Bear with me while I finish up pouring gasoline on myself,
because apparently there’s no way I can make it easier to cop backlash for what
I’m about to put down on paper. I would so very dearly prefer for this not to
turn into part of the larger discourse concerning Martin Scorsese and his
opinions on the modern state of blockbuster cinema, but because line-drawing is
all kinds of easy, I feel like reviewing this movie is only going to further
embroil me in a conversation that, to be honest, is kind of killing my
enthusiasm to discuss movies. I’m firmly in the ‘don’t make judgement calls on
other people’s tastes in fiction’ camp, and considering my continuing showings
of praise for comic book movies around here, I want to make all of this
perfectly clear before I deliver the big news. Martin Scorsese’s latest… I’m
just not feeling it.
I could easily just chalk that up to the running time, as
I’ve mentioned before that I don’t have the ideal attention span for lengthy
epics like this and it stands as the longest film Scorsese has ever made.
However, that would fly in the face of how Scorsese is pretty much the only
filmmaker still working today that I would trust to pull off a film over three
hours long. His track record for crime epics especially speaks for itself,
between Goodfellas, Casino and The Wolf Of Wall Street, and this finds him in
the same territory of real-life crime narratives. Well, “real-life” in
air-quotes, given the unreliable narrator take shown here, but regardless, I should
be in the dude’s corner on this one. Hence why I’m so downtrodden that it just
didn’t click with me this time around.
It’s the kind of story and production that, knowing
Scorsese’s tastes in storytelling, are a little too obvious for him to
adapt, in this case being the all-time classic Mafia legend of the
disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. He’s brought in his regular collaborators like
Robert De Niro as the titular Irishman Frank Sheeran, Joe Pesci as the nicely
understated gangster Russell Bufalino, even collaborating with Al Pacino for surprisingly
the first time ever as Hoffa himself. Their chemistry with each other and the
director works well in the wordier scenes, and Steven Zaillian’s scripting
carries the same organised crime intricacies of Scorsese’s work with Nicholas
Pileggi, but it still feels substantially less… well, substantial than his
usual.
With the narrative involving everything from the mob to the
labor unions to the President and back again, it makes sense for it to be
lengthy, but did it really need to be this lengthy? Goodfellas managed
to turn the prototypical gangster story into a horror film with how it framed
the lead’s aloofness towards his ‘work’, and Casino’s wraparound premise of a
man who never believed in luck that, ironically, was saved by a lucky turn
remains one of Scorsese’s most striking character portraits. Here, while it
gives some nice thematic touches to the source material and (technically) this
film’s title I Heard You Paint Houses, that’s a moment right at the start and
it shows the film peaking way too early.
To an extent, I can at least get why everyone else is
so enraptured with this film. There’s a decent meta quality to the story and
its production, considering everyone’s connection to the genre and to each
other, and I can definitely see how this could be Scorsese commenting on a
genre that, while he may not have invented it, he built up into what it is
today. That, and for all my bitching, the film still looks, sounds and even feels
Scorsese, with all the precision you’d expect from someone who’s been championing
the art form for this long.
However, merely giving this film a pass on those merits
would only serve to undermine just how fucking great his work has been
throughout the 2010’s. Hugo is one of the finest love letters to cinema I’ve
ever witnessed, The Wolf Of Wall Street is an absolute blast from start to
finish, and Silence is a dead-easy contender for one of the best films of the
decade, if not all bloody time. All marvellously realised, all fairly
lengthy to certain extents, and all showcases of a filmmaker who has somehow
managed to hold onto his prime after all these years.
The Irishman, by contrast, doesn’t stick in the brain nearly
as well, making for yet another unfortunate let-down in a year that seems to
have been carved from a lump of raw disappointment. In fact, this might make
for the worst kind of disappointment I’ve ever covered on this blog: It makes
me hate myself for not liking it more than I do.
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