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.
The irony of Scorsese’s elitism is that the first hour or
two of the Irishman is not any better than a Marvel movie (absent the framing
devices). They’re not bad or hard to watch. But they’re just fairly mediocre
television about a topic well known to hook audiences: how a regular schmoe got
involved in and seduced by the mafia, and his increasing violence as he climbs
the ranks. It sure is engaging, we’ve been eating up mafia movies (and now
television) for half a century after all, and there’s no failure in this part
to entertain. But it’s exactly as rote as a superhero movie. There’s no particularly
artistry or powerful emotion to them. It’s television storytelling, the same as
the MCU the director derided. What would you get from this you didn’t get from
Casino or Godfather?
So ignoring the very common mafia seduction story, let’s get
to the heart of the movie: it’s incredible, pathetic lameness. It is about
nothing if not if not this disappointment (including the two framing devices
emphasizing the oldness and lethargy of the main characters.)
There’s the pure financial side of things: all of these
characters, who kill for money and establish intricate rituals and mythologies
underlying their greed and corruption… live hilariously middle class
lifestyles. You couldn’t even call them upper-middle-class, but at best
upper-lower-class. Look at their houses and their cars. Hell the movie takes place
over a three day roadtrip to go to a wedding. They don’t have private planes or chauffeurs. They have a Lincoln and smoke breaks and have to replace flat tires.
They stay at Howard Johnson motels!!
Frank eventually goes to prison for the crime of buying that
Lincoln at a discount. That was his luxury (and he’s sad to lose it.) These
movers and shakers have to share hotel rooms. Their homes are in old stucco
neighborhoods, and never in a mansion. Jimmy Hoffa, a man of legend, gets a
payout of a measly $1.7 million for his lifetime of work (and causes a feud
with a powerful mafia boss over denying them a similar payout.) It’s chump
change compared to the titans of our financial world, or even the middle
management of any investment bank.
Irishman is far from the first mafia work to draw on this contrast.
Soprano’s showed Tony in a decent high six figure home in a Jersey neighborhood,
and how astonished his son was when he went to the house of someone with actual
money (just a random executive of a pharma company.) The FBI agents don’t envy
his collection of European sports cars (which he doesn’t have) – they envy his
marginally bigger water heater. It’s all so small (and painted very well.)
Some if it of course is that these mafia men derive pleasure
from non-material power, the amount of people who praise them and serve them
and make them feel more like a king than a law partner working 80 hour weeks
trying to calm their clients down ever does. They have tribalistic community
networks, and easy sex available, which are some recompense. But it’s still a
hilarious contrast to see the most feared man in Philadelphia, who orders the
death of presidents of unions (and he hints, of America too), staying at a
Howard Johnson.
This parallels with the stakes of the movie. The mafia are
trying to abuse the Teamster’s pension fund, a multi billion pot that they want
to use to make easy loans to their friends, and which is treated as the highest
crime of corruption. And yet, what happened to that fund after the mafia were
cleaned out in the 80’s? Oh, Republicans gave it to more aggressive Wall St
brokers who lost half of it in the 2008 crash. It didn’t even make the news
because no one cared and that was yet more chump change given what was going on
in Wall St.
It’s all so small and sad. And visually you realize… these
men are too.
Since this movie is after all, about the end of the mafia
era. The male characters spend the majority of the runtime being well, old and
doddering. They aren’t dry and witty. They’re slow and dim-witted. They deal
with crime by using a lot of euphemisms and (very convincingly) playing dumb
whenever anyone asks them about them. Large parts of this movie are like trying
to explain the internet to your grandpa. In particular, they reliably react to
bad news with confusion and denial, simply refusing to understand anything that
does not make them happy. This is not to say all old people (or only old
people) act this way: just that they are a parody of what a nursing home
politics debate is like.
The funniest sad moment of the movie is when Frank tells his
best friend Hoffa to back off or that the mafia men will kill him. Hoffa
refuses to understand, and even once he does get that there is a threat, he warns
Frank to get protection too, because they could take out anyone – blatantly missing
that Frank is the one threatening, and the one who would pull the trigger, even
as his eyes try desperately to telegraph it.
They are of course, sometimes sharp. The most dramatic
contrast in the movie is how on one day, Bufalino informs Frank that Hoffa will
die by just telling Frank they’ll stop driving for a day, meaning Frank would
not be able to make it to a dangerous meeting Hoffa had been invited to. Frank
tries to protest and Bufalino just refuses to understand, insisting on the
value of rest and slowness before continuing to drive. But the very next
morning, Bufalino informs Frank that rather than sitting around all day… he’s
going to drive to a local airport, get in a biplane, fly to Detroit, take a car
that was left in the parking lot, go to the meeting, and kill Hoffa himself, and
then fly back before anyone misses him. The shifting between willful doddering
and Bondian super-plan creates a more sinister atmosphere for the mafia. They
can be sharp when they want to.
But still, they usually aren’t. It’s a problem behind the
entire plot of the movie. What is Hoffa doing anyway? He’s on a sad campaign to
get his old job back post prison, and approaches it with all the foresight of a
wild boar. Every step he takes only makes his mission harder and more quixotic.
So he lashes out and becomes an anti-mafia crusader, which is both politically
unbelievable given his history, and upsetting to the allies he used to rely on.
He has no more art or plan than a confused man yelling at Fox News. And he
certainly isn’t a *threat* to anyone.
So why kill him? The bosses don’t really have a reason. They’re
annoyed and embarrassed by Hoffa. He is not in any way an actual threat to their
livelihood, but they’ve reached the stage of life when they can’t tell the
difference between enemies and people who disagree with them. They off him out
of pique. And far from the towering presence of American Labor, he’s just a
slumped over dude waiting in a Red Hen parking lot for his ride.
And honestly, here is where the movie needed to be *longer*.
Because, within the film, immediately after they kill Hoffa, everyone involved
goes to jail. Not for that crime, but for other convictions as a result of all
the mud stirred by the high profile murder. It’s presented as a logical and
quick progression (even if, in the real world, the causation and connection
were more complex and much slower.) They make the terrible decision at the
moral climax of the film, and immediately all go to jail for it. Which makes
the decision *stupid*. These were old fogeys who if they had left the other old
fogey alone, nothing would have happened, but instead they lashed out violently
and paid for it with prison.
This is why the analysis of Peggy is wrong. That’s a
melodramatic universe, where Frank made a serious choice about which half of
his personality he would save, and that choice lost him his family. Frank didn’t
make any choices! He reacted out of inertia and cowardice to a poorly thought
out plan, and everyone involved was the worse for it. The characters *want* to
be figures of great moral tragedy. Instead they are the slapstick fools at the
end of Rashomon.
(Go watch Rashomon btw.)
The post climax stuff just pushes this theme harder. The
most existentialist bit is when FBI agents are asking Frank what he knows about
Hoffa, and he gives them the usual push off saying to speak with his lawyer.
His lawyer is dead they say. Who offed him? Just cancer. In fact, everyone is dead.
No one Frank could be protecting is alive anymore. There’s no mafia and code of
silence to protect, Hoffa is decades old history. No one cares about you, old
man, they seem to be communicating. You’re the last soldier of a lost war, just
come out already.
No comments:
Post a Comment