THE IRISHMAN, A Martin Scorsese Picture with de Niro, Pacino, Pesci, Keitel

i keep coming back to the scene where frank is explaining how you want a clean weapon you can throw away once the job is done, and thinking about how frank himself is used as a weapon, getting more and more tarnished each time, until eventually there’s no-one left to throw him away

de niro does a really good job of playing frank as the guy who’s just not quite smart enough to grasp what’s going on until it’s too late

I found Dominick Lombardozzi's fat suit way more disturbing than digital De Niro.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EKn8WNlXsAMRzSQ.jpg

i think on second viewing (in which i went from liking it to loving it) it became clear that it’s less about someone who lost their soul than someone who never had one. frank’s ultimate horror is that even his own inner life is meaningless to him, it’s just this endless purgatorial damnation (it’s key that he DOESN’T die at the end)...and there’s that moving scene with the priest at the end with the line “lord help us to see ourselves.”

it’s just this endless purgatorial damnation

and now you're free! until later today, when we have to put you through all of this again.

if he loses his soul it's at anzio. loved how many people say "you know, it's like in the war" to him while talking around murder. economic-- political-- even spiritual.

yeah, I'm not sure if Frank ever had a soul, but if he loses it, it's definitely in the war.

if he doesn’t have a soul why is he so affected by his daughter rejecting him?

Narcissism?

i mean "soul"'s a lil vague (as ever). frank has dutifully repressed himself into an inarticulate instrument; he did it young; and now, like the fascist soldiers who dug their own graves, he finds at the end of an unpleasant working life that nobody feels merciful towards him and there is no reward. was there another way he could have been? unclear. difficult to imagine. too late now.

I loved the 'secret' title. It also ties into how language is constantly used to mask things, they paint houses, things are what they are. Nobody talks about how serious and dangerous what they do is. To a large extent, it seemed to me to be a film about psychological repression.

def. "frank" is a v fortunate name. liked that hoffa's ultimate moment of defiance (+ simultaneously, blindness) is "this is my union, frank-- very simple when you say it that way", and that when joe pesci is finally sent to "school" it's for saying someone "needs to go to australia" lol

(joe pesci's entire performance being a kind of unslipping mask, w added intertextual thrill from yr immediate suspicion that he is nevertheless a joe pesci character underneath it)

good posts dlh

love bg’s clean gun insight and dlh’s posts!

Suddenly the tossed-out budget has ballooned from $160 million to $200m, not that we'll ever know. Josh, you are making no sense re Marvel v Marty.

As for Pacino's sliding accent, I didn't especially notice nor care (see also Mitchum's Boston yawp in The Friends of Eddie Coyle). And not being moved by the Hoffa-Sheeran relationship -- well, it's a rancid one. I think it's fine to diagnose it from a distance... again, no sentimentality.

The book is particularly daring in partly blaming Frank's service in The Good War for his pathology. Ditto the one scene in the film, plus the "It's like the Army" line.

$200 mil is the last I saw, but yeah, we'll never know. I absolutely concede I'm not making as much sense as I'd like, or at least not consistent with whatever argument Scorsese himself was making (I didn't really follow the debate, tbh, so probably came at it sideways). I tried to clarify, but I guess what I was getting at is that if this story and how it's told took $200 million and lots of VFX, then ultimately the impact on moviemaking is imo just as detrimental (or whatever he was arguing) as CGI people in CGI costumes flying around fighting aliens. (And per what I posted earlier, Scorsese wouldn't have even had access to the tech he used were it not for the inroads made by the Marvel bugaboos he dismissed.) I suppose that's all a different debate.

I think as a filmmaker first it’s safe to assume he’s gonna try to get as much funding for his movies as he can get away with. Also with the cast and sets and locations and fx I think you can see most of the ~160 on the screen.

Re: Sheeran/Hoffa...there’s maybe also a meta-textual element here in that Sheeran thought he was closer to Hoffa than he really was? Maybe the movie doesn’t support this...but it’s clear that he sees his proximity to Hoffa as a “great man” as the one thread of his life that connects to something meaningful.

