Scorsese’s The Irishman packs a punch
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is one of the ageing director’s finest achievements.
Martin Scorsese’s first studio-made feature, Boxcar Bertha (1972), was about a union official of the 1930s who turned to crime. Over his long career Scorsese has, time and again, returned to the theme of crime in America: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Casino and Gangs of New York have all, to a greater or lesser degree, become landmarks in the exploration of a criminal society. Now comes The Irishman, a rich, complex, 3½-hour epic that seems to encapsulate all the themes that have obsessed this major American director, adding a couple of his other concerns, ethnicity and religion, into the mix.
There’s a new element to The Irishman, however. This is a film made by an old man (Scorsese is now 76) and the story he tells, as sharp, dynamic and well-made as his past work, is suffused with melancholy, regret and nostalgia.
It opens with one of those elegantly fluid tracking shots the director loves so much as the camera moves through the corridors of a retirement home until it settles on the figure of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), sitting in a wheelchair talking to no one in particular about his past. He recalls a fateful summer day in 1975 when he and his friend Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) are travelling with their wives from Philadelphia to Detroit, ostensibly to attend a wedding. And, as in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, the drive triggers memories from the past.
Memories of the war, when Frank fought in Italy. Memories of the post-war period, when he drove a truck, and the day he met Bufalino (“I met what was going to be the rest of my life”). Memories of how he became involved, in a minor role at first, with the Mob and how he became the friend of Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Teamsters Union and, next to the president, “the most powerful man in the country”. Hoffa is played by Al Pacino who, working for the first time with Scorsese, gives a towering performance (the last time Hoffa was portrayed onscreen it was by Jack Nicholson in the film Hoffa in 1992).
Scorsese and screenwriter Steve Zaillian explore the links between organised crime, corrupt unions and the political establishment. Hoffa’s role in the election of John Kennedy in 1960 — the result of some dodgy vote rigging and campaign funds — led the union leader to believe he had a friend in the White House, making him livid when JFK’s attorney-general Bobby Kennedy (Jack Huston) launched a campaign against the Teamsters.
Scene after scene involves these influential criminals using euphemisms to issue deadly orders (the simple phrase “It’s what it is” assumes dreadful connotations). There are brutal assassinations during the internecine wars of the period and, at the film’s climax, a chilling murder plot in which Frank is a key figure. Frank’s family life, or lack thereof, also features strongly in the film, with Anna Paquin — in an almost wordless performance — strikingly good as his favourite daughter.
The film also benefits from the wonders of modern technology. A revolutionary “de-ageing” process, better used here than in Gemini Man, allows De Niro and Pesci, who are both in their 70s, to appear as men who look 30 years younger. It’s a little creepy but very convincing.
Suffused with black humour and, in the end, a strange sadness, The Irishman is one of Scorsese’s finest achievements. De Niro’s performance is one of his best, while Pesci’s Bufalino is chilling in its placid menace. Scorsese veterans such as Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano and Barry Primus also make key contributions.
Despite its length, The Irishman is riveting. It confirms Scorsese as one of the great American filmmakers.
The Irishman (MA15+)
Dark revelations of hidden tortures
Who will judge our judges, and who will police our police? At a time when the attention of all thinking Australians is rightly focused on media freedom and scrutiny of the actions the government takes in our name comes The Report, a devastating expose of what went on in the aftermath of 9/11, when security agencies in the West began to accumulate bigger budgets and more power.
The opening title of writer-director Scott Z. Burns’s sobering film reads “The Torture Report”, but then the word “torture” is scrubbed out — redacted. Daniel Jones (Adam Driver), a staff member of the US select committee on intelligence, is assigned the task of preparing the eponymous report on behalf of Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening); the subject is the use by the CIA of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) — that is, torture — on suspected terrorists.
After five years of painstaking investigation, Jones discovers that the EIT program was assigned to a pair of psychologists, James Mitchell (Douglas Hodge) and Bruce Jessen (T. Ryder Smith), who assured the CIA that the use of techniques such as waterboarding would succeed in extracting information about forthcoming terrorist attacks. The fact that absolutely no such information came from the EIT program is just one of the film’s revelations. A total of 119 suspects were exposed to this kind of torture and one of them died as a result.
The film strongly makes the case that this kind of thing cannot and must not be carried out without scrutiny. Yet John Brennan (Ted Levine), the CIA director under Barack Obama, obfuscates and openly lies (after an illegal CIA raid on the offices of the select committee, Brennan baldly asserts: “We wouldn’t do that”).
By its nature, this kind of investigative film is unlikely to reach a huge audience. It’s important to note that Burns’s approach is not that of a simple Left v Right argument. Rather, he poses questions that both sides of politics need to answer and seeks to shed light on those dark events that occurred in the wake of the 2001 attack that changed the world. Driver and Bening give detailed and thoughtful performances, and the film, though necessarily on the dry side, is riveting from start to finish.
The Report (tbc)
Limited national release from Thursday
Arctic justice
Animated features are thick on the ground this year, as kids flock to the G-rated fare that adults don’t find too painful. Aaron Woodley’s Arctic Justice is a mildly amiable affair set — as the title suggests — somewhere in the frozen north. Swiftly (voiced by Jeremy Renner) is an Arctic fox who, because he blends into the snow-covered landscape so successfully, is often ignored by the denizens of Taigasville.
He’s a humble postman who sees no chance of ever becoming “top dog” — until he becomes involved in thwarting a dastardly plot by Otto von Walrus (John Cleese) to destroy the local environment with his unethical mining and drilling. Cleese revels in his role as the bad guy, but the best line goes to Alec Baldwin’s Polar Bear who, on learning that the walrus is the villain, remarks: “I thought the walrus was Paul” — a joke that will be lost on non-Beatles fans.
Arctic Justice (G)
National release
The wild women of Rome revealed
This revisionist history argues that the women of ancient Rome weren’t quite as nutty as some histories would have you believe.
Combining ‘euphoria’ and ‘sexual’ to go deeper and darker
British artist FKA Twigs has transmogrified into a Hollywood A-lister since her 2014 debut, and her third album Eusexua takes her into horny, avant-garde territory, with career-best results.