The Irishman: The Wages of Loyalty

In one of the many flashbacks generated by this 1975 journey (itself a flashback from the 1990s nursing home), we find ourselves, briefly but essentially, in 1940s Italy as Frank tells Russell about summarily executing German prisoners of war. The latter episode—the prisoners obediently digging their own grave, then falling backward as Frank guns them down—registers Frank’s almost casual discovery of two prime and closely linked capacities: to follow orders, even if unspoken, and to kill without hesitation or regret. These movements in and out of different decades are managed with seamless ease, the chief indicator of transition being the de-aging technology that is employed throughout.

To make the film at all required the successful development of such a process—the leading actors are in their late seventies, and the action stretches over half a century. The effect is not exactly undetectable, at least at the outset; one is aware of variations in texture and sharpness, disparities between the apparent age of faces and bodies, odd distortions that can create a momentary masklike quality. But those anomalies become part of the film’s language, and what might have been a distraction serves an aesthetic purpose. De Niro and Pesci and Pacino morph in and out of different points in time like revenants in a dream, their faces in youth having a slightly different consistency, as if dredged up out of memory, becoming more harshly real as they age. The transformations wrought by time are never far from our awareness. Most important, the technology allowed the actors freedom of movement and a minimum of encumbrance. Outward changes provide convenient markers for the spectator, but the sense of flow in the continuity of personalities over time binds together what could otherwise have seemed a swirl of discrete episodes.

Frank’s story is about the forging of connections. It’s an education in rules and hierarchies and penalties, and at each step another link is clarified. These links diagram a world that makes its own kind of sense, at least for a loyal foot soldier who knows his skills and his limits. He takes his first tentative steps into that world, ripping off the beef he’s delivering to sell on the side, with the shortsighted cunning of a not particularly bright operator. From that point on, what happens to him happens by what he can regard only as great good luck, as others more seasoned size him up and see how useful he can be. He knows he’s being recruited but prefers to see that as a reflection of shared sympathies and admiration for his talents. Russell, he figures, “took a shine to me.” He feels honored when Russell sends him off to provide the legendary Jimmy Hoffa with some muscle, as if he has been selected to serve General Patton. Late in the film, and late in his moral education, he’s honored with a “Frank Sheeran Appreciation Night” attended by as many mobsters as Teamsters. Despite all he knows by then, perhaps he still feels a glow of accomplishment when the president of the roofing union (a superimposed title, one of many throughout the film, tells us he will be “shot six times in the head in his kitchen, 1980”) announces: “Frank is a man with a lot of friends.”

The core of The Irishman, in between the shootings and brawls and breaking television-news stories, is a series of intimate exchanges, one-on-one encounters, small transactions, soundings out—a constant redefining and reassertion of permissions and limits. Each of these interactions has its own very specifically defined balance of power. There’s the moment early on when Frank, caught stealing by his employer, seeks help from Teamster lawyer Bill Bufalino, who, with test questions and probing glances, turns the occasion into a skillful audition, encouraging Frank to show off a little to demonstrate how well he catches Bill’s drift. There’s the moment when Frank, already in with Russell but still thinking of himself as a freelance operator, allows himself to be solicited by the dubious Whispers DiTullio (Paul Herman) to burn out a rival laundry business.

Immediately thereafter comes the perfectly realized episode in which Frank is hauled in by Philadelphia boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), who turns out to control the business in question. Russell sits silently next to Bruno, looking on with an unreadable grimace faintly resembling a smile. As Frank takes in the fact that his life is on the line, Bruno, not so much angry as irritated that he has to deal with the situation at all, lets him off the hook with a nod toward Russell: “You got a good friend here. You don’t know how good a friend you got.” The scene could not be more minimal in its effect, or the voices more controlled. Frank ultimately understands without being told that he is being ordered to kill the man who has gotten him into trouble. The violence is so thoroughly embedded as to not need any outward marker. With Frank sheepish and Russell hanging, it’s Bruno’s scene, and Keitel makes the most of his brief and rather hilarious outburst of pedantic annoyance as Frank initially fails to grasp what he’s being told.

The Irishman is, for long stretches, a remarkably quiet film. The quiet enables actors like Romano and Herman and Keitel to achieve powerful effects with the most laconic bits of dialogue, in a realm where line readings—any breath, any half-swallowed remark, the smallest points of timing or expression—are matters of life and death. As Russell, Joe Pesci demonstrates his power through restraint and politeness, whether conversing like an old friend in Italian with the newly recruited Frank about his experiences in Sicily, or lovingly preparing a salad in a restaurant kitchen while giving Frank the word on Hoffa’s fate; he sets the tempo of any conversation he takes part in. Most of the volume is provided by Pacino as the volatile Hoffa—a leader with an operatic sense of his own historical importance—as he stirs up the union troops, harangues his executives for letting him down, and rails against his legal nemesis, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. “He’s too emotional”: when Russell makes this comment about Hoffa to Frank, who’s trying to balance his loyalties to both men, Pesci’s tone of almost offhand reasonableness makes it the equivalent of a death sentence.

