Peter Viney's Blog

The Irishman

NETFLIX

Directed by Martin Scorsese
Written by Steven Zaillian (screenplay) and Charles Brandt (book)

CAST
Robert De Niro- Frank Sheeran
Al Pacino- Jimmy Hoffa
Joe Peci – Russell Bufalino
with
Harvey Keitel – Angelo Bruno
Ray Romano-Bill Bufalino

IMDB:

Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran is a man with a lot on his mind. The former labor union high official and hitman, learned to kill serving in Italy during the Second World War. He now looks back on his life and the hits that defined his mob career, maintaining connections with the Bufalino crime family. In particular, the part he claims to have played in the disappearance of his life-long friend, Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, who mysteriously vanished in late July 1975 at the age of 62.

Charles Brandt’s 2004 book, “I Hear You Paint Houses,” features Brandt’s interviews with Frank Sheeran, a labor union leader believed to have worked for years as a hitman for the Bufalino crime family. His nickname  was “The Irishman,” and the book served as a basis for the new movie — as Sheeran has claimed credit for killing his one time friend Hoffa.

It’s three and a half hours long, which doesn’t matter too much for Netflix (we watched it in three chunks) but it would be an ordeal at the cinema without a break, though the nearest place the very limited theatrical release got to was Dorchester, 35 miles away. The big chains all took revenge on Netflix by refusing to show it. Netflix spent $200 million making it.

When shall we three meet again …

As Scorsese’s says in the conversation on Netflix which follows the film, the subject is the three characters and the complexities of loyalty and forced betrayal. It’s “about” the relationship, not “about” the Mafia. It’s interesting to watch the three lead actors sitting with him. They almost fall into their roles. Pesci and Pacino are articulate and talkative. De Niro is near silent.

Frank Sheeran (De Niro) is singled out by mobster Russ (Pesci) early on as a bodyguard / confidante / gopher / assassin and best friend.

Russ Bufalino (Pesci) and Frank Sheean (De Niro)

The dialogue leaves much unspoken. Russell (Pesci) will say simply It is what it is. Sheeran (De Niro) is content with I know.  Orders for murders are left unsaid.

I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now …

De Niro as Frank Sheeran aged 20 in 1943 Italy v De Niro as Sheeran “now” in the film in his 80s

The technical tour-de-force is “de-ageing” De Niro (76), Pesci (76) and Pacino (79) for the earlier sequences. Ageing actors with make up and prosthetics is a tried and tested effect. Making them younger is far harder, and the computer work must have eaten up a great deal of budget as well as breaking new ground. They list hundreds of digital artists.

De Niro has to go from “now” in an old people’s home in his eighties (older than he is) to himself forty years earlier. De Niro declined to use the large facial markers normally employed for CGI transformation, but used near invisible ones. They used three cameras to get a 3D model.

Pabo Helman (Digital effects):Marty Scorsese didn’t want to rewind 30 years and see Jimmy Conway from “Goodfellas,” right? He wanted to design a character that was a younger version of Frank Sheeran. And when you see him first on the screen, you don’t say, oh, wow, he doesn’t look like “Deer Hunter” – you know what I mean… Or “Taxi Driver.” He looks like the character that he’s being portrayed as, Frank Sheeran.

Even when they’re younger, they certainly limit their assassinations to gunfire and walk to dispose of weapons, rather than run about a lot.

It is a three character movie. Scorsese says only the three principles had the full CGI applied … for others it was make up.

Three men too, women barely feature except for Sheeran’s estranged daughter, Peggy. She knew what he’d done. Earlier she comes home as a child to say a shop owner had pushed her. This is when we see macho dad wreak vengeance.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker:

Early in the film, sometime in the late nineteen-fifties, the young Peggy is at the center of a sequence that scars her for life. After she accidentally made a mess in a corner grocery story, the grocer shoved her. Learning of this, Frank takes Peggy by the hand, brings her to the store, and, so that she can see, pushes the grocer through his own glass door and kicks him in the head and repeatedly stomps on his hand, audibly breaking it—on the sidewalk, in front of Peggy and other passersby who look on in mute horror (and it’s quite certain that their horror will remain mute, because they know what they’d get for snitching). Peggy’s own sense of horror is manifested, soon thereafter, in her aversion to the cagey and calculating Russell, who’s a frequent presence in the Sheeran family (and whose increasingly transparent efforts to ingratiate himself with her grow all the more hopeless).

