Charles Brandt, Steven Zaillian, and Martin Scorsese, 2019
#5,
2019 Skandies
A note on the header graphic: apparently this film is officially titled The Irishman, but the book on which it is based is called I Heard You Paint Houses, and that’s what appears on the opening title cards. Thus, the Skandies list this film as I Heard You Paint Houses, and I likely would have done the same if not for the fact that by coincidence this article is going up on St. Patrick’s Day. For what it’s worth, the end credits show both titles back to back.
I try to avoid learning anything about the movies on my watch list, but I couldn’t help but hear about the movie’s central gimmick: this is another Martin Scorsese mafia movie, with a cast of the usual mafia movie guys, except the ’70s are over and those guys are now old. When this movie was filmed, Robert De Niro was 74, Joe Pesci was 75, and Al Pacino was 77. Yet the story unfolds over the course of decades. Historically, that would call for the casting of young actors who would either be replaced by the older ones as the story reached a spot where it could jump forward in the timeline, or who would be encased in increasingly thick layers of old age makeup as we followed the characters from the ’50s up to the ’90s. Because you couldn’t really go the other way. Sitcoms would occasionally try to do flashbacks to earlier seasons, but the characters rarely looked like their younger selves: more often, the wigs just made their current faces look that much more haggard. But digital de-aging had made a great leap forward by the time Scorsese moved this project to the top of his to-do list, so the fortyish versions of these characters are played by the elderly actors, with some help from a computer graphics team (and a posture coach). Then, when the time comes for them to play the elderly versions, no old-age makeup is required. (When they play the seriously geriatric versions, it is, though I presume that could also be digital. I’m also seeing conflicting reports on whether Robert De Niro’s blue eyes are done with computer graphics or just contact lenses, though I lean toward the former because in one scene they looked like they were glowing purple.)
But while I’d heard about the de-aging, I hadn’t actually heard anything about the plot, so I was surprised to discover that this isn’t just any old organized crime story: the titular Irishman is a real guy named Frank Sheeran, who in the last years of his life claimed to have murdered Jimmy Hoffa. As the Sheeran character’s voiceover narration points out, to the generations before mine, Hoffa was a major player on the political stage, the face of organized labor in an era when organized labor had a lot of power to flex. Most young people today haven’t heard of Hoffa at all. To my generation, or at least to me, what he was famous for was his disappearance. At age eight I saw a documentary on HBO called Missing Persons: Dead or Alive? that terrified me to the point that for days afterward I sprinted past open doors for fear that someone would leap out and kidnap me. (The mind of a child is not a very logical bone.) Here, enjoy the primitive animation that chilled me to my very soul:
This made enough of an impression on me that a few years later, at age twelve, when I had to read an autobiography of a notable figure for history class, Jimmy Hoffa was the one I chose. I doubt I understood even one percent of what I read, and as I got further away from age eight and the Missing Persons documentary ceased to hold quite so firm a grip on me, my fascination with the incident waned. Still, I did feel a sense of closure watching a dramatization of the Hoffa case now that I was finally equipped to process what I was seeing.
As for the movie: I mean, it’s certainly better than Silence, but ultimately it’s pretty clear that the same guy made both films. Frank Sheeran isn’t very interesting: he’s a cog in the mafia, who commits murder after murder seemingly without even a glimmer of recognition that there might be moral implications to this. But he’s not completely inhuman. He has at least a truncated spectrum of emotion. When he is instructed to execute Hoffa, who had taken him under his wing and acted like an older brother to him, he does experience some distress—sure, he obediently goes along with every step of the plan, but as he is unquestioningly following orders he feels upset about it. He’s also upset that one of his adult daughters has permanently cut him out of her life, the Hoffa murder functioning as the last straw after a childhood spent grappling with the fact that her father is a monster. This is especially painful to him once all of his old mafia associates are dead, leaving him alone in a nursing home, very close to the end of the line himself, with nothing to show for his life but a body count. And Scorsese’s primary concern seems to be, how does a good Catholic priest properly minister to such a man? How do you serve as an instrument of God’s infinite mercy on behalf of a murderer who, to human eyes, seems eminently unworthy of it? How do you help him turn his regrets about the ultimate course of his life into true, soul-saving repentance? The problem is that to viewers who find these concerns to stem from a worldview rooted in silly superstition, the answer to these questions that lie at the heart of the movie is “who the fuck cares”.
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