Three and a half hours of Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino, Pesci. The film Netflix paid for that nobody else would.
Frank Sheeran, an elderly man in a Pennsylvania nursing home, narrates his life into a digital recorder. The film moves between three timelines: Frank in his last days, Frank on a road trip with Russell Bufalino and their wives in 1975, and Frank's career as a Teamster, Mob enforcer, and friend of Jimmy Hoffa across the post-war decades.
The trip in 1975 is the film's spine. Frank and Russell are ostensibly driving to a wedding; the actual purpose is for Frank to be in position to kill Jimmy Hoffa, who has become a liability to the Outfit. The film follows Frank to the door of Hoffa's hotel room in Detroit and through what follows. Hoffa, in actual history, was last seen on 30 July 1975. His body has never been found.
The Irishman cost $159m, which is unusual for an adult drama in 2019. Paramount had spent years developing the project, then dropped it. Scorsese took the film to Netflix, which financed the entire production in exchange for streaming rights. The deal made Scorsese — at 76, with a half-century filmography — into the most-prominent argument for the streaming model as a way to fund mid-budget-to-large-budget adult drama that the studios had stopped financing.
The trade-off was the theatrical release. The film had a 26-day theatrical window before streaming; most major chains refused to book it. Whether this was a tolerable concession depends on how seriously you take the theatrical experience. Scorsese, in interviews, has been openly conflicted: he is grateful Netflix funded the film, frustrated that theatrical distribution was so limited.
De Niro was 76 during production, Pacino was 79, Pesci was 76. The film required all three to play their characters across roughly four decades, from their thirties to their seventies. ILM's de-aging technology was deployed at the most-aggressive scale yet attempted in feature cinema — Roughly 1,750 shots were digitally de-aged.
The technology was visually convincing. What it could not fix was the actors' physical comportment. A 76-year-old Robert De Niro de-aged to 35 still moves like a 76-year-old man. The scene of Frank Sheeran kicking the head of a grocer who threatened his daughter — a sequence Frank is meant to be in his thirties for — has become one of the most-discussed examples of the limits of digital age-shifting. The face is young; the body is not.
The Irishman is adapted from Charles Brandt's 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses, in which the real Frank Sheeran (in his nineties, near death) claimed to have personally killed Jimmy Hoffa. The historical accuracy of Sheeran's claim is, to put it gently, contested. Multiple journalists and FBI agents who worked the Hoffa disappearance have publicly disputed Sheeran's account. The film takes the claim seriously enough to dramatise it.
Scorsese is on record arguing that the film is not, strictly, a historical claim but a portrait of a man's deathbed self-presentation. Whether Sheeran killed Hoffa is, in the film's frame, less important than the question of what a man tells himself at the end of his life when nobody else is left to contradict him. Frank's confession to the priest at the end of the film, in which he refuses to express remorse, is the film's structural answer to the question of whether anything he did matters.