1058 The Irishman

[T!me]

This was my favorite film of 2019 after Birds of Passage and an unbelievable treat to watch at the cinema.
Scorsese and his films helped me to get into movies in the first place and seeing him now taking a résumé of his long career along with DeNiro, Pesci, Keitel and Pascino gave the 3 1/2 hours a completely different feel to it, a feeling I have never experienced before at the cinema. It sure ranks with his other masterpieces (Casino, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas) and it’s a shame only a handful of people watched it on the big screen (and in one sitting for that matter).

[swo17]

Nov 24

[knives]

That teamsters interview sounds really interesting.

[Ribs]

I believe this marks all three leads' entry into the Collection proper - De Niro is in the Varda set, I guess, which you could count.

[domino harvey]

I believe this marks all three leads' entry into the Collection proper - De Niro is in the Varda set, I guess, which you could count.

Brazil

[The Pachyderminator]

The extras look pretty good. I might wish for more about the historical events, but hopefully the interviews with Sheeran and Hoffa will be substantial. I admit I breathed a sigh of relief that it's getting two discs.

[Roscoe]

Well, we'll see. I'll pick it up, I'm sure, but I'd rather have it in 4k.

[flyonthewall2983]

I believe this marks all three leads' entry into the Collection proper - De Niro is in the Varda set, I guess, which you could count.

Brazil

Plus Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (which Pesci was in too) in the laserdisc days.

First overall for Pacino which is surprising.

[The Narrator Returns]

It’s the first Pacino, but weirdly the third Ray Romano and the tenth Action Bronson.

[Ribs]

I wanna pick up some of the conversation from the packaging thread because I think it was interesting and I love this movie a lot and I'm excited to be able to watch it at home after having seen it three times in its release last year. Just putting things behind a spoiler box for anyone who, for whatever reason, missed this one:

SpoilerShow

I don't really feel like I need to "explain" my reading of the movie, I'm just some guy, I don't have the keys to the puzzle that will unlock everything, but the cover does bring to the forefront the core idea of the title The Irishman. Now, even if Scorsese pushed very hard to keep the other title, I would expect he did still come up with the title The Irishman, it was just his second choice that was agreed upon by investors and distributors and everything as being preferable. Scorsese was aware while making this movie it would have this title (I would be surprised if the cheeky I Heard You Paint Houses cards were planned at the shooting stage and not something that he came up with in the edit), so I think it's interesting they're making such a point of the one scene that really brings home the meaning of the title in a way that's inferred and whispered about throughout the rest of the movie. The movie is, ultimately, about the same type of made-man family culture as Scorsese's explored before (Sheeran like De Niro and Liotta in Goodfellas not allowed to be part of the formal upper echelon of the mob due to their background, being granted a position at the top of the heap). In this movie it becomes not quite a choice, but a dilemma, as he chooses to embrace that status and that position at the cost of killing what is essentially his only friend in the world which has the ripple effect of isolating him from what limited family life he had and ruining his entire life to be one of the guys.

I see the movie quite clearly as a riff on Once Upon a Time in America, another great film with De Niro (and a little bit of Pesci) about friends having to betray each other (and I find the De Niro aging up effect interesting when juxtaposed with the methods used here), with the nonlinear structure and general reminiscence atmosphere. (I also have to imagine the version of this movie where you take out Pacino's towering performance and replace it with a fierce, deaged James Woods to match it cleaner, which I think would have also been tremendous, but obviously would not have been cards.) In that movie the future is almost an imagined one, one where De Niro is sort of able to get atonement and forgiveness for what happened when he was younger - here, time just marches on, and the regret just builds and builds. He doesn't get the forgiveness, he doesn't have the point of blissful ignorance that he gets from the Opium Den imagining his future atonement. I don't see the last shot as particularly trying to refute the Godfather as just evoking the scene earlier where De Niro stays in Hoffa's room as he leaves the door open when he goes to sleep - just that, whenever he sees a door left open at night, he thinks back to that hotel room, and his friend, and regrets what he did so he could be in the club and get the ring. And at the end of the day he's there and everyone's dead and he still has his ring. Again, I don't know, this probably is a clumsily made series of points, just wanted to share some of my thoughts, please ignore if it seems like nonsense.

