11/10/2023 0 Comments Netflix touchez pas au grisbi![]() ![]() It's here that Scorsese picks out a significant, novelistic detail involving a house speciality that resembles a Panettone fruit cake, which Sheeran and Bufalino rip apart with their hands and dip into dessert wine. In the world of men, Sheeran finds sanctuary in a restaurant called the Villa di Roma - a mob hangout with heavy wood furniture and sepia lighting where several key scenes unfold, including his introduction to Philly boss Angelo Bruno (an arms-length Harvey Keitel, with narrow eyes staring through cigarette smoke). ![]() Scorsese, instead, returns to the confused and later-disapproving gaze of his eldest daughter, Peggy (played as an adult by Anna Paquin) - a stare that might as well be a force pushing her father out the door. The common places associated with family life - the dining table, lounge room, marital bed - don't figure in Sheeran's fondest memories. Except there's barely a glimpse of domestic bliss or even gratitude. ![]() It's the '50s and Sheeran is a returned soldier with no skills beyond those learned in battle, so his new life provides an opportunity to earn extra for his family. In an early flashback, we see him as a young man hauling meat on the interstate when he has a life-changing encounter with a quietly spoken gangster, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci).īefore long, via some fluid camerawork and typical Scorsese needle drops (doo-wop grooves, crooner ballads) we pass through the highlights of a burgeoning mob career: the beatings, shootings and courtroom drama. Sheeran, who laments that no-one knows who Jimmy Hoffa is anymore, recalls this history from a wheelchair at a nursing home, anonymous and unnoticed, except by a young priest and a couple of FBI agents who pry him for confessions and remorse. In The Irishman, the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa is presented as part of the same tectonic shift in American politics as the assassination of JFK and the decline of the American mafia. Themes of grief and nostalgia are recurrent in the 76-year-old's work, from his gangster movies Goodfellas and Casino to his 1997 Dalai Lama biopic Kundun - a work infused with the mournfulness of exile, that he completed just after the death of his mother. Told in flashbacks across several decades (helped along, but not always believably, by a process of de-ageing that looks like digital airbrushing), the film is thick with melancholy, even for Scorsese, who has made a signature style out of first-person, voiceover-led films about male loss. The film is best savoured - and makes most sense - as a late-career exploration of some of Scorsese's life-long obsessions: the moral codes and shared triumphs of men, and the particularly masculine hubris that inevitably corrodes the most ironclad