De Niro as Sheeran and store keeper

Peggy is  subject to the vaguely creepy attentions of Russ Bufalino (who is childless). These guys were always known for sentimentality about children.

Sheeran, Bufaino and Peggy. Early days.

I Hear You Paint Houses

The first interest was that as usual with Martin Scorsese, Robbie Robertson had curated the soundtrack, and I had the Sinematic album with the theme track, I Hear You Paint Houses (Robbie Robertson and Van Morrison). This is the tenth Scorsese film Robertson has collaborated on.

I hear you paint houses is a line Robert DeNiro’s character uses early on. Painting houses means splattering your victim’s blood over the walls. He adds that he does ‘carpentry too’ which means making coffins, though not literally. It means disposing of bodies.

Read Robbie Robertson’s autobiography Testimony. He had plenty of direct experience of meeting up with organized crime, most especially with Morris Levy of Roulette Records,  the mobbed up label that Ronnie Hawkins & The Hawks recorded for. Levy was the model for Hesh Rabkin in The Sopranos:

Robbie Robertson: ‘Wow! I’ve got songs on an album!’ I’m really cherishing the moment. I open the record slowly and I’m savouring the scent of the vinyl and I look on the label and I see the song titles and I see my songs there, and under the songs it says, ‘Robbie Robertson and Morris Levy.’ And so I say to Ronnie, ‘Who the hell is Morris Levy and what is his name doing on these songs I wrote?’ And Ronnie says in his southern accent, ‘Well, son, there are certain things in this business we just don’t question and it’s better for all concerned to just accept.’ Ronnie took me up to Roulette Records to meet my ‘songwriting partner,’ Morris Levy. We go into his office and Ronnie introduces me as his young guitar player and songwriter who he thinks has great ‘potential’ as he calls it. And Morris Levy looks at me and says, ‘Yeah, he’s a cute kid. I bet you don’t know whether to hire him or  f—- him.’ And I’m thinking, ‘Whaaaat? What is with this guy?’ And I look around his office and he’s got these guys in there with these tight dark suits on; they’re packing  heat or something. Two things became apparent to me immediately. One was that the Cosa Nostra was not a myth. And number two, that I would forego my comments.”
(interviewed by Blair Jackson,  Mix Magazine, March 1998)

The best tales about Roulette appear in Tommy James’ autobiography, Me, The Mob & Music. Martin Scorsese approached Tommy James about turning the book into a movie.

Joey Dee also described the set-up.

Joey Dee: These guys can open doors for you. Or they can put you in a box… Peppermint Twist was the number one song in the country. I get a royalty check and it states that I owe Roulette $8,000. I said where’s my royalty money? He (Morris Levy) said “Joe, keep your mouth shut. You’re gonna get hurt “… but I’ll give the mob credit for one thing. They’ll usually, 99% of the time, give you a warning. “Don’t do that”’ and that’s all they’ll say. Now if you don’t get it the first time, you’re definitely going to get it the second time.’
(online interview, 2011)

Jersey Boys, the Four Seasons biopic is also openly explicit about mob involvememt.

We Can Talk About it Now …

Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino

We can talk about the Mafia freely now, not that it’s a word the Cosa Nostra ever use. Mafia referred originally to the Sicilian syndicates. Then there’s the Camora in Campania and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria. Sardinia and Corsica had their own versions (and the Corsican one was said to be the most active in South Central England).

We see in the conversation on Netflix that all four Italian-Americans … the three main actors and Scorsese … say they recognize “the neighbourhood” in the movie.