The other big influence, which I haven't entirely formed any kind of argument around but must be clear considering the basic scope of this and who directed it, is Colonel Blimp, which I felt shockingly didn't get discussed at all in the discourse surrounding this. Again, I'd probably need to revisit both movies to figure out at least the bones of an argument, but it's just something that has struck me as missing from the discussion. It feels like a somewhat missed opportunity that this movie *doesn't* ever try to do the first transition to the past of that movie where in the course of a single shot we go from the Old De Niro moving out of frame to the young coming in - seems like the kind of thing Scorsese would have loved to homage to.

I am extremely excited for The Making of the Irishman feature - Netflix has published like a six minute sizzle reel of footage of just "here we are, fly on the wall of the set, watching Scorsese direct the movie," which was very similar to the Marriage Story feature, which leaves me hopeful we'll probably be getting something like 2 hours of just Martin Scorsese directing, which will be an invaluable document for the future.

[therewillbeblus]

Thanks for explaining a bit further though I don’t really see a clearcut connection thematically with the title, at least the way I’m understanding your reading (however it’s quite possible I’m misinterpreting). Even if we’re not in complete agreement, your post forced me to look at the title I’ve rejected to find meaning- though I can’t even start to go down a rabbit hole comparing it to the P&P!

SpoilerShow

While Sheeran’s heritage may squash him from being on equal playing ground as an outsider of the group, he’s not asking for more and so I feel like that becomes a moot point. Scorsese makes clear that even the group members are living a meaningless existence, and Pesci essentially admits as much at the end in presence and words. There’s definitely a dilemma inherent in the Hoffa/mob diversion of allegiance but I also see the film more about “not choosing” than making choices. De Niro’s non-actions are of course actions with consequences but he basically takes the easiest path the whole time, and remains unconscious to actual risk taking which would be an initiation of agency towards morals and growth, none of which happens. (Just to clarify I don’t see “risk-taking” as taking the clearcut directions from the mob or an act of kneejerk aggression to the shopkeeper, because they’re familiar patterns to follow that defer agency to sanctioned roles and behaviors. Real risks would be to challenge those and think critically apart from a track one is on.)

I believe that De Niro is comfortable being exactly how ‘part of’ the clan he is here, and thus it’s the opposite to the clamming for ‘more’ in the other mob movies, that distinctively defines those characters and drives their dramas. Sheeran is just happy to be at the party, which is arguably more problematic since at least those other guys were participants in their lives! His ignorance feeds his drama which is basically anti-drama mostly, harming others without awareness until he does and even then has no skills to fight the robotic functions that define his existence. Even at the end he is bothered just like all people faced with mortality, and meditates briefly on morality, but can’t dissect himself because he never learned the tools or frameworks to do so, nor has he stopped to define his ‘self’ as a separate identity. So he becomes permanently stuck in purgatory unable to find catharsis because he can’t identify a tangible problem.

I agree that Scorsese probably had a say in the title though, and it likely signifies a broader thematic interest that perhaps you’re also getting at: that he is alone, belongs nowhere, and yet the title is ironic in context because it’s not his heritage that stunts his membership but his attitude of non-engagement with the real connections around him. Because Sheeran the character cannot comprehend the consequences of his actions, why his daughter is upset or what he’s explicitly done wrong, he is doomed to draw inferences such as he didn’t belong because he’s an Irishman, shrug, and move on to the next shiny object in front of him.

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

The other big influence, which I haven't entirely formed any kind of argument around but must be clear considering the basic scope of this and who directed it, is Colonel Blimp, which I felt shockingly didn't get discussed at all in the discourse surrounding this. Again, I'd probably need to revisit both movies to figure out at least the bones of an argument, but it's just something that has struck me as missing from the discussion. It feels like a somewhat missed opportunity that this movie *doesn't* ever try to do the first transition to the past of that movie where in the course of a single shot we go from the Old De Niro moving out of frame to the young coming in - seems like the kind of thing Scorsese would have loved to homage to.

