THE GANGSTER IN WINTER by Dan Sanders

Martin Scorcese, 77, Takes a Last Look at Mob Life in The Irishman
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​Like life itself, almost no one leaves Hollywood on their own terms.  Even the almighty studio chiefs of yore like Warner, Mayer, Selznick, and Goldwyn all got thrown off the lot one sorry day.  Martin Scorcese just turned seventy-seven.  His directing skills, as seen in his new film The Irishman, remain formidable.  But like Clint Eastwood, one can’t expect Scorcese to make the same type of blithely violent films he made in his heyday.  The losses, consequences, disappointments, and world-changes that old age imposes all converge to shift any director’s outlook.  Many of Eastwood’s mid-career films – The Outlaw Josey Wales, Pale Rider, Sudden Impact – reveled in gunpowder justice so completely that some dismissed him as just a Mozart of Revenge Porn.  Then came Unforgiven, when Eastwood was seventy-two.  By the end of that superb Western, Eastwood’s gunfighter William Munny is little more than a rural serial killer, a nineteenth-century Charles Starkweather (the Martin Sheen character in Terrence Malick’s Badlands).  Bill Munny hasn’t just killed baddies who had it coming; “I've killed women and children,” he moans during his last gunfight. “I've killed everything that walks or crawls at one time or another.”  It is a confession, not a boast.  And Clint Eastwood has never directed another Western.
 
What Unforgiven was to Clint Eastwood, The Irishman is to Martin Scorsese.  One gets a strong sense that it’s his last word on what he’s best known for, his final gangster epic.  It’s not his best film as Unforgiven was for Eastwood, but it’s very, very good. 
 
So what changes for a storyteller when they get old?  In Hollywood, the studio no longer automatically finances exactly the film that Mister Legendary Director wants to make next.  And medium-budget dramas, even with Oscar winners, are an endangered species now.  The day may have come where the only home for films like The Report, Marriage Story, and The Irishman are at streaming networks.  So be thankful that Martin Scorcese can still get a gangster pic made with major stars and the great Thelma Schoonmaker editing.  And yeah, it’s over three hours, but c’mon, you’ve binged that long for years on great TV. 

​Most movies set out to either fulfill a dream or a nightmare.  At the root of our love for gangster movies are our dreams of respect, caring family, tough-loyal friends, protection – and above all, absolute vengeance on those who have wronged us.  This last fantasy has always thrilled audiences.  Twenty-five centuries ago, Euripides wrote the tale of Hecuba, a queen whose son and daughter have been murdered by an enemy king, Polymestor.  Hecuba makes a deal with another mob boss – um, I mean an army general.  She lures Polymestor to a sit-down with a promise of huge loot, then Hecuba kills Polymestor’s two young sons and cuts out his eyes.  As Polymestor wails Hecuba growls:  “I rejoice in my revenge.”  Fifty years ago, Francis Coppola’s The Godfather perfected the gangster genre by opening with a peasant’s plea to his Don for vengeance:  A meek funeral proprietor named Bonasera is shattered by the beating and rape of his innocent young daughter by two college dirtbags.  The judge did nothing because the boys were rich, the girl was poor – and she was Sicilian, which in mid-century America made her a lower life form.  The two rapists will be ambushed by Don Corleone’s enforcers, who will maul both men so badly they’ll be hospitalized for months.  Godfather ends with a pageant of revenge:  The Corleone Family wipes out all their enemies in one afternoon, in a brilliantly coordinated strike.  Here is absolute Justice, harsh and Old Testament, meted out to all the treacherous.  The ratty brother-in-law who got Sonny killed is garroted.  A longtime family general trying to set up Michael Corleone is led off to die.  The five enemy Dons who tried to take the Corleone kingdom are assassinated.  The slimy Vegas casino boss who dared slap Michael’s weak brother around in public is paid off with a bullet through his eye. 

​Scorcese’s GoodFellas, the last truly great mob movie that anyone has made, has an incident of revenge redolent of the rape of Bonasera’s daughter in its origin story of Harold Hill, the 1990 film’s central character.  Harold’s future wife Karen has been groped and assaulted by the college boy across the street.  Harold confronts the punk, who is out in his driveway wrenching on his Corvette with two pals.  The three are no doubt considered tough at their frat house.  But Harold Hill was a big-league Mob prospect at twelve.  With Karen watching, Harold pulls a revolver on Corvette Boy, uses it like brass knuckles to beat 400 points off his SAT score, and leaves the other two boys begging Harold for their suburban lives.  In voiceover Karen recalls this brutal defense of her honor: “I gotta admit the truth – it turned me on.”  Just how grimly handsome is Ray Liotta (then just thirty-six) in Harold’s early-adult scenes?  A friend once told me that the only time his wife of three decades ever confessed to lust for another man was as she watched Liotta in GoodFellas.

