The Irishman

What a waste of 3+ hours.  I've enjoyed most of Martin Scorcese's films over the years but The Irishman was quite a disappointment.  Flaccid and dreary.  It looks like it was shot on video - the cinematography is terrible.  The screenplay just kind of sits there and the movie is way too long.  Because the film takes place over a 50 year period and the actors, particularly Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci appear throughout, a "de-aging" process was employed on them - the result is weird and off putting, particularly for DeNiro who, even when his face looks younger, walks and moves like a guy in his late 70s.

This is DeNiro's movie, told completely from his character's perspective, that of Frank Sheeran, a mob hit man and supposed confidante of Jimmy Hoffa, but his performance failed to capture my interest.  The only decent performances were by Al Pacino who portrays the mercurial and charismatic Hoffa quite well, without falling into Pacinian overacting, and Pesci who plays the subdued, controlled, but merciless mob boss Russell Buffalino.  The rest of the cast seems to include every actor who's played a mobster in a movie during the last four decades doing their mob thing.  One touch I appreciated is that Hoffa's wife Jo is played by the actress who was the annoying babysitter and drug bagman in the climatic scenes of Goodfellas thirty years ago.

I am not one who is much concerned with factual accuracy in a film as long as it captures some overall truth or insight into the events but when factual inaccuracy is matched with inexcusable and irrelevant incursions into the movie it becomes ridiculous.  Suddenly, in the middle of the film, we switch without explanation to the story of  the murder of mobster Crazy Joey Gallo at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, which has nothing to do with anything else in the story and, most certainly, was not done by Frank Sheeran (nor, for that matter, did he kill Hoffa).  What was that all about?

As far as historical accuracy is concerned the best part of The Irishman is its portrayal of Hoffa, down to his personal tics - did not drink alcohol, loved ice cream, was a stickler for punctuality - and the bigger context of his battles with Bobby Kennedy, his dealings with the mob when Teamster president, the mob's outright takeover of the Teamsters when he was imprisoned and his murder by the mob, prompted by seeking reelection as union president while denouncing the gangsters.  The worst part as far as accuracy is everything else in the film.

If you are interested in more of the history of the Teamsters, the life of Hoffa and his disappearance read Jack Goldsmith's recent book, In The Shadow Of Hoffa, which I wrote about here.