The comparison occurred to me as well back when I first saw it––it's nice to see someone else bring it up! It also resembles Citizen Kane, although I think that comparison is much more commonly cited. I actually think that the comparison with the Archers's film is rather straightforward, but relies on a less commonly accepted reading of Colonel Blimp:

For Colonel Blimp and The IrishmanShow

I think The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp also is a portrait of a man who has lived a somewhat empty life. The three Deborah Kerrs, all three unobtainable for one reason or another, are the clear signifier for this. Even the one he does marry, dies so early on. All he can do is hang a portrait of her, amongst his stuffed heads, which is so clear an image of what she has been to him it's unbearable to draw out the implications that this poor man can do nothing but chase after copies of the original (Edith Hunter; the original Hunter becomes the hunted in the forms of Barbara and Johnny). And of course it's not until everything of his has been destroyed, annihilated, in the end, that his home has been turned into a lake, an absence, that he can fully dedicate himself to the war-cause, which is to relinquish his own beliefs that British society as a whole has outgrown. After all, it is the life and death of Colonel Blimp. So the wartime context keeps it from the pessimism that The Irishman resolves into, and that I think many other Powell/Pressburger films do.

Although the film is also, in a sense, about outliving those around you. In Colonel Blimp, it's not only the Deborah Kerrs, the first two of whom die before their husbands, but also so many other characters, even poor John Laurie's Murdoch. This would have been a very pertinent message for wartime England, even if only subliminally, but as the film goes on so many deaths accumulate in the periphery simply by the facts of life. Scorsese, again, draws this out more vitally and explicitly, but The Irishman is, stripped of all specificity (which is not something we necessarily should do), a depiction of the existential horror of life, of everyone dying around you, and of waiting to die. All the worse when you're responsible for it as he is with Hoffa.

As for the title The Irishman and the Criterion cover:

SpoilerShow

The title does in part emphasize the fact that he was the sole Irishman to have the ring, but I've also felt it plucked at the very subtle historical shift that the film is engaged with, implicitly, which is the consolidation of whiteness. It's been a while since I last watched it, but I seem to recall being struck, at least somewhat, about the ways in which whiteness and working class solidarity were being consolidated at this time to reconstitute the division between Italians and the Irish, something that Scorsese has addressed in other films as well.

As for the image, it also strikes me as the most evocative for the film's complex homosociality. The film is nearly a love triangle in how DeNiro courts the friendships of both Hoffa and Bufalino––relationships that dominate his life so much not only to remove a sense of his own autonomy but also at the detriment to his relationships with the women in his life, something which is highlighted by the fact that in the first scene, they are with their wives, who promptly disappear from the narrative at large (although also his daughter). These friendships ultimately result in Frank having to choose one or the other, and the decision is only made after Russell gives Frank a ring, which he wears in the same place as he would a wedding ring, something the cover image draws out. Frank essentially spends his life with Bufalino, which only assists in alienating his daughter (not that he needed any help), whereas if he had made a different choice, if Hoffa had lived, if he had maintained that relationship, perhaps (in his mind) his relationship with his daughter would have persisted. This is more a general observance of the film's structures of feeling rather than an explicit claim.

One last thing, is that the film's official title always made me think of John F. Kennedy too, which isn't wrong either.

[TheKieslowskiHaze]

The comparison occurred to me as well back when I first saw it––it's nice to see someone else bring it up! It also resembles Citizen Kane, although I think that comparison is much more commonly cited. I actually think that the comparison with the Archers's film is rather straightforward, but relies on a less commonly accepted reading of Colonel Blimp

I'm not sure how I feel about your reading of Colonel Blimp, but I appreciate your connecting it to The Irishman. I'm surprised I didn't make that connection myself, being a fan of both movies.

SpoilerShow

Colonel Candy at the end of Blimp is a man out of time in multiple senses of the phrase. "Out of time" meaning he has little time left, but he is also living through a time during which he is less relevant. The country and world have passed him by; they've changed and he hasn't.

I thought about this and the last few scenes of The Irishman, when the nurse didn't know who Jimmy Hoffa was. One of the most famous and influential people in Frank's world was no longer relevant. Frank was, like Candy, a man out of time.

[Bigbrendan]

The Irishman is not a gangster film.

I found The Irishman terrific, more so on second viewing. I did, however, pick up on something odd during second watch; on first Chicago visit, watermelons are displayed outside during Winter. Also, no discernable wind during that or other Chicago scenes, nor ice on water, or frost on car windows. Orson would not have ok'd.

