in Nowhere is a great end to
Goodfellas, but
The Irishman would have shown you Henry Hill working at his boring job for forty years, his retirement and eventual death. It's just such a protracted end sequence that distinguishes the film from a Greatest Hits set and emphasises the film's concern with finality and mortality
(i).
Although death and endings are constant themes throughout the film thanks to a blackly comic version of the on-screen information in
Brink, where whenever a supporting character is introduced the movie freezes and a caption informs the viewer exactly how and when they will eventually meet their (invariably violent and bloody) end.
No cast members survive to join Sheeran in the rest home, but the film thinks they're the fortunate ones. You probably have to be eighty to make a film that argues the only meaningful choice we have in life is how we feel about and respond to watching everyone we know die
(ii).
Rather than playing Hoffa, Pacino's playing Al Pacino
(iii), in the same way that Scorsese's making a Martin Scorsese film, which is fine because they're both great at it. There's a scene where Pacino makes a life or death decision seated beside a lake - you don't put Pacino in the
lakehouse accidentally or without realising its significance.
Plemons, Cannavale, and Graham represent the next generation (X and Millennial) of actors who, if the movie industry - not even what Scorsese grandly termed 'cinema', but just the movie
industry - still existed, would be playing the roles that De Niro and Pacino once did, but who have done their signature work on telly.
Link Prime's exactly right - this is an indulgent but wonderful film. It probably won't be Scorsese's final movie, but it'll feel like a fitting end to a career once he's dead - tying up a body of work in the same way
Endgame capped-off the MCU - and it makes a beautiful farewell to an entire era of movie making and popular culture, too.
Check the name of the film on the marquee:
(i) If you're interested in watching this film to witness De Niro restored to the beauty and vitality of his youth via the miracle of CGI de-ageing technology, you'll be disappointed. DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci look like men in their seventies wearing hairpieces and eyeliner. They've dialled De Niro's age back ten years at most, even when he's supposed to be in his thirties. Everyone's too old to play these roles - there's one scene where Pesci introduces DeNiro as 'the kid I was telling you about' and you look around the screen to see who the kid is supposed to be - but if you were fine with a black Miss Moneypenny or a female Iago - and I was - then that isn't going to bother you.
(ii) The film's concerned with the end but also how we ended up in the place we are now. It's the story of how the (white) blue-collar members of post-WWII US society knowingly conspired in corruption, operating a sort of double-consciousness that allowed them to go along with the lies American society is built upon as long as the lie benefited them and they felt the liar in charge was on their side.
From its (sub)title - I HEARD YOU PAINT HOUSES - onwards, the film's about a society based upon saying one thing and meaning another, knowing fine well that everyone knows exactly what you actually mean. Pacino's character dies because he doesn't understand what people are trying to tell him because they never say what they actually mean and he's been telling lies for so long he doesn't believe anything he's told.
Sheeran's baby boomer daughter Peggy, who works in a bank, understands the lies and sees the corruption but her only response is silence and to (literally) put the shutters up. By a coincidence, I watched an episode of South Park last night in which protesting white nationalist truck drivers were replaced by Alexa, their chant of 'you will not replace us' figured as pointless protest demanding the return of a world that has passed into history.
(iii) Or maybe Sil from The Sopranos, which is like accusing John Lennon of imitating Liam Gallagher. Van Zandt turns up as a lounge singer in a pivotal scene, sharing screen time with Pacino, whose performance in Godfather III he memorably parodied in The Sopranos. This film boasts more Sopranos cast members than you could shake a stick at, which, considering that show made a conspicuous point of hiring Goodfellas alumni, creates a dizzying spiral of self-reflexivity