Film Review: The Irishman

I wanted to like The Irishman. After failing to win Best Picture with Roma last year, Irishman is Netflix’s undeniable play for the award. Martin Scorsese, Al Pacino and Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci teaming up for a gangster movie. Complete Academy catnip. The film should be right up my alley. What’s not to love?

Well, a lot.

Irishman is based on Frank Sheeran’s memoir I Heard You Paint Houses. He claims to be a hitman for the Bufalino crime family. He was also a higher-up at Teamsters Local 326 and a close friend of Jimmy Hoffa, played here by Al Pacino. The film is mostly about how those relationships destroy Sheeran’s life.

The film doesn’t come into focus until about an hour into its three hour, 29-minute runtime. Irishman spends the first hour of its run time setting up Sheeran’s background as a truck driver, his links to the Bufalinos, and his beginnings as a hitman. This is despite not one, but two framing devices that make Sheeran’s crime links clear.

This is accompanied by uncanny valley level CGI to de-age De Niro nearly 40 years. It gets less offputting as the film goes on, but it never quite settles into a place where it’s “normal.” The most frustrating thing about the CGI is that it’s almost entirely unnecessary. The Irishman could stand to lose most of that first hour. It’s a well-paced, but superfluous intro to the film. Keeping the framing devices and jumping right into the relationship with Hoffa would’ve made for a much tighter film and more enticing re-watch.

Pacino’s Hoffa and Pesci’s Russell Bufalino are two of the best parts of the film. Pacino is bombastic and scene-chewing. Pesci is cold, subdued, violent and arguably the best part of the film. No performance in the film quite matches either actor. Most either phone it in or are so hammy as to take the viewer out of the experience.

The best example of this is Anna Paquin’s Peggy Sheeran. She spends most of her screen time staring blankly at De Niro and showing little to no emotion. She puts a damper on a third act that could have been a moving exploration of grief, self-reflection and a lack of either.

Steven Zaillian’s script does its characters no favors. It gives viewers zero reason to care about any of its many characters. No character shows any degree of remorse or inner thought about what they’ve done and De Niro’s voice-over allows the script to tell viewers what’s going on instead of showing it. There are also several scenes that do nothing but pad the film’s already massive run time.

Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker make directing and editing decisions that are just odd. They focus on the wrong characters in certain scenes, use too much slow-motion work and whip pan the camera enough times to induce whiplash.

The Irishman is the equivalent of a sports superteam that falls apart when the games are played. The individual pieces are great on paper, but fail when it’s time to perform. The result is a massive, jumbled mess with very occasional flashes of brilliance.

Final score: 5.2/10