​In its leads, The Irishman has a Holy Trinity of living mob-movie legends:  Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.  When I first learned that the movie would be directed by Scorcese and star these three greats, I joked to friends that it felt like 1973 and Cream just got back together.  But of course Irishman is a supergroup reunion forty years on, not five.  This is, again, a gangster picture from a man who’s pushing eighty – and its three stars are 76, 77, and 79.  Nowhere in sight is a princely-youthful avenger like Liotta’s in GoodFellas.  Though the film takes place over forty years, there are no “Young Frank” or “Jimmy at 25” actors, either.  Instead, Scorcese opted for a de-aging CGI technology from Industrial Light & Magic.  (At times the faces look like something off Activision, though it’s definitely a better solution than any makeup artist might have cooked up.)  Most of the film, though, depicts these men from late-middle age up, and it’s hell being old.  These gangsters are feeble, diseased, ugly, and pathetic, dying one by one in hideous, filthy prisons.  In GoodFellas the still-youngish wiseguy inmates make us laugh with their dinners of steak and spaghetti and fresh lobster, smuggled in by bribed guards.  But there’s nothing funny about where Irishman’s hoods do their time.  Few films have conveyed the awful bleakness of incarceration as believably.  Unlike earlier Scorcese mob sagas, Irishman runs on an nonglamorous melancholy, on the strain of being constantly hunted.  We’re reminded of this every few minutes by a classic Scorcese device:  Freeze-frame stoppages, with text superimposed onscreen, tell us how each true-life character eventually died.  “Phil Testa – blown up by a nail bomb under his porch, March 15, 1981.”  “Salvatore ‘Sally Bugs’ Briguglio – shot three times in the face, 1979.”
 
Scorcese made headlines in the fall when he said comic book movies are not cinema, just onscreen theme parks.  His remarks, though justified, showed his age.  The defensive pushback from younger filmmakers like James Gunn had a sour condescension to it.  This eternal disdain of the young for the old is a key element in The Irishman.  Al Pacino is staggeringly good in his portrait of James Hoffa as the classic past-his-prime player, specifically the very last one to know It’s Over.  Everyone else knows it is time for Jimmy to retire and walk away with his money, but not him – and it, well, triggers a sad and degrading end for him.
 
As a parent, a particularly moving aspect of Irishman is how Robert De Niro depicts the gradual but total alienation of the Made Guy, Frank Sheeran, from his children.  Other gangster films like the unfortunate Godfather III have tried to wring drama from this, but it may be the single most compelling element of Irishman.  What De Niro does with this arc is a reminder of his all-time greatness.  You truly feel Frank’s fatherly pain as his daughter Peggy’s respect for him ebbs away year by year, crime by crime.  Anna Paquin plays the adult Peggy, and her scenes with De Niro forge the best cinematic rendition I’ve ever seen of a great truth:  Your kids always figure you out in adolescence.  When they hit their teens you lose your superpowers of authority and awe.  And if you have an addiction or a secret life, they will find it.
 
Much media dust has been raised about the character of Peggy rendered all but mute by Scorcese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian.  But in that time and place and culture, this Silence of the Daughter is entirely plausible.  Frank Sheeran passed his teens in the Depression and turned twenty-one a few weeks before Pearl Harbor.  Of course this generation is revered in movies like Saving Private Ryan, but anyone raised by men of that era knows there was a very dark side to them.  Many had PTSD before anyone knew a name for it.  Therapy was an admission of weakness for most men back then.  The entire energy of a household revolved around these guys when they were home from work.  They resented their children’s money, freedom, sex, college – all the goodies that history screwed them out of.  Many smoldered their way through life, and they could make the next generation feel like absolutely nothing.  More than once as a boy, I’d go over to another kid’s house and before we went inside the kid would whisper to me nervously:  “Hey listen, we have to be really quiet because... my dad is home.” 
 
And for girls, it was many times worse.  Steven Zaillian, who was born in 1953, knows what the hell he’s writing about.  His choice to make Peggy the aphasic Observer does not diminish her character, far from it.  Paquin’s is a terrific performance that sets yet another contrast with Scorcese’s earlier, jauntier assays of mob life.  In GoodFellas young Harold Hill is taught the crook trade by a dozen affable and playful Neighborhood Guys who are far cooler company than Harold’s brooding, abusive father.  Then a truancy letter earns Harold a paternal beating.  When the Guys slap around the mailman to suggest that no more such letters be delivered to the Hills, we barely mind that an innocent man doing his job (and violating federal law if he doesn’t) gets beat up.  And young Harold is more than fine with this solution – hey, school’s out forever.  When Harold walks out of the police station after his first arrest, his Guys are cheering on the steps like the kid just got bar-mitzvah’d (the scene scored big laughs when it showed in theaters).  There is nothing cute or funny, however, about the equivalent scene in Irishman.  Frank comes home to learn that grade-schooler Peggy got angrily shoved by the corner grocer after the girl accidentally knocked something off a shelf.  Frank takes Peggy down to the corner to witness punishment.  We see the little girl’s permanent trauma as, just feet away, her father knocks the grocer’s head through his shop window, kicks him in the face, then breaks the man’s hand as he screams in agony.  Peggy is repelled, ashamed, and doesn’t want Frank to be her father from that day forward, inflicting what will be the keystone heartbreak of his life.  She won’t talk to us either, and it’s truly awful.
 
Every mainstream gangster film, GoodFellas and the Godfather trilogy included, show a terrible reckoning for those who choose criminality.  In The Irishman, though, there are no good old days.  

Dan Sanders is an actor/writer/producer and teacher and holds a Master of Fine Arts in Drama from the University of California-Irvine.