Despite its ten Oscar
nominations, I can’t pretend to be a fan of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Though
some critics have praised this story of the mob-directed murder of Jimmy Hoffa
as Scorsese at his violent best, I found it too over-blown and too meandering to
warrant a 3 ½ hour run-time. But after struggling to watch The Irishman,
I felt compelled to look back to the days when Scorsese—though much overlooked
in the Oscar department—was truly at the height of his powers.
Scorsese pretty much moved
into the big-time in the 1970s. Starting out as a teacher of film studies at
NYU, with a handful of indie films to his credit, he fell under the tutelage of
my former boss, Roger Corman, who knew talent when he saw it. Having shot the Bonnie
and Clyde-ish Boxcar Bertha for Roger, Scorsese made the breakthrough
urban drama, Mean Streets (1973), which introduced him to the talents of
Robert De Niro. The 1976 collaboration of director Scorsese and star De Niro on
Taxi Driver confirmed their artistic partnership. (One year earlier, De
Niro had bagged a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in The Godfather
Part II. Though he was nominated for Best Actor for Taxi Driver, and
the film was named a Best Picture nominee, Scorsese’s directorial contribution
to this powerful and still relevant study of all-American mayhem was somehow
overlooked.)
Raging Bull became the movie that gave Scorsese his first Oscar
nomination (though he did not actually win the statuette until The Departed in
2007). This down-and-dirty biopic of Jake LaMotta tells a small story—about a real-life
boxer whose propensity for violence spills over into his private life—but tells
it so brilliantly that it cannot be easily shrugged off. Dynamic
black-and-white cinematography conveys a dark, edgy mood, and it’s complemented
by the razor-sharp editing of Thelma Schoonmaker, whose work here won her the
first of her three Oscars. (The other two, as well as her five additional
nominations, are all for Scorsese-related projects.) Members of the Scorsese
stock company who appear prominently in Taxi Driver include star De Niro
and co-star Joe Pesci, who vividly portrays the brother LaMotta can’t always
bring himself to trust.
If The Irishman seems
like a valedictory of sorts, it’s partly because both De Niro and Pesci pop up
in major roles, along with another Scorsese favorite, Al Pacino. (Yes, Schoonmaker
was the film editor.) There’s also the fact that The Irishman takes as
one of its big themes the passage of time: how hugely people change as the
years go by. This is vividly brought home by scenes of De Niro’s Frank Sheehan character
in a nursing home, exploring religion as a way to come to terms with the sins
in his past. There’s been much discussion about how Scorsese, to make his
stars’ younger scenes credible, used a digital de-ageing technique that many
found distracting, in order to return his characters to a more youthful
appearance. The irony is that Raging Bull too is built around the
passage of time. The film starts with the tubby middle-aged LaMotta practicing
a dramatic monologue that’s going to kick off an attempt at a stage career.
Then we jump to an earlier era in which he’s strong, trim, and boasts a full
head of hair. De Niro, ever the perfectionist, stopped production for four
months in order to gain 70 pounds so that when he delivers his “coulda been a
contender” speech he’s clearly over-the-hill. Too bad that for The Irishman
that method doesn’t work in reverse.
Thanks to my radio pal Bob Morris in Fargo, North Dakota, here's a broadcast of me on KKGO, making my annual Oscar predictions.
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