(fwiw, I was curious, so looked up the reported budget of "Zodiac," which used extensive FX to tell a story set across decades with the same actors/characters, and it cost $85 million, at least in 2007. Tbf, I guess it's a lot easier to make younger people look older than it is to make older people look younger.)

(oh wait, it *cost* $65, but *made* $85, my mistake)

Also Zodiac depicts, like, twenty years, whereas with I Heard You Paint Houses it's more like fifty.

Scorsese's gripe w/Marvel movies was specifically with the stories they tell, not the amount of VFX or size of budget

if he doesn’t have a soul why is he so affected by his daughter rejecting him?

he feels its absence

Maybe the punchline is they talked Pesci out of retirement with a $150 million payday

I do think some of Scorseses films seem quite expensive to an extent where it seems almost decadent. Of course, his films are often about decadence. But I watched The Aviator the other night, and in that film the budget is clearly on screen in a way I found detrimental to the film.

nearly all of the Zodiac effects were environments and buildings, too

xpost Yeah, that and Gangs of NY I kind of agree *did* look a little too expensive, which is a funny complaint.

xxpost lol

Has it been reported with any degree of accuracy just how much the de-aging (keep wanting to type "de-icing") specifically cost?

xpost Yeah, that and Gangs of NY I kind of agree *did* look a little too expensive, which is a funny complaint.

― Josh in Chicago, 30. november 2019 23:50 (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

With Gangs of New York especially, I felt like the script had been compromised to make it more 'commercial'. Also, both films were Miramax films, and feel like it.

You people loling about the budget -- are you accountants? What the hell do you care?

Why does anyone care about anything, come on.

The whole argument against Marvel is that it crowds out other types of film, so that other filmmakers don't get the chances they deserve. I don't think it's out of line to point out that you could make 2000 Tangerines out of The Irishman.

how many seasons of Orange is the New Black could you make, though

and we're back to Marvel, yipee

There’s a discussion to be had about whether Netflix or major studios should be pushing for more small budget flicks but their funding of this one was basically a play to look more serious by making a movie with Scorsese and a budget on par with his other work instead of a one-off

trivial things that bugged me: Pacino's wig. Why was Russell fixing his own salad in Howard Johnson's, had he brought his own oil and vinegar? And I think we hear "Sally Go Round the Roses" playing in 1960.

but I loved that opening tracking shot through the nursing home; that's a Scorsese joke right?

Pacino's rug was awful, and sure, the accent slipping wasn't fatal, and I'd be more forgiving if I thought he was good - he was much better as a Jew in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

w/r/t movie budgets: always remember how dramatically they shrank after the recession. The Mothman Prophecies, which came out in 2002, cost $30 million. that is a solid B movie that would be made by Blumhouse today for less than a million. that was the same year Scorsese scrapped together hundreds of millions to shoot GONY in Italy only to arrive with a shitty movie.

xp Yeah that was one of the only obvious meta-textual things going on in here, which I was expecting a lot more of honestly.

i mean "soul"'s a lil vague (as ever). frank has dutifully repressed himself into an inarticulate instrument; he did it young; and now, like the fascist soldiers who dug their own graves, he finds at the end of an unpleasant working life that nobody feels merciful towards him and there is no reward. was there another way he could have been? unclear. difficult to imagine. too late now.

I think it’s key that pesci *does* show him mercy, particularly coming to his aid the moment he met him and saving his ass when he could have gotten himself killed over his side job. he pledged loyalty to pesci in return for power and protection; he loses any real sense of meaning and the only relationship that really matters to him (his daughter). it’s all very faustian

Some of you were actually bothered by a wig ( didn't notice ) and the provenance of salad ingredients (wtf) ?!

The wig made him look like Ciaran Hinds

I've made my own cut of THE IRISHMAN to appease its critics. pic.twitter.com/Qva9A7c3uM

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) November 28, 2019

Yuk yuk

(Rickles voice) "Tough crowd, Joey!"

I like that the upshot of Hoffa from this is that even though he was deeply in bed with the Mob it’s like he was too stubborn or hotheaded to get how the Mob works. (Or the Italian mob anyway.)

Second half of the movie was like Frank watching Hoffa dig his own grave, like the POW’s in WW2. “Why didn’t they just stop digging?”

