The Irishman

“You don’t know how good a friend you got,” says Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel) to a middle aged Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) after the latter makes a hit on a competing laundromat as a side job for Whispers (Paul Herman, who played the Apostle Philip in THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST).  Contrary to Whisper’s claims, Angelo, an associate of the storied mob boss Carlo Gambino, owns the laundromat.  The “friend” is Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), head of one of the largest crime families in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

The scene, which takes place in the middle act of Martin Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN, is one of the few moments Keitel appears in the role of the paternalistic gangster—indirectly cleaning up other people’s messes.

“I’ll give him back his money,” says Sheeran.

“He won’t be needing it,” replies Bruno.

Adapted by Steven Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s 2004 novel, I Heard You Paint Houses, THE IRISHMAN chronicles Frank Sheeran’s (Robert De Niro) ascent as an enforcer within the Bufalino crime family of Chicago.

Making a three-day drive from Philly to Bill Bufalino’s (Ray Romano) wedding, his brother Russell (Joe Pesci) pulls Frank aside.  They’re not going to the wedding.  He’s sending Frank ahead to Detroit, to paint a house.  In mafioso vernacular this is a metaphor; think about it.

Flashing forward to the present, from his convalescence in a rest home the cancer stricken Sheeran recalls his first encounter with Russell outside a Stuckey’s near Philly.  Fired for theft after embezzling inventory from his meat packing delivery truck to a local gangster, Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio (Bobby Cannavale), Frank finds himself indebted to Russell after Bill, an attorney for the Teamsters, successfully wins his wrongful termination suit.

Frank, the film argues, succumbs to criminality out of a desire to provide for his growing family.  With each successive daughter’s birth, none of whom (read: permitted) will earn a man’s income, he becomes more entrenched in the service of Cosa Nostra.  At every turn, he takes the next job, and the next, and the next, until he finds himself on the phone with Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).

A member of Teamsters Local 107 since after the war, during which Frank participated in war crimes—shooting prisoners of war and disposing of their bodies in unmarked graves, the two converse late night in Hoffa’s hotel suite.  He likens their enterprise to war, “You go from place to place, spilling a little beer along the way.”

Hoffa has a charismatic, genial way about him.  Like Bruno, he doesn’t personally get his hands dirty.  He pays other hands, like Frank, to do the dirty work.  Peggy, Frank’s third daughter, adores him because he compartmentalizes well.  She gets caught up in America’s fascination with the public face of Hoffa’s labor movement—oblivious to the mafia’s looting of the pension fund to finance their casino projects.  The relationship between organized crime, casinos, and politics provides a germane backdrop—coming to a head as Attorney General Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy takes down Santo Trafficante Jr. and Carlos Marcello, which, along with a subplot involving E. Howard Hunt and David Ferrie shipping weapons to Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion, tries unsuccessfully to weave a conspiracy theory about JFK’s assassination.  But the real story centers on Frank’s choice of criminality over family.

There are many things Frank could have done to provide for his four daughters.  He could’ve started a business that one day his children might inherit.  He never took that opportunity, even after Russ taught him the ropes.  He chose not to.

If fathers are one kind of theme here, daughters are another.  Frank at one point describes Carrie (Katherine Narducci) as “Mafia royalty”.  In a flashback when Russ comes home, wearing a blood-stained shirt presumably returning from his first hit, Carrie descends from the staircase, her nightgown ensconced in diffuse light, like an angel coming to absolve him of his sins.  Russ looks stunned, still processing what he’s done.  Unfazed, Carrie tells him to clean up while she disposes the evidence.

Peggy sees less but suspects and, as the years go by, knows.  After her father violently beats a shopkeeper for touching her, she looks at him, and the other men around him, differently.  While we deserve to know these women’s side of the story, it’s not one that Scorsese would pretend to narrate better than women screenwriters and directors.  But it’s a worthy argument that a man in his position of power, who contributed to and enabled the careers of other filmmakers, missed an opportunity to diversify the writer’s table here.  There’s no dispute that wouldn’t have made for a better story, as good as the IRISHMAN is.

THE IRISHMAN wants to be Scorsese’s grand symphony, featuring all the old players, retelling a story evolved by time and experience.  In Scorsese’s earlier pictures, from RAGING BULL to GOODFELLAS, his stories played with the idea of hyper masculinity as a vehicle to identity.   The respect commanded from one’s men around him determined his self-image.  In that regard, men are their own worst enemy.

DeNiro, Pacino, and Pesci go through various stages of CG “de-aging”, which jars us at first but takes a backseat to the wonderfully understated performances.  Pesci especially shines opposite type.  Gone is the hyper-sensitive expletive cannon, and in its place a soft-spoken man who commands respect with his constant sense of equilibrium amidst chaos.  He manages his businesses, and his extortion racket, by guiding others quietly, out of sight.

Avoiding unnecessary attention or confrontation, this is how the Mafia carried out business for a few decades until hotheads like Tony Provenzano (Steophen Graham) and Joey ‘The Blonde’ Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco) ushered in a brutal era of organized crime in the 1970’s.  But time is no one’s friend.  Like its Italian counterpart, Marcello Bellochio’s THE TRAITOR, the film makes use of subtitles to tell us about the fates of these men.  Most went to prison; all died.

Now 77, a grandfather, married five times, Scorsese sees the struggle not as that of a man against himself, but as a man fighting against time.  He revisits his “made man” narrative, but let me diverge here for a minute.  What is the “made man” narrative about?  My wife and I discussed Scorsese and Disney, and while reading Scott Tobias piece on SONG OF THE SOUTH, which Disney excludes from its new streaming platform, we ponder this question:   How do white people see and comprehend the past compared to people of color?

The subject of race isn’t central to THE IRISHMAN, but it’s all around its margins—from the hierarchies of the Italian and Jew mobs, the Cuban arms dealers, the blacks hired by Hoffa to carry out hits.  At the top of this hiearchy are white, Christian men, who see themselves as the enforcers of order, not the extorters and murderers that they are—that’s just the business of balancing good and evil.

It’s fitting, then, that Frank’s penance is four daughters who cannot forgive what he did.