The Irishman (2019)

Important facts to keep in mind when approaching director Martin Scorsese's lengthy end-of-career midcentury gangster epic and usual jukebox bacchanalia: Scorsese is 77. Robert De Niro, the star, titular Irishman, and practically in every scene, is 76. Al Pacino, who plays Jimmy Hoffa, is 79. Joe Pesci is 76. Harvey Keitel, whose appearances are so brief they practically qualify as cameos, is 80. Ray Romano and Bobby Cannavale are the spring chickens around here, 62 and 49, respectively, and they're not even in the picture that much. De Niro and Pacino dominate, with strong support from Pesci. Cannavale looks like a tween in this context. It's little surprise that The Irishman rocks along like a summertime porch scene and garrulous old men swapping stories they've all told and heard a million times. The stories are not bad, in fact, and they are often told well, though by now they are familiar. The Irishman is practically a nostalgia project by design and who can begrudge these various giants? Scorsese seems to be reaching here for the energy and sizzle of Goodfellas and Casino more than the strange poetry of Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, or Raging Bull (let alone any of those wandering in the desert but always interesting experiments such as The Age of Innocence, Kundun, or Bringing Out the Dead). It's sad when the panache is decidedly thirdhand—the rapid-fire cuts and swoops, the voiceovers, the brash flourishes like freeze-frames or random career biographies displayed as titles ("Angelo Bruno—shot in the head sitting in his car outside his house, 1980"), and all that midcentury music ("In the Still of the Nite," "Delicado," etc.). We've seen it before, and better. At the same time Scorsese remains a natural at these loose, freewheeling narratives so there's a certain amount of comfort to the movie that is unmistakable. It's like climbing into a barcalounger with a cigar and a glass of wine. You probably won't doze off. The rewards are here, notably for students of 20th-century gangster movies, even if you have to set aside the requisite amount of time—The Irishman is seven minutes longer than The Godfather: Part II. Speaking of The Godfather: Part II, the point for me where The Irishman slips over from interesting and into mere nostalgia is in the decision to cast the young Frank Sheeran with the same old Robert De Niro. He's supposed to be absolutely no older than 35 in some of these scenes but he never looks younger than 54 on a good day. De Niro, if you recall, was cast to play the younger Vito Corleone in Godfather II, partly because of contract hang-ups with Marlon Brando, but mainly because Brando, who was about 50 at the time, was plainly too old to play the part. No, in case you're wondering, the CGI in The Irishman doesn't come close to cutting it. If Orson Welles demonstrated in Citizen Kane that a young man can play on old one (actually a dubious proposition), then De Niro demonstrates here that an old man cannot play a young one. In theory, I don't have that much of a problem with handing the whole schlimoozle over to De Niro—he and Scorsese go way back, and they both deserve the retirement party. But it certainly takes down the ambitions of this movie a number of notches.