And even if it’s all baloney, the idea that they whack hoffa & throw him into the cremation oven is impressively expedient. Why bother concreting a corpse.

Oh and Sal already working on lifting the linoleum in the entry when Frank arrives at the house was a nice detail

I dont buy his whole PTSD robbed him of his morality, sociopathology being what it is, but maybe it helps him sleep at night.

who played rickles? worst impersonation imo

jim norton

it’s just “angry baby head” casting

Seems like this really works for a platform like Netflix - I'm stunned by people that have watched it more than once. I saw it a theater and don't know when I'll ever revisit it. But reading this thread has made me realize how many perfect details are in there, I agree with everything VG said above ("Why didn't they stop digging?"). there is a deliberate distance that I mistook for blandness, at least for many parts of the movie. it's so cyclical, and I would imagine watching it in bits on Netflix feels like dipping into Sheeran's head.

I've never 'revisited' any of his films with DiCaprio; this and Silence are more suitable

It's the emotional core of the movie, this man killed one of his closest friends and lost his daughter and sold his soul in doing so. it doesnt quite connect for me.

spitballing…

i dunno, i don't think it's supposed to. up until he's off to detroit, we're watching a gangster movie but one that seems to have had some of the gangster movie brio leached out of it, the humor is less unchecked, the menace in the conversations and the language is blunted, in general the mobsters have cooler heads, everyone is explaining and clarifying a bit more—it comes undone in the long conversation between sheeran and hoffa where hoffa's intolerable defiance is to mean what he says, to someone (through sheeran as intermediary) who is meaning what he says, which conversation itself seems to be a little less fluent and impactful than you imagine it could be, say if it were really to be a kiss-off type scene. only it's not, it's just the start of sheeran's glimpse outside the hermetic world of the gangster and the gangster movie.

if the 'emotional core' had simply connected then we would view the movie as some kind of diverted tragedy that gives a window (cracked door) onto hope of redemption at the end. but without it we can look at the movie more like frank's account of his own life (are we in fact supposed to see his scenes of narration in the nursing home as narrated to the priest? seems so), which with the voiceover and, i think, the camera work (all those pivoting conversational shots, suddenly turning to someone who was there—as if the memory is kind of surprised not just to be focused on the person it had been intent on), and arguably the de-aging artifacts (tricks of memory), all amounts to a view that's mired in the first-person perspective. when he talks to the priest the one prayer is 'help us to see ourselves as god sees us', i.e. not only as fit for salvation, but also in terms of what we really (morally) have done, which frank is not at all doing. but given the way we watch gangster movies, especially gangster movies with this cast, we're also not able (without a 'decision of the will'?) to see their content in moral terms, say because we don't know how a gangster movie could BECOME moral. which puts the 'emotional core' where?

with the de-aging, i have to assume that one thing it got them was not a hiding of the actors' age but a new way to highlight it, in a story set in the past, told via memory, in a long-worn genre which the main actors helped define. there were old men in those movies before, but now with these old men playing at being young men, and moving stiffly, shuffling and hunched, or ramrod-straight, what you see is how much the physicality of men contributed to the effect of gangster movies. the characters in this movie are still deferential to the criminals, but like in the scene where sheeran stomps the candy store owner, it's more visible that it's ONLY about the violence and the power, the men do not have the magnetism that the gangster film conferred upon the mythic gangster by grace of a way of moving through the world that the camera made dramatic.

Enjoyed the Jimmy Hoffa as junk food fiend motif throughout this. Got a pang of nostalgia from the beer-battered hot dogs from Lum's, bc we had one of those joints where I grew up. Have eaten at Umberto's Clam House too, though not the original location where Gallo got hit but the second one two blocks away. The guy who ranked the food in this movie on Twitter neglected to include what was being served at Umberto's, but of course if we're not even sure who made that hit we probably can't know what food was on the table.

And then there's the post-movie roundtable discussion on Netflix, where I tried to figure out what each guy was drinking.. iirc:

Pesci: martini
Pacino: perhaps an old-fashioned
Scorsese: wanna say a Benedictine & brandy with a big ice cube but could be scotch
DeNiro: had one empty glass in front of him and another with whiskey (?)