So Mrs. Grandstander and I decided upon a Saturday Night at the Movies date night this weekend, and settled in to watch perhaps the most anticipated movie of 2019, Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman", and what can I tell you, it did not disappoint.
This is an epic of a movie. Three and one-half hours long and and all-star "mob movie" cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci. It is the story of the rise of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), the Irishman of the title, within both the Mob in Philadelphia and the Teamsters Union of the 1960's, and how he became a favorite of both mob leader Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and teamsters head man Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). It has all the trademarks of Scorsese - the long single take that takes us through the halls of a nursing home (and a few other such takes elsewhere in the film), the sound track featuring period music, the voice over narration of the main protagonist, and the freeze frame shots of characters that tell us "whatever became of" them. "The Irishman" is reminiscent of all great Scorsese movies, and it is just as good, and perhaps better, than all of them.
The main thrust of the movie is the story of "what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa, anyway?" Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zallian posit their theory on how Hoffa came to his end, and I won't spoil it for you. There are so many great scenes in this movie. One of my favorites involved a meeting between Hoffa and mobster Tony Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham, who played Al Capone in "Boardwalk Empire") wherein Tony Pro is late for his meeting - an unforgivable sin with Hoffa - and most of the meeting is the back-and-forth between the two of them as to why you should never be late for a meeting, per Hoffa, and who-gives-a-shit-I'm-here-now, per Tony Pro. Fantastic.
The three stars are great. No surprise with De Niro, who's always great. Pesci plays a very different type of mobster, not the bombastic, fly off the handle type you are used to seeing him as, but quiet and perhaps even more chilling. And Al Pacino will probably get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa.
I really, really liked the movie, but I wish that I could have seen it in a movie theater. As I wrote about earlier in the month, this is a Netflix production that was released to a few theaters in selected cities for a three week period so as to qualify for the Academy Awards and then pulled and sent straight to the streaming service. I would like to have had the experience of seeing it on a big screen with a crowd of people in a theater, but this is the wave of the future, so I guess that there is no point shouting at the clouds about it. And with its three and one-half hour length, I was able to hit PAUSE for both a bathroom break and a break to get myself a dish of ice cream, so there is that.
About that length. At first, I was put off at the thought of it. Hey, a good movie should be no more than two ours, tops, amiright? After watching "The Irishman", though, I can't think of any part or parts of it that were superfluous or that could have been done away with to tighten it up.
One final thing. The movie is based on a book by Charles Brandt called "I Heard You Paint Houses". You can guess what "painting houses" is a euphemism for. Anyway, both the opening title and the closing credits did not say "The Irishman", rather they said "I Heard You Paint Houses". Wonder what was up with that?
"The Irishman" gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.