The first question is how The Irishman competes with Scorsese’s other mob movies … Goodfellas, The Departed, Casino. Then how it competes with The Godfather and The Sopranos. I can think of three episode sequences of The Sopranos that would compete. The ‘Italians’ certainly like the image of all their screen stories. I went to the Carbone restaurant in New York which is “Godfather themed.” I was surprised that they pronounced it Car + Bone rather than Car-Bonay (as in A View From The Bridge). The waiter explained that Car+Bonay was The Godfather I but that Car+Bone was The Godfather II. I’ve walked round the magnificent Christmas displays in Italian-American Dyker Heights on Long Island. We went on to a long-established Italian-American restaurant on Long Island which was like walking into the 1950s. I had never seen such gargantuan portions of food and was about to take a photo when the thought came that the immaculately-dressed gentlemen enjoying a Saturday evening feast with their wives (men at one end of the table, women at the other) might not take kindly to cameras flashing around them. We were on an Alaska cruise sharing a table with a most friendly and pleasant man who told us he was in the waste-management business. Nice gold rings. It was only years later watching The Sopranos that I realized it might be a euphemism.

Atlantic City

Well they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night
Now they blew up his house too
Down on the boardwalk they’re gettin’ ready for a fight
Gonna see what them racket boys can do
Bruce Springsteen,”Atlantic City” also recorded by The Band

The violence in The Irishman is surprisingly brief and not dwelled upon too long, though nasty enough as when they shoot a rival deliberately in front of his children. There’s a lot of blowing up of property, but a sheet of flame is just a Catastrophe Canyon Theme Park ride. It got a 15 rating. No lingering on blood and gore.

Atlantic City brings back this question of whether any of this mob stuff is secret any more. Years ago, we were told that anyone who ran casino hotels in Atlantic City and /or Las Vegas was connected. Now we have a casino owning hotelier in those places as President of the United States. Here in Britain, we have a Prime Minister who some years ago openly admitted discussing having journalists beaten up as a favour to a dubious friend. Is this what it’s all about at one level?

Frank Sheeran in talking to his biographer for the book the movie is based on clearly couldn’t give a shit about claiming the hit.

Bang Bang (You Shot Me Down)

Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa

It is based on real characters with their real names … Frank Sheeran, Russell Bufalino and Jimmy Hoffa. Pacino studied the many newsreels of Hoffa in action.

Watching the film, I began to think that the reason organized crime is so openly discussed is that so many are dead. Peripheral characters have a pop-up caption with stuff like “Killed in 1980. Shot three times in the head.” As more and more captions appeared, I thought about the wholesale slaughter in Western movies, the other great American legend. In fact the real numbers killed in gunfights or by Native Americas is surprisingly small to someone brought up on a diet of those westerns. Did the mob really kill so many of their fellow gang members?

P.T. 109 

A float appears briefly in a J.F. Kennedy parade with a model of P.T. Boat 109. The song about JFK’s wartime exploits was a US #3 hit for Jimmy Dean in 1962:

In Forty-three they put to sea
Thirteen men and Kennedy
Aboard the PT 109
To fight the brazen enemy …

The section around Kennedy’s election flies by at great speed. We hear that Jimmy Hoffa, pissed off with the Kennedys had given $500,000 to the Nixon campaign, but the mob got Kennedy elected. There are references to ballot box stuffing in Illinois (certainly an accusation made at the time) which gave JFK victory. Then there’s the Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco in an attempt for the mob to regain their Cuban casinos.  Robert Kennedy as attorney-general is pursuing Hoffa, and there are very explicit references to Joseph Kennedy, their dad, being under Mafia –er- influence and needing to talk to his son. Later Hoffa worries that ‘they whacked the president of the USA, they can whack the president of the union.’

All these references are clear to Americans of my age, to many British people of my age, and I studied American Studies and Political Studies. But I wonder how transparent they are to an international and much younger audience?

Part of The Union

Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa. Robert De Niro as Frank Sheeran

Frank Sheeran (in the film): Nowadays, young people, they don’t know who Jimmy Hoffa was. They don’t have a clue. I mean, maybe they know that he disappeared or something, but that’s about it. But back then, there wasn’t nobody in this country who didn’t know who Jimmy Hoffa was.

Jimmy Hoffa was real, and tales abound about which bit of freeway concrete his body ended up in. According to Sheeran, it was simpler. They just cremated him in the local crematorium at night.

