It is what it is: Martin Scorsese and The Irishman
Through the eyes of regret, Scorsese closes the door on a career of greatness.
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It’s natural to wonder what we’ll end up regretting. As a question that can frame both the ephemeral moments we chase or a more general, subconscious awareness that guides our sweeping pursuits, the anxiety of what we did or didn’t do is often the driving force behind much of our life. But even when we’re not about to jump off a particularly high ledge into murky waters or trying to set a career milestone, a confrontation with the aftermath of our time here can be a sobering thought. Pondering the feelings and immaterial concepts that will long outlive our mortal coils seems dependent on the place in which we’re thinking about it. The naivety of youth eventually giving way to the remorseful regret of seniority.
For Martin Scorsese, that thought is ostensibly a little easier to parse. As one of the greatest filmmakers in history, the legend of his ability has seemingly already engulfed his material person. Given his penchant for skillfully managing the line between entertainment and depth, Scorsese’s place in history is well-deserved. Even in the latter stages of his career, a film like The Wolf of Wall Street carries none of the debilitating agedness of its creator. As an epic on our unfortunate role in the glorification of individualism, its most complimentary factor is that the three hours fly by. However, one issue that besets many of the legendary filmmaker’s modern efforts is their message. The pivotal scene in the aforementioned movie, wherein the perspective shifts toward the audience and the meta experience of viewing the spectacle of the Strattonites on film is reflected upon as a real-time look at how we enable people like Belfort, is a masterstroke in craft. The problem is that the point is ultimately undermined by the extravagance of what informs the conclusion.
Jordan Belfort, reimagined through Scorsese’s skillful eyes, became the figurehead for the societal phenomena the director intended to warn against. The same can be said for a number of his other reimagined protagonists. Henry Hill’s decadence turned paranoia did little to stop a generation of young men looking to be wise guys, and lord knows what can truly be said about those who misread Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy.
None of this is said to point blame at Scorsese, rather to mention that his tendency to put the subject matter before himself for the sake of a narrative or simply the story itself has been a large part of what informs his style. While he hasn’t necessarily shielded any and all particularities of his persona from the material, other directors are far more involved when it comes to infusing elements of their ideology. It’s in this sense that his latest effort, a gangster flick rife with 50s and 60s era needle drops and boat sized Cadillacs driven by minor and major criminals alike, while seemingly just another comfortable actualization of his favorite cinematographic haunts, is instead one of the most personal stories he’s ever told.
In classic Scorsese fashion, The Irishman occupies much of the language and aesthetic trappings many readily associate with the storied director. Like always, the film is as true to the source material as possible. Through unreliable narration, Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, runs us through an alternate history of the last sixty or so years in America. The titanic struggle between labour, government, and private industry is seen through the perspective of those who shaped our current material landscape. And while that kind of summary makes the plot seem more like a middle school history lesson than something you’d like to dedicate just over three hours to, the film ambulates through the most boring and exciting bits with the kind of candor and levity that can only come from someone who has largely defined the modern American criminal.
‘Whispers DiTullio. Not the Whispers they blew up in that car around the same time
*BOOM*
This was the other Whispers, the good one who knew how to make money.’
‘ … ’
‘Now, for somethin’ like this, you’re gonna need two guns.’
How he delivers comedy in a moment bereft of words, one implicating the savage murder of a man while he eats clams in front of his wife and kids, is a testament to the director’s vision and that of his long-time editor Thelma Schoonmaker. It’s also a result of the chemistry and comfort of his favorite and most coveted tools. Where De Niro occupies the primary purview of the film, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, playing Russel Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa, respectively, bring forth powerful performances as opposing sides of Scorsese’s barely disguised ideological coin.
