{"id":8948,"date":"2019-11-12T06:47:09","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T11:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=8948"},"modified":"2019-11-12T23:02:11","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T04:02:11","slug":"guest-contributor-the-fat-man-movie-review-the-irishman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2019\/11\/12\/guest-contributor-the-fat-man-movie-review-the-irishman\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Contributor \u2013 The Fat Man \u2013 Movie Review \u2013 The Irishman"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Fat Man is a learned critic of cinema.\u00a0 I welcome his contributions and hope to see him on a regular basis.<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There are many ways to consider The Irishman, Scorsese\u2019s\u2019 latest, and hopefully last, gangster pic. We can try to at least mention them all but it may be best to see it as another allegorical mock epic. Almost the entirety of post-war US history not only acts as a backdrop to the film, but the movie suggests its main characters were central players in such events as the Kennedy assassination, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crises, perhaps even Watergate. The baby boomers can\u2019t get over their all but irrelevant history of air conditioned atavism and faux passivism. They have no epic story to tell, so they are continually painting up their cowardice in the face of a minor war or their alternating deification and denunciation of their fallen non-hero, JFK.<\/p>\n

It is no shame that Scorsese reveals himself as sentimental and self-deluding in The Irishman. Many great films begin with cherished delusions, like the tradition of the Ronin or the hooker-with- a-heart-of-gold. Marty and Paul Schrader did wonders with that last fantasy in Taxi Driver, with the whore\/Madonna duo played by Cybil Shepard and Jodie Foster. The fact that poor Jodie was still prepubescent was just a cute detail, like attending college to avoid the draft and then going on to graduate studies to learn to justify it to the memory of the poor guys that got killed. But at least Taxi was, in its dysfunctional characters and their infantile motivations, funny. \u201cHe\u2019s not a murderer, he\u2019s a Sagittarius\u201d (or was it an Aquarius), protests Jodie Foster\u2019s character, Iris, to Robert De Niro\u2019s Travis Bickle for criticizing her pimp, Sport. That may be the funniest line to come out of Hollywood in the 1970\u2019s.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I guess it\u2019s time to address the details of The Irishman and justify all this scorn I\u2019m heaping. Let\u2019s start with funny. It\u2019s not. The cheap laughs squeezed out by mocking the blue-collar naivety of the regular-guy-come-psychopath, Frank Sheeran, the movies protagonist played by De Niro, are so hackneyed they will make you squirm. The rest is humorless. How Scorsese managed to get one of the most naturally funny actors of the 1970\u2019s and 80\u2019s, Joe Pesci, to turn in a joyless performance will remain a mystery.<\/p>\n

But, you may ask, why is funny so important. This is big stuff, Pacino, De Niro, Pesci, Keitel, the all-stars, it\u2019s an epic, remember?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true Scorsese swung for the fences on this one, as he did with The Aviator, The Age of Innocence and The Gangs of New York. You\u2019d think he\u2019d learn. Not satisfied with his one true contribution to American cinema, Raging Bull, a small movie perfectly drawn, he continues to balk at the big canvas. He can\u2019t do it. All of his attempts, whether he juices them with amazing sets as in Gangs, or beautiful costumes like in Age, or a remarkable profile like Howard Hughes, fail for the same reason. He can\u2019t tell that story. He can scare us and make us laugh, but he can\u2019t move us. His work can be natural or abstract but never profound. He knows it, as all directors do that pile on the violence. They\u2019re impotent so they pour on the blood.<\/p>\n

And Scorsese, as usual, does pour on the blood. We make our way through Frank\u2019s mournful decent from hard working family man to prolific serial killer. We are told the war was to blame where he was asked to unofficially execute German prisoners. His wonders why these prisoners were so compliant in digging their own graves. He asks himself maybe they thought they would get a break if they did a good job? It never occurs to him they were just taking more orders, the same process that dehumanized them in the camps and him.<\/p>\n

The Irishman is quiet for a Scorsese movie, without any of the Eric Clapton that accompanied the mayhem in Goodfellars. A number of times, in the background score and in shots of empty rooms through partially open doors we see references to that most quiet of directors, Yasujiro Ozu. Ozu, who directed Tokyo Story, is of course admired by Scorsese but unlike the Italian neo realists that he loves, Ozu and his peaceful style is wholly unsuited to a gangster movie. It\u2019s a clue of what Scorsese is trying to do. Make peace. It explains the unfunny Pesci performance and the banality of De Niro\u2019s narration. Scorsese never had the hand to paint the kind of movie that his contemporaries Roman Polanski and Francis Ford Coppola did. He could never shoot a scene like Brando in his office listening to the undertaker or like John Huston and Jack Nicholson discussing broiled fish. So he made up for it with rotating camera\u2019s in the ring and forensic dialog ripped from FBI files.<\/p>\n

But in The Irishman he tries Ozu and we get a whispering Joe Pesci saying \u201cI chose us\u201d to De Niro at the movies end to explain Hoffa\u2019s betrayal. And Hoffa was betrayed, by Scorsese, by Pacino, by everyone who might be interested in what he did build into his union. It must be a curse to try to do a film about the union boss. Nicholson\u2019s Hoffa was terrible, but at least he wasn\u2019t transformed by an aging Italian actor and his friend\u2019s pathetic confession into a one-dimensional stooge. Nothing is examined, nothing explained, just gossip.<\/p>\n

And that is the reason the Irishman is a terrible movie. You can\u2019t attempt to depict the sweep of a generation without saying something about why it matters. But because his generation still lies about the meaning of Kennedys and Castro and war, Scorsese has to lie as well. And so he does for the three hours of The Irishman.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Fat Man is a learned critic of cinema.\u00a0 I welcome his contributions and hope to see him on a regular basis.   There are<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,2177],"tags":[408,1596,2179,43,38,1355,2178],"class_list":["post-8948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-the-fat-man","tag-gangsters","tag-guest-contributors","tag-martin-scorsese","tag-movie-review","tag-review","tag-reviews","tag-the-fat-man"],"yoast_head":"\nGuest Contributor \u2013 The Fat Man \u2013 Movie Review \u2013 The Irishman - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2019\/11\/12\/guest-contributor-the-fat-man-movie-review-the-irishman\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Guest Contributor \u2013 The Fat Man \u2013 Movie Review \u2013 The Irishman - 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