The Irishman Review
The Irishman is a dense movie. It's three and a half hours long and there's no way a review can do any of it justice. You should watch it. Plain and simple.
Based on Charles Brandt's I Heard You Paint Houses, it recalls the life and times of hitman Frank Sheeran which spans several decades from the 50's to just before his death in 2003. It's similar to other Scorsese crime classics like Goodfellas and Casino but slower in pacing and a lot more meditative. The great casting, soundtrack and tight editing are all hallmarks of a Scorsese picture and are all here as one would expect and it's great to see cinema's most legendary figures at the top of their game. I'm referring to Scorsese himself who has never really faltered as a filmmaker and documentarian, Thelma Schoonmaker who's still one of the greatest film editors of all time, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino who haven't given such nuanced and emotional performances since 1995's Heat, and the return of Joe Motherfucking Pesci. There's also Rodrigo Prieto (Brokeback Mountain, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence) in charge of the cinematography, and writer Steven Zaillian (Schindler's List, Moneyball, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 2011) so there's obviously going to be a lot of hype for this particular gangster epic.
There's a lot of context when the movie begins. We listen to De Niro's Sheeran being interviewed near the end of his life as he tells us where he was at the time, who he was with, why they matter, what they were all doing, how they were doing it, and why. Although it's a slower movie than your Goodfellas and Casino, that doesn't mean that the movie slows down. It's a constant burst of information, and it's always fascinating and full of historical context and it all comes back to Sheeran, Pesci's Russell Bufalino, and Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa. There are a lot of main events but it's always about Sheeran's reactions to the other men and the ones he's close to. There's also a tricky story arc with him and his daughter Peggy played by Lucy Gallina and Anna Paquin that feels earned and became of the the most emotional parts of the movie for me personally but a lot of people don't feel the same way due to her lack of dialogue. But her involvement and the events during the final hour of the movie are tense, and beautiful.
You might've heard that there's a lot of de-aging vfx handled by Industrial Light & Magic. It was great in Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy 2, and Captain Marvel. But now it's seamless I think. It's a perfect mix of practical and digital effects and for all I know they could've shot this movie over the span of 50 years. It look incredible. Except for the colour grading. Which, at times, looks like an outtake from 2004's The Aviator. But it wasn't enough to distract me from what I think is a perfect movie and an all time classic. The Irishman is another one of Scorsese's masterpieces.