The Irishman is not only Netflix’s highest-budget film project to date, but also the most expensive and longest film of Martin Scorsese’s career. A kind of Magnum Opus of this outstanding American director and probably one of the main contenders for several Academy Awards 2019 at once. At the moment, the film has an incredible 94 points on Metacritic and an impressive 8.5/10 on IMDb . However, I’m afraid I’m not ready to join the choir of enthusiastic critics, Scorsese’s new film has something to scold.

The Irishman is an adaptation of Charles Brandt’s semi-documentary novel I Heard You Paint Houses, based on the author’s conversations with Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a trade unionist and career mob assassin who, in these interviews shortly before his death, confessed to committing numerous murders. by order of the Bufalino crime family. Among other things, Sheeran confessed to the murder of his longtime friend and boss, the popular labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, whose disappearance in August 1975 is considered one of the most famous crime mysteries in US history, comparable to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The fact that Jimmy Hoffa was a longtime and implacable enemy of the Kennedy family and, in particular, the president’s younger brother, Robert Kennedy, who spoiled him a lot of blood, gives a special piquancy to the situation. Not only that, Hoffa was among the suspects involved in the murder of JFK. Despite Sheeran’s confession, it is still not known for certain whether this was actually the case, and many authors dispute the veracity of the Irishman’s testimony.

The events of The Irishman, built in the form of a confession of an elderly gangster, cover the period from 1955 to 2003. An epic canvas that can be divided into a prologue, telling about Sheeran’s acquaintance with Russell Bufalino and the beginning of his work for the mafia, the central part telling about Sheeran’s friendship with Hoff and the murder of a trade unionist, and a poignant epilogue showing the once all-powerful gangsters as frail old men who look back on their lives and realize that they have wasted it, having lost the most important thing in their quest to follow the really meaningless rules of the criminal world.

The Irishman for Scorsese is also an attempt to look back at his life and his work in the 80s and 90s. last century. After all, Martin Scorsese, along with Francis Ford Coppola and Sergio Leone, are the very people who created gangster cinema, romanticized the mafia and made this path somewhat attractive for representatives of several generations. In The Irishman, Scorsese argues with his 30-year-old self by referring to his own films Goodfellas and Casino, trying to show what really lies behind the glamorous facade of the mafia life, what this road ultimately leads to. He has already done something similar in The Departed, in The Irishman the idea of the hopelessness of a criminal life is emphasized to an even greater extent.

Naturally, in order to make a film that argues against the most famous crime dramas of the 20th century, Scorsese also needed actors who are directly associated with these films. And if the director has already worked with the same Robert De Niro and John Pesci at Goodfellas and Casino, then for Al Pacino this is the first joint picture with Scorsese.

Undoubtedly, actors of this magnitude will adorn any film, and no one in their right mind will doubt their talent, after all, four Oscars for three mean something, but, it seems to me, Scorsese’s desire to shoot the same performers both in the image of young people and in the role of infirm old people, relying on virtual rejuvenation technologies and makeup is a big mistake. Still, Robert De Niro, John Pesci and Al Pacino are already well into their seventies (76, 76 and 79 years old, respectively), it’s just physically difficult for them to play young people. They already have a limited, old man’s range of facial expressions, a limited timbre of voices, in the end, they move like old people, and in many scenes this is clearly visible.

For example, the hero De Niro in the opening scenes of the film is only 35 years old, and in one of the memories he is 24 at all, these episodes are clearly difficult for the actor. Or the hero of Al Pacino has several scenes in which he yells at subordinates … it is clearly visible that the actor is given such an outburst of emotions with great difficulty. The Irishman is just the case that clearly demonstrates that no money, no technology can fight old age. Virtual rejuvenation in some scenes only makes things worse, turning the faces of the actors into dead masks.

Another problem with The Irishman is the timing and tempo. And while Scorsese has been hostile to the idea of some viewers turning the film into a miniseries, splitting it into four virtual episodes, it is not without logic. It is really not easy to endure three hours of a very leisurely, heavy, filled with a mass of seemingly insignificant details of the film.

And finally, about the story itself, which is dedicated to the film. Yes, for the United States, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is one of the great criminal mysteries of the 20th century, exciting the public for almost 45 years. Dozens of books have been written about Hoffa and his possible murder, several films have been shot … but even in the USA they began to forget about him, which Scorsese himself ironically emphasizes in the finale of the picture. What can be said about domestic viewers, for whom the name of Jimmy Hoffa does not mean anything at all.

Undoubtedly, Martin Scorsese made a grandiose movie, just one analysis of religious allusions in The Irishman can burn a liter of ink, just like drawing parallels with the previous works of the director and some of his colleagues. And yes, most likely the film will collect a good crop of awards in February 2020, but … personally, I will remain a fan of Scorsese’s other works – Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed and, of course, the classic 1976 Taxi Driver with a young Robert De Niro.