{"id":8958,"date":"2019-10-14T15:15:38","date_gmt":"2019-10-14T14:15:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/?p=8958"},"modified":"2019-10-14T15:15:39","modified_gmt":"2019-10-14T14:15:39","slug":"lff-the-irishman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/lff-the-irishman\/","title":{"rendered":"LFF: The Irishman"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I saw The Irishman<\/em> at one of the satellite screenings that the BFI has tended to organise for the closing film. I didn\u2019t come up lucky in either of the draws for the opening or closing films \u2013 perhaps because the Odeon Leicester Square \u2013 or Luxe \u2013 is now so<\/em> luxury, that there are far fewer seats than there used to be, many of them controllable by motor to become something akin to the flat bed on a first class flight! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That said, the Everyman Barnet is no slouch in the luxury stakes, with the seats being in ones and twos, and more like armchairs. Plus, they\u2019d given everyone free water and popcorn for this screening. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Irishman<\/em> is a return to the gangster film for Martin Scorcese, telling the true (?) life story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), the \u201cIrishman\u201d of the title, at one time a truck driver, but becoming a mob hitman, and through connections with Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci \u2013 coming out of retirement for this role), becoming a close associate of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), head of the Teamsters union, and the man who controlled their massive pension fund.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things that this pension fund was used for was the build casinos in Las Vegas, something that\u2019s referred to here, and in some ways is the jumping off point for Scorcese\u2019s 1995 film Casino<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Casino <\/em>and Goodfellas<\/em>, Scorcese uses the voice-over as an efficient method to provide us with context and backstory. He knows he has to tell us who Jimmy Hoffa was, so the exposition comes through voice over rather than through clunky scenes. Because, while this is a long film (just short of three and a half hours), it still zips along. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We start at the end, with De Niro\u2019s Sheehan in some kind of old people\u2019s home, sitting in a wheelchair, and telling us his story. The Irishman<\/em> is based on a book, I Heard You Paint Houses <\/em>(terminology meant to suggest that you carry out hits) by Charles Brandt. It\u2019s worth noting that some have questioned the veracity of Sheehan\u2019s tale, but let\u2019s go along with it for now. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A chance meeting with mob-boss Bufalino sees Sheehan\u2019s driver first begin to skim off the top of his beef cargo, before getting ever more involved in mob activities. Eventually Bufalino sends him the way of Hoffa, someone who needs a close aide to help keep things in check. Hoffa runs the Teamsters like a dictatorship, taking proactive methods to stop others rising too much to challenge him, including Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Against all of this, is the rise of the Kennedys, who Hoffa and the mob, believe that they have in their pocket, although Hoffa has given money to Nixon which doesn\u2019t help matters. And, when Robert Kennedy (Jack Huston) makes life hard for Hoffa, he believes he\u2019s been stabbed in the back. Hoffa is running out of control and bosses like Bufalino are worried. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film spans sixty years, and a lot of the coverage of this film has concentrated on the digital de-ageing that has been achieved here. The technique is sophisticated and works well. Only when they\u2019re very young do you not really buy the effects, but as they reach middle-age, it\u2019s much more subtle and less noticeable. By the end of the film, they\u2019ve actually aged up everyone, probably just using make-up techniques. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As always with a Scorcese film, the soundtrack is important, with a range of easy listening classics helping us with our timelines \u2013 we rarely get captions, beyond some freeze frames highlighting a secondary character, and mostly telling us about their violent death in the late seventies or early eighties. Glamourous though the lifestyle might be, they all seemed to end up either dead or in prison. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The film looks it\u2019s reported $160m cost, seeming to use every fifties and sixties car that\u2019s still on the road. It\u2019s not as showy as a film like Casino <\/em>or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood<\/em> in that the setting is more suburban than anything. But it feels real.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

De Niro\u2019s Sheehan is the heart of the film, but this is very much a three-hander with Pesci\u2019s Bufalino being the schemer, while Pacino\u2019s Hoffa is vulnerable and going off the wall at every moment. There\u2019s a great scene where Hoffa is yelling at his lieutenants, and Sheehan is standing at the back of the room. Sheehan doesn\u2019t appreciate being shouted at, and walks out, only for Hoffa to chase after him and explain that he hadn\u2019t been shouting at Sheehan \u2013 just everyone else! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a mostly male film \u2013 the female characters being very secondary wives and daughters, although Anna Pacquin\u2019s Peggy Sheerhan becomes very important despite having few lines at all. She\u2019s the woman who sees Frank for what he really is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s also notable, and probably quite deliberate, that just about the first person of colour we see is an orderly who helps Sheehan out in his old age. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I enjoyed The Irishman<\/em> a lot. I\u2019m not sure it has quite the gusto of Casino<\/em> or Goodfellas<\/em>, but obviously there\u2019s a joy in seeing Scorcese working with De Niro, Pacino and Pesci together, something we\u2019ve previously been denied. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note: Having seen this film, I thought it would be nice to re-watch <\/em>Casino and <\/em>Goodfellas. Goodfellas is widely available. It\u2019s on Netflix, and you can rent or buy it from all the usual digital outlets including Amazon and Google Play Movies. You can also get it on DVD and Blu Ray.<\/em> 
<\/em> 
Casino, on the other<\/em> <\/em>hand, is a completely different case. It\u2019s not on Netflix. It\u2019s not on Amazon Prime. You can\u2019t buy it on Google Play Movies or iTunes either. On disc, you <\/em>can get a 4K + Blu Ray bundle for \u00a320 from Amazon. But a Blu Ray on its own is only available from <\/em>third party sellers.<\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The only place I could actually find <\/em>Casino at an affordable price was on the UKTV Player, because Dave has recently broadcast the film! <\/em> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Quite why Universal are making it so hard to see this film in the UK, I really don\u2019t know. <\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw The Irishman at one of the satellite screenings that the BFI has tended to organise for the closing film. I didn\u2019t come up lucky in either of the draws for the opening or closing films \u2013 perhaps because the Odeon Leicester Square \u2013 or Luxe \u2013 is now so luxury, that there are far fewer seats than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8924,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[49,43],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8958"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8959,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8958\/revisions\/8959"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8924"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}