I believed the characters and story. A couple of years before Hoffa murder, while pulling my go-cart up street fronting our house, a fedora wearing man in brown suit called me over to car and said, "tell your father I'm gonna kill him." Dad was a flight engineer at National Airlines and a Teamster who was working to keep gangsters from muscling in on member benefits. The wise-guy and passenger walked away from car and street after Dad put a round through engine. A number of other war-vets in that Bronx neighborhood (and many others) would have done same.

The Irishman puts into perspective Mafia power - big, but not fed government big. When Pesci's Bufalino tells Sheeran, "Not that high" and "If they can kill a president, they can kill the president of a union" he's not talking about Mob bosses - he's referring to the powers-that-be; beef, cartels, party bosses, and oligarchs they worked for. Arms trafficking scene is shown under artistic license in order to further illustrate nature of U.S. power structure. (those weapons would not have been shipped by any civilian without high clearence, which Sheeran probably did not have.) Enormous role of arms suppliers as political and economic reality is deftly alluded to through this sequence, including symbolism of 'big ears'. If you own guns and ammo, a truck brought it to you.

Was Justice Department's aim in incarcerating Hoffa to help gangsters get control of Teamsters, or to keep union support and pension money from challenging its power? The Kennedy's were not stupid. Neither were Mob bosses - they're not shown as trigger happy cowboys. Coercion is employed using implicit threat of violence. Is this not how diplomacy is conducted?

[dwk]

Criterion has added a new extra to this:

• Anatomy of a Scene: “The Irishman,” a 2020 program featuring Scorsese’s analysis of the Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night scene from the film

[bluesforyou]

I am really curious if this transfer will be any better than the 4K WEBRIP that is available online. It is a 69GB file that has an average bitrate of 50mbps. The Marriage Story 4K WEBRIP is superior to the Criterion BD since it is the size of a whole BD. Same goes for Uncut Gems. However, this film is being put out on 2 discs.

My hunch is that the WEBRIP will remain the best available video (and muxing it with the audio from the Criterion disc would be the best overall presentation) unless we get a UHD with HDR at some point.

[Nasir007]

I am really curious if this transfer will be any better than the 4K WEBRIP that is available online. It is a 69GB file that has an average bitrate of 50mbps. The Marriage Story 4K WEBRIP is superior to the Criterion BD since it is the size of a whole BD. Same goes for Uncut Gems. However, this film is being put out on 2 discs.

My hunch is that the WEBRIP will remain the best available video (and muxing it with the audio from the Criterion disc would be the best overall presentation) unless we get a UHD with HDR at some point.

Criterion is 1080p. And 4k Webrips are 2160p. Of course the webrips will be better quality unless Criterion jumps on the UHD bandwagon. Even accounting for encoding and lower bitrates that streaming usually has to stream quickly, I think the webrip would be better.

And with faster internet, they might start rendering streaming qualities at higher and higher bitrates.

[The Pachyderminator]

The Marriage Story 4K WEBRIP is superior to the Criterion BD since it is the size of a whole BD. Same goes for Uncut Gems. However, this film is being put out on 2 discs.

It will almost certainly be the film on one disc and extras on the other, so at 69 GB the webrip will still be a larger file than the Blu-ray version. I don't know of any examples of Criterion splitting a mere three and a half hour film onto two discs.

[tenia]

What Nasir wrote.

It's 69 Gb because it's 4k. A BD can't even, norm-wise, have a 50 Mbps AVB. It's likely the extras will be on a dedicated disc, but this is trying to compare apples with oranges.

Using the same logic, no, it's unlikely a 1080p Criterion BD will be better than a proper 4K file, simply because, well, it's 4k and the BD won't be.

[dwk]

The Irish Beaver

[Mr. Deltoid]

The Irish Beaver

Or alternatively, I Heard You Paint Beavers!

[tenia]

Interestingly, this seems to be region AB, probably since this is also getting released in the UK but which wasnt the case before.

[dwk]

Roma was region free, so I was surprised that Marriage Story was seperate A and B locked discs.

[tenia]

Roma was a very particular case since it was released in other countries re-using almost the exact same disc.

[EddieLarkin]

That looks horribly compressed, especially in near black areas (see caps 4, 7 and 8). I seriously wonder if the bit starved Netflix stream may be better than this.

Criterion seem to getting worse not better at compression, if this and the Fellini box is anything to go by.