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As a banal cis white dude from the suburbs, I remember growing up idolizing gangster films, or at least buying into the glamour and coolness of the wiseguy lifestyle. I'm in my late 30s now so I've kind of cooled off on stuff like that. I came into The Irishman really worried that a) I had grown apart from mobster movies and b) the 3.5 hour runtime was going to feel indulgent and wasteful. Wrong on all accounts, I looooved this film. Didn't feel the runtime one bit. I think it made a big impact on me BECAUSE I was a dumb kid from the burbs fantasizing about being a gangster. The way the film strips away the cool factor and highlights the emptiness, the loneliness of a life of bloodshed and betrayal was heartbreaking. I mean, even the opening shot: instead of a long slow tracking shot through a racous mobster nightclub, the film opens with a long slow tracking shot of a nursing home. Oof. I wasn't distracted by the de-aging other than how even though RdN looked like he was 49, Pesci kept calling him "kid". But that just added to the dreaminess of the film, with Frank looking back on his life with a mix of memory and bleed over from his present situation. For me, The Irishman has the "x factor" that Once Upon a Time In Hollywood lacked for me. Both films are veteran directors expertly capturing the look and feel and spirit of a time, but for my money, Scorsese actually manages to say something with his. QT felt like he was just going "Man, how cool was Hollywood huh? Shame it all ended, let's just bask for awhile..." where as Scorsese is seriously meditating on a career glamorizing organized crime and what the life really means. People talk a lot about how few lines women get in this film and normally I agree, but unlike how QT used Margot Robbie as set decoration/iconography, to me it felt like the silence of Anna Paquin was powerful and damning and a kind of central theme of the film. If she'd gotten a big emotional monologue, it wouldn't have resonated as much as how she was actually used. Like Frank says, one day, she's just gone. No emotional pleas, no big blowout... Frank blew it and he blew it forever. This has easily jumped into probably my top 3 for the year. Also, for me this seriously closes the book on east coast Italian mafia gabagool-fugeddaboutit movies. We're done, it's all been said now. Frank D'Angelo can pack it up and find a different archetype to obsess over.
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Nov 29, 2019 21:53
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 05:55 |
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