The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
Cast: Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Canavale, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Jack Huston, Kathrine Narducci, Jesse Plemons, Dominick Lombardozzi, Paul Herman, Gary Basaraba. Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, based on a book by Charles Brandt. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Bob Shaw. Film editing: Thelma Schoonmaker. Music: Robbie Robertson.
The Irishman feels valedictory, and not just because it's about gangsters growing old, but also because it's about the kind of gangsters Martin Scorsese and others introduced us to as well as the aging actors who played them: De Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel. And also because it feels like Scorsese's farewell to conventional theatrical release. Movie theaters today thrive on the kind of blockbusters Scorsese has recently dismissed as "not cinema" and more like theme parks. His collaboration with the king of home streaming services, Netflix, seems to announce that a new era of movie distribution and exhibition has arrived -- one in which the old limitations of film content and even length no longer apply. Scorsese recently said that The Irishman's three-and-a-half-hour length would probably hinder its release in today's theaters, where the only movies that long are ones like the three-hour Avengers: Endgame, a "theme park" movie. Exhibitors want films that fit tightly into a schedule, which discourages producers from making epic-length features like Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962). Netflix audiences, on the other hand, can watch on their own time, with the leisure to interrupt the film at any point for a snack or bathroom break. So a movie like The Irishman, which has an epic length but also a subtle, intimate treatment of its characters, doesn't fit in today's theaters. What's lost, of course, is the communal experience of moviegoing, the sharing by complete strangers of dreams in the dark. But we should be glad that anything makes movies like The Irishman possible. I don't know if it's a "masterpiece," as some enthusiasts have called it, but it's a damn good movie, with the best performances by De Niro and Pacino in years, and a wonderful return from semi-retirement by Pesci, who tamps down his usual ebullience for a quietly sinister but also, in later scenes, touching portrayal of a mob manipulator. The whole thing is a kind of morality tale, with De Niro's Frank Sheeran paying for his many sins by waiting for death in an existential loneliness. It takes a wizard like Scorsese -- helped by Steven Zaillian's screenplay -- to keep that kind of fable from going mawkish and sentimental.
