Martin Scorsese draws a visual callback to his most popular crime film GoodFellas in the very first scene of The Irishman, with a long tracking shot, however instead of a lively racous celebration that ends on the joyful Henry and Karen, in The Irishman we are taken on a dull deflating journey that ends on a lonely decrepit old man towards the end of his life mumbling about the old days.
It is from this very moment, you should know that this is not just another rock-and-roll sort of Martin Scorsese crime drama. On the surface the whole thing looks like a bunch of old guys filming a love letter to the gangster dramas, but it miraculously works in the favour of the film. Unlike GoodFellas or any other Scorsese crime drama, The Irishman focuses more on the importance of family and the persistence of time, these two themes seamlessly blend together to give us an undeniable feat in modern cinema.
Frank’s daughter Peggy is one of the most important characters of the film, she constantly watches her father go deeper and deeper into his gangster lifestyle, and unlike Karen in GoodFellas she is horrified instead of being lured by the voilence, Peggy slowly realizes she is losing someone she once knew, but maybe she never knew him at all, her eyes serve as an opening to the world from someone who isn’t in it, she is there for every good thing he does and every mistake he makes. She forms an irrevocable opinion on her father. Her eyes saw everything her father did, and when Frank needed his family the most he was no longer met with those same eyes, he was met with a cold shoulder, leaving him lonely and deprived of the only people that were his own, but he never valued them.
There is a scene in the film where Jimmy Hoffa leaves the door open as he leaves the room, that sums up Hoffa’s personality in a nutshell, he is a kind of person who sees ahead of himself, he can sense that whatever he has built can fall down at any instance, he just doesn’t want to get swallowed by the waves of time that chase us all, but waves of time eventually catch-up he lost the kingdom he so greatly wanted to keep, and time systematically breaks down him.
Time systematically breaks down Frank as well, but him losing everything he loved so much is way more painful to see, he is cursed to stay alive as an old relic of a forgotten time who unfortunately outlived everyone else, by the end of the film he is still living to regret all his life decisions with all the time he has left. At the end when Frank shows Hoffa’s picture to the hospital nurse she doesn’t recognize him which totally perplexes Frank, as earlier in the film he’d said, that in 50s Hoffa was as big as Elvis and in 60s like Beatles, this scene just implies that after a point of time everyone will be forgotten, the memories that were once so vivid will fade and ultimately disappear into nothingness and the world will move on, and what is left is how we treated the people that even if we didn’t know at the time were the most important.
The Irishman is a mournful eulogy to the gangster genre. A moving portrait of guilt, loneliness, regret, mortality, and the consequences of a crime filled life on everyone in its periphery. I really have no idea what demon I was possessed by when I’d called it mid tier Scorsese in 2019, so ya don’t be like me of 2019, give this film another try if it didn’t work for you the first time.
Ritesh has only two passions in life: movies and writing. With over two years of professional writing experience, he goes beyond SEO norms to convey his unfiltered love for cinema. A devoted admirer of Martin Scorsese, Ritesh believes that cinema is the most powerful storytelling medium on the planet, and through his words, he seeks to share that passion with the world.