‘The Irishman’ is a rambling masterpiece

It is not easy to sit through   209 minutes of this magnificent mobster-piece. After all, we don’t love mobsters as much as Martin Scorsese who has had a life-long passion for the trigger-happy outcasts who for reasons of perverse pride and honour and subverted masculinity, love to shoot their victims in the face.

In the face of it, The Irishman is Scorsese’s final farewell to those immigrant hitmen who ruled suburban America in the 1950s. It is a fabulous farewell,  seething with unexpressed rage, brimming over with the director’s love for his outlawed characters and their family affairs, all arranged in a spiral that threatens to tumble down in a rush any moment but miraculously manages to stay in place.

The Irishman is not only Scorsese’s longest film, it is also his most verbose  and emotional mobster movie. The last half an hour is in fact amongst the most brilliant portrayal of loneliness and  approaching death that  I’ve seen in cinema. De Niro excels  as a man who after a lifelong  liaison with violence craves for his estranged youngest daughter to forgive him.

As the daughter Peggy, the brilliant child actress Lucy Gallina’s  accusing eyes follows de Niro  and the  blood-drenched  narrative , to their nemesis. In an epic film—and let be known that this is  an epic work  of  splattered art in the truest sense—chockful of  accomplished  performances,  little Lucy Gallina’s Peggy becomes the moral compass that weighs the  monstrous  misdeeds  of her father and his two associates, played  with oscillating  brilliance by  Joe Pesci and  Al Pacino. These are two of the most brilliant American actors of all times whom we haven’t seen in a while. To see them get together with the  God Of Histrionics De Niro is an experience of a lifetime.

We never feel the collective weight of their reputation. Scorsese uses this iconic trio strictly as characters. The socio-political dynamics of the 1960s and 70s are applied to the lives of this trio of mobsters with telling ferocity. The narrative lumbers forward at a  pace that today’s generation of Scorsese followers would find challenging. The Irishman is a very wordy film. There are long passages of conversation where the characters discuss violence and corruption so casually, we need to focus on the unstated punctuations between the lines to see where these heroes are heading to, and at what cost.

Finally, to me, the brilliance of The Irishman is incumbent on the profound relationship between violence and self-worth that the plot accentuates through the characters’ ageing passages. CGs knock off  40 years from De Niro, Pacino and Pesci. But the process is not an exercise in bravura. As we see these men plod violently from amoral middle age to their winter of discontent, a whole ethos of the curdled American Dream passes by in front of our eyes.

The  Irishman is not  just great film for the performances (watch out for the little-known actress Marin Ireland as De Niro’s eldest  daughter in the one sequence where she scoffs at her dad’s justification for being such a brutal householder), its keen eye for period detail (truly the Devil lies in the details) and its severely austere soundtrack , but also because like Scorsese’s best films on mob blood like Mean Streets and Good Fellas, The Irishman shows us the ultimate nullity of men who swear by violence.

A pity, it takes so much bloodshed to get there. But the violent journey is worth every bit our time and patience. We may not love mobsters as much as Martin Scorsese. But we surely cannot help plunging deep into the lives of these uprooted sophisticated sociopaths who stop at nothing. And that’s where it ends for them. Nothing.