Upon its release, there was a great deal of conversation about various aspects of The Irishman. None of the discussion was about the substance of the film itself, however, but instead was focused on the digital de-aging process applied to Robert De Niro, the enormous runtime (209 minutes is many minutes, to be fair) and the idea of Scorsese, the great master and famed cinephile, releasing a film via Netflix. Rewatching the film just four years later puts most of these side issues into focus as exactly that: ancillary talking points that can largely be ignored.
The opening scene of The Irishman is a delightful long Steadicam shot that feels like Scorsese doing an homage of Paul Thomas Anderson doing an homage of Scorsese, probably because it takes place within a nursing home in the ‘90s and is dripping with the sort of material cultural signifiers of early P.T. Anderson films. De Niro begins voiceover narration just as the roaming camera finds him in a wheelchair, with his voice shifting from off-camera voiceover to on-camera speaking, a classic Scorsese trick with diegetic sound. These camera and sound tricks do not continue for the whole film, as if the perspective shift in the next scene also changes the storyteller at the reigns of the film. The film moves from Scorsese’s take on the tale to the protagonist’s.
For this perspective shift, the film goes backwards in time several decades into the memory of Frank Sheeran, De Niro’s eponymous Irish-American WWII veteran from South Philly. The film is now in the middle ‘50s and introduces the viewer to a digitally de-aged, blue-eyed De Niro who looks startlingly like John Wayne. Sheeran is a union truck driver for a butcher service who begins smuggling top-shelf cuts of beef to a local Philly mobster. When he gets caught, a mob-tied union lawyer sees him acquitted and Sheeran’s refusal to rat anyone out puts him into the good graces of Philly mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). From here, Sheeran becomes a “house painter” for the East Coast mafia, a hitman enforcer, with an upward trajectory.
These scenes in the past, told from Sheeran’s perspective, are also on two time lines, so that The Irishman is shifting through time on three separate time lines. Sheeran folds a chronological story from the ‘50s and onward into a separate story set in 1975 which sees Sheeran driving Russell and both men’s wives from Philadelphia to Detroit for a wedding. Along the way, they are collecting payments and issuing threats as needed.
As the film progresses, Sheeran’s two storylines begin to converge. What brings Sheeran’s rise higher and higher in the mafia and the 1975 road trip together is the enormous, magnetic presence of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino, who Scorsese introduces in a very fun way). Hoffa, of course, is the former leader of the Teamsters union and was genuinely one of the most influential figures of the early Cold War in the United States. He lent money from the union pension fund to Mafiosos so that they could build casinos and racetracks in Vegas and Atlantic City. This helped lead Sheeran into a collision with Hoffa, with the two men becoming very close friends. For those who know their lore, Hoffa, who lived in Detroit, disappeared in the summer of 1975, the same weekend that Sheeran and Bufalino were driving that direction. This is the climax toward which The Irishman is building: what happened to Hoffa, what did Frank Sheeran have to do with it and what were the consequences of this for all the people involved.
Over the course of three and a half hours, The Irishman broaches dozens of subjects and raises hundreds of talking points. The jokes about the rise of the Kennedys—and Hoffa’s visceral hatred for both of them—carry the middle act of the film. Living in 2023, with folks like Elon, Trump and Oakland Athletics owner John Fisher fucking up everything, makes Hoffa condemning JFK with a line about how you can never trust the kids of millionaires one of the more amusing parts of the film, for instance. The Irishman also offers worthwhile commentary on unions, prisons, Castro, the best red wine vinegar, which handgun to use to murder a mobster in a seafood joint and much more.
Looking beyond the Netflix of it all and getting past De Niro looking like Rooster Cogburn may take some effort from the viewer, but once these issues have been resolved, it is undeniable: The Irishman is among the best US-American films of the past decade and proof positive that Scorsese still has it even in his old age. Here’s hoping he goes on to make another dozens films!
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