The film’s meanings are rooted in its performances, from the distinct inflections provided by those in even the tiniest roles to the central triad of Pesci, Pacino, and De Niro. Each facet revealed by these three, by a stammer or a slight shift of vocal tone or mere immobility, is that of a fully imagined being. Such compression and mutual responsiveness here finds its ideal occasion. One can generalize about the characterizations—De Niro as the almost bashful loyalist, ready to follow orders in one army or another without ever choosing the goal or questioning the cause, guarding an enormous but carefully controlled violence within himself; Pesci as the Machiavellian statesman with the air of a tribal sage, a politician of the most ancient and untender school; Pacino as the disruptive independent warrior, possessed by the exhilaration and rage of combat yet unique among them for having a certain joie de vivre, a capacity for genuine fondness—only to find further contradictions in each of them. These are performances that circle around each other, teasing out further edges with virtuosity.

They are all men, of course, men who find no alternative to doing whatever they end up doing, locked in power relationships founded on violence and the threat of violence. Despite that, at least for Frank, there is the will-o’-the-wisp of some warmer bond. His shy hesitance when he asks Hoffa to be the one to present him with the appreciation-night award seems just as authentic as the professionalism with which he will eventually, however reluctantly, carry out his fateful assignment. His situation is that of a man who has been permitted to live a life exempt from moral decisions while enjoying the illusion of affectionate camaraderie and (as the father of four daughters) paternal love. A hard shell acquired early on protects him from any emotional connection to his acts of killing. Even when he finally comes to an unresolvable conflict of loyalties, as Russell and his mob colleagues determine that Hoffa must go, Frank makes no choice but merely accedes out of necessity to the stronger power.

From the beginning, from the moment of his execution of the prisoners of war, the possibility of choice ceases to exist for him. All the killings, he will tell a priest, are “water under the dam.” If he chokes on anything in the end, it will be only a single phone conversation: the stammering call to Hoffa’s wife, Jo, made days after the killing, conveying pure deception in a tone simulating deep concern. The concern turns out to be deeper than he imagined—he has failed to preserve some image of manliness that, despite everything, has sustained him—although it is not deep enough to make him go against the acquired habits of a lifetime by telling the truth. After he hangs up, he sits on the bed with the door closed, as if the bedroom were a prison cell.

His daughter Peggy (played as a child by Lucy Gallina and as an adult by Anna Paquin) is the near-wordless presence standing in solitary resistance to everything else that happens. After watching her father crush the hand of a grocery-store worker who, perhaps accidentally, had shoved her, she withdraws into a dark and sullen knowledge. She recoils from the smiling Russell, who reacts like some fairy-tale ogre enraged by a child’s refusal to acknowledge his power, while later on, as a grown-up, she responds warmly to Hoffa’s genuine affection. (The bond between them, sealed by a last dance together while Jerry Vale sings, is the sole flickering evidence of spontaneous human connection in the whole film.) Peggy stares down Frank and stops talking to him forever once she realizes he has killed Hoffa. Both Gallina and Paquin, in this shared role, exercise a power that goes far beyond the amount of time they spend on-screen: the power of refusal, for which Frank has never had the slightest capacity.

When the journey is done, the film is still far from over: having presented the main action of a life, it can settle into its afterlife, a coda that takes Frank through a series of increasingly hesitant steps leading only to the grave. We see him with Russell and other colleagues of theirs in a cold prison yard, all of them suddenly grotesquely aged. They have outlived themselves, washed-out ghosts who have lost motor control and are locked in place like the inhabitants of one of Dante’s circles. Their torment is an inability to exert power even on the level of their own bodies. Joe Pesci has an extraordinary moment: Russell, who has suffered a stroke and can barely feed himself, goes within a few words from expressing sympathetic regret for what happened to Hoffa to venting the pure venom of an unappeased malevolence. The next and last time we encounter him, he is being wheeled into the prison’s chapel, warning Frank, “You’ll see.”

After watching Frank selecting his own coffin and picking out a crypt for aboveground burial (rejecting both cremation and burial underground because they’re “so final,” whereas “the building’s there, the crypt’s there”), and letting on to the priest that he may perhaps feel some glimmer of remorse, not for any killings he committed but for that lying call to Jo Hoffa—even if the priest has no idea what Frank is talking about when he says, “What kind of man makes a phone call like that?”—we leave him alone in his room at the nursing home. Night has fallen, and at his request the door has been left ajar.