Kritiken

I saw The Irishman in a huge theater on a giant screen, and I did not want to get up, didn’t want it to end, and could have watched another hour of it if there was one.

[Watching it on Netflix,] I found myself overwhelmed by feelings and thoughts and sheer beauty, and I often stopped the movie to savor the moment, back up a bit, and watch a scene again. Viewed this way, the movie stretched out closer to five hours—a day very well spent.

Scorsese’s allusions go deeper, slicing through the surface of genre to draw real blood and leave real scars.

Filled with unforced humor, pungently flavorful characters and settings, and bone-deep melancholy, it earns its running time of three and a half hours; it doesn’t feel long, but it conveys the weight of a long life.

More than any film since Scorsese's first masterpiece, Mean Streets, The Irishman merges together nearly all of his major themes and concerns.

This opera seria about decay is handled with utmost brio, vivified by the signature élan of one of American cinema’s most enduring big-canvas filmmakers.

Scorsese’s smooth-running, three-hour-plus film clears a very low bar to reveal “Where we are today” — the maxim that Sixties reviewers used for socially conscious generation-gap movies, now brought back to praise millennial nihilism.

An extraordinary feat of rejuvenation, and not just because of the digital effects that turned its lead actors back into young(ish) men.

I went back to The Irishman, and immediately understood that I was watching a masterpiece—a necessary postmortem on a particular romance with gangsterism that took hold in the twentieth century and, through an obvious though unstated analogy, an indictment of the international gangsterism that today controls the US political system and economy to a degree that the Cosa Nostra could have only dreamed of.

Perhaps The Irishman is indeed the last exemplar of a dying breed, a requiem for a mode of production ironically paid for by its disappointed child who can’t wait for it all to be different. But the film also carries the energy of a new beginning, not as much for its groundbreaking technology, but for the way it imagines “attractions” only the present can afford.

The mastery here is in Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker’s orchestration of Mob depredations, Hoffa’s rousing of the rank and file (in scenes packed with everyday physiognomies worthy of Elia Kazan) and the intimate talks between Sheeran, Bufalino and Hoffa, with Pesci’s quiet and subtle performance, a thing of beauty, balancing Pacino’s bellicose but charming one.

Its length, extreme for a mainstream American narrative, is noteworthy: not for its own sake but for how it affects our intake of knowledge, and how it changes what we think we perceive.