The Irishman’s Last Ride

Convivium, 07 February 2020

Martin Scorsese’s homage to Mafiosos movies is ultimately a tale of life experienced from the perspective of eternity.

At the Oscars on Sunday Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is nominated for best picture. It is not expected to win. And to tell the truth, the film would be better considered for a lifetime achievement award. It is the last ride for Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel and the rest of that gang which started making Mafia films nearly fifty years ago.

It’s an elegy, a true lament, not a eulogy, an act of praise. After the elegance and quasi-apologetic of The Godfather, the work of Francis Ford Coppola (1972), Scorsese gave us his own treatment in Goodfellas (1990); here the elegance was gone and the brutality of the life was exposed, but there was still the excitement, the glamour, the fast-paced high life.

De Niro and Pacino were in The Godfather saga, Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. Now The Irishman brings the old men together to look back over it all. The elegance is gone and the glamour. Scorsese et al., in their old age – not alive and kicking, but alive and flourishing with magnificent performances – are giving a final account of, as Moe Greene, put it memorably more than 40 years ago, “the life we have chosen." 

Scorsese tells us what is coming from that long opening shot. In Goodfellas, the young on-the-make Ray Liotta weaves his way to the front table of the most glamourous club, dispensing fat tips to cocktail waitresses. In The Irishman the opening shot shuffles down the corridor of a nursing home, where a retired and decrepit Robert De Niro reflects upon his life as a Mafia hit man in Philadelphia, the assassin – he claims – of Jimmy Hoffa.

The film cannot be taken as reliable history; the book upon which it is based has been seriously challenged. So it is not a historical fact that the Mafia killed JFK, though Pesci’s character puts it that way: “If they can whack a president, they can whack the president of a union.”

Joe Pesci’s character – the superior figure to De Niro’s subordinate – is a delight, for Pesci finally steps out of the shadows of Pacino and De Niro, both excellent as always, even if Pacino plays Hoffa as Pacino plays all his characters, alternating between ruminative and manic.

The Irishman mainly tells us this: While the Mafia might be a law unto themselves, it is not exempt from the laws that govern all life. When Pacino and De Niro get into their pajamas to go to bed in their shared hotel room, they are just that – two men in their pajamas. Time and age take their toll; the old (dis)order which gave to their rise is now leaving them behind. One extended scene involves Pacino arguing at long length about proper dress for a business meeting and the importance of taking traffic into account in order to be on time. There is nothing Mafia-esque about any of it, just a curmudgeon railing against the kids these days. 

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