The Teamsters Union was and is real, and feared too. Once we were filming in an office block in Greenwich Village, New York City on a Friday afternoon … an elevator sequence featuring a young Edward Norton in fact. Suddenly the location manager pointed at a sign … the Teamsters Local office was in the building. Our young driver / gopher disappeared at speed. Apparently he was non-union which could have placed us all in deep shit with the Teamsters. The local grip crew were not bothered, ‘After lunch on a Friday? No self-respecting teamster official is going to be in the office.’

Al Pacino shows Hoffa as charismatic and with serious anger management issues. Frank Sheeran is assigned to him by the Mob as a kind of bodyguard … he even has to sleep in the same room. He has to protect him and his family.

Hoffa and Frank Sheeran

Hoffa does time, and once released … and keeping his mouth shut for years … he has become more stubborn, no longer maleable.  A lot of the film’s power is De Niro’s restrained, understated Sheeran compared to the fiery Hoffa. Go back to that Joey Dee quote:

Joey Dee: They’ll usually, 99% of the time, give you a warning. “Don’t do that”’ and that’s all they’ll say. Now if you don’t get it the first time, you’re definitely going to get it the second time.’

In Frank Sheeran’s world, one warning was enough. He was perplexed and troubled (or in Bufalino’s words “a little concerned”) that Hoffa failed to heed it.

Sheeran (De Niro) and Hoffa (Pacino) take their final car ride. Sheeran knows what he has to do.

In the end …

As we move to the termination / elimination of Hoffa, there is a long inane conversation about transporting fish in the car. First it’s Sal and Hoffa’s foster son, Chucky. Sheeran observes. Hoffa joins in the long fish debate. I thought it dialogue writing of the highest order.

Sheeran post-prison, the FBI trying to get the final truth, ‘Everyone’s dead, Mr Sheeran.’ He still has his Teamsters cap.

The really powerful scene for me is when Sheeran has to phone Hoffa’s wife, Jo, and pretend he knows nothing about the disappearance. It’s the one that is to haunt him.

Jesse Hassenger: The Verge:
The Irishman is particularly interesting in the way it follows Frank as he ages. It’s clear from the opening shot, which tracks through a nursing home, that this isn’t a guy who gets whacked, blown up by a car bomb, or even confined to witness protection. He lives with what he does, yet seems fully unequipped to grapple with it. The movie is chilling not because De Niro plays Frank as an icy, remorseless killer, but because he’s an affable company man, proud of his union appreciation dinner, and he also happens to kill without remorse.

They all get their comeuppance by getting old in jail, usually for a lesser offence. In Frank Sheeran’s case, it was 18 years for getting a Lincoln car cheap, so a bribe. In prison Russ has palsey, others have cancer. When Sheeran is released, he’s feeble, finds it hard to walk, haltingly seeks absolution. Age is their punishment, a miserable old age. The descent into decrepitude is long, taken slow, but gives the movie powerful impact.

Spanish Eyes

Steve Van Zandt as Jerry Vale sings Spanish Eyes

The music score for The Irishman was an unusual feat. We were trying to discover a sound, a mood, a feel, that could work, over the many decades that this story takes place
Robbie Robertson

Mainly, Robbie Robertson has illustrated with found songs. This may make a soundtrack album less appealing. The Mafia taste in music ran to Jerry Vale’s Spanish Eyes as mimed in the film by Steve Van Zandt. There are other songs such as Al Di La, Canadian Sunset, A White Sport Coat (& A Pink Carnation) which evoke the era perfectly, but I’m not sure I’m up for an OST album with Percy Faith, Hugo Winterhalter, Johnnie Ray, Jackie Gleason, Ray Connif and Perez Prado tracks. I was surprised that Robbie chose Fats Domino’s original The Fat Man rather than his own cover from Carney. Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny stands out, but I have it already, also Honky Tonk Pt 1 by Bill Doggett.  I would like his own Theme from The Irishman.

I was waiting for I Hear You Paint Houses over the credits. Not so. They start with In The Still of The Night for the main part (earlier used for a wedding), then go into the haunting surround sound guitar instrumental which must be Theme From The Irishman. The line I hear you paint houses is intoned lightly right at the end.