Let’s talk about Martin Scorsese’s the Irishman. It’s hard
to talk about this without the context of the director ripping on Marvel
superhero movies as “not really cinema”, or without the context of his history
of many successful mafia movies. Avoiding those two things, the best piece I’ve
read about the Irishman is about the role of Peggy, the protagonist’s largely
silent daughter.
The real story of “The Irishman” is that of the deteriorating relationship between Frank and his daughter Peggy (Lucy Gallina as a child, Anna Paquin as an adult). In an early scene, Frank stomps off to the corner grocery, Peggy in tow, after his wife (Aleksa Palladino) informs him that the owner shoved Peggy when she misbehaved. In front of his daughter, Frank drags the man out to the curb and stomps him, shattering his fingers. He intends it as a show of paternal loyalty and fatherly protectiveness. For Peggy, it’s a defining moment: The beating shows Peggy what her father truly is.As Frank’s involvement with Bufalino and Hoffa deepens, both men try to win over Peggy, who is repulsed by Bufalino and drawn to Hoffa’s vision of dignity for working men. And when Bufalino sets Frank up to kill Hoffa, Peggy is the one person who immediately intuits her father’s involvement and makes the moral choice to cut him off forever. The climax of “The Irishman” isn’t the murder. It’s a scene where an aged Frank leaves his nursing home on crutches to queue at the bank where Peggy works, hoping she’ll talk to him if he approaches her at her teller’s window.
It's a good attempt at thematic reading, but it gets the
movie entirely long. Let’s talk about why.