Where Scorsese ends up inserting himself is through Sheeran. What most of the three hours builds up to is *spoiler alert* a betrayal. But how Frank gets there is something that many of us, including the guy behind the camera, can relate to. What’s true of the now resting, tell-all former gangster is that he arrives at a pivotal moment in his life with a set of skills. More than that, a specific outlook. It’s how he and Bufalino come to befriend one another. Their experience in the war, or in Bufalino’s case, organized crime, while coincidentally bolstered by a shared admiration of Catania, is nonetheless predicated on the life-altering experience of their time in conflict.
‘Che successe successe’
‘Whatever happens, happens. Fuck it.’
At this moment, Bufalino learns of the altered morality of a man looking to survive. He knows he’ll be able to count on Sheeran because of his willingness to ‘do what needs to be done.’ The tension between the two then comes in the form of Hoffa. As an idealist, someone dedicated to the pursuit of betterment for others through an adequate and unrelenting representation of labour struggles, Sheeran becomes inspired by Hoffa’s charisma.
‘I thought I was talking to General Patton.’
At the start, Bufalino and Hoffa’s interests are aligned. Their desire to forward the concerns of the union allows Frank to rise from just another working stiff to prominence in both Bufalino and organized labour’s ranks. But as either side’s political interests hit their fork in the road, Frank is eventually led to betray the man that inspired him. After a Scorsese-ian odyssey filled to the brim with regal band numbers cacophonously underscoring the criminal gaiety consistent with a series of mostly Italian and Irish men flipping taxis into rivers, tampering with ballots, robbing, shooting, and intimidating people of various persuasions, Sheeran is led down a path of his own making.
Shortly following his induction in the eyes of the Bufalino crime family, Sheeran’s inability to convince Hoffa away from the volatile hubris sat at the heart of his monumental aura results in a paralyzing cooperation with what led him to Bufalino to begin with. Sheeran, as he was on a number of occasions, is unknowingly implicated in something greater than himself. Trading on the trust built between his long time friend, he lures an appropriately suspicious Hoffa to his final resting place.
House painted.
Carpentry done.
Where others might’ve rolled credits and called it a day, Scorsese continues. The final act, a slow, looming drudge through the decrepit remorse of a life lived without total forethought, is the raison d’etre for all the killing, explosions, murders, and bribes. Peggy, Frank’s daughter and the film’s quiet, glaring moral center, refuses to talk to her father- knowing something of the betrayal against the only family-related man she ever took to. While not as cold as Peggy, his other daughters offer credence to the perspective only hinted at throughout Frank’s life as a career criminal.
Where the decadence and life springing forth from the set pieces and scenes that painted their most consequential actions lived in bright, well-lit Kodachrome, the depressing realizations of whoever remained are shot in more neutral, blank tones. As the score slows to an arthritic blunder of sounds, the gang, riddled with arthritis and issues with their medication, are barely cognizant enough to understand where they are. The tragedy of Sheeran’s lucidity being the sobering horror of a lifetime of consequences. Slipping into the terrifying maw of the unknown, he’s unable to let go of the finality of his actions. Of the betrayal of a lifetime. Of the abandonment of his daughter. Of the regret of his fluid principles.
Though it may remain forever unclear what parallels Scorsese and De Niro were attempting to allegorize about their own lives through The Irishman, their point remains. While they themselves declare the desire to make the film based itself on their own experiences in Hollywood, there isn’t a tell-all book or film, at least not yet, that details why they might relate to the life and times of Frank Sheeran. What Scorsese allows through the nuance and cinematographic linguistics of someone with an eternity of experience as an auteur is the capacity for anyone to supplant themselves in this story.
The majority of us won’t directly relate to the regret of killing a lifelong friend and leader of the most significant labour movement in American history- but we will all have regrets in our life. What Scorsese ends up positing in the final moments of Sheeran’s life reflects upon what those regrets can do to us. How they function as contingent parts of the actions we so boldly enact in the blissful ignorance of our youth. More than anything, if but for one final time in the American gangster genre, Scorsese, the man who tantalized entire generations with the projected decadence of what it is to live as an outlaw, lets us sit with the learned perspective of a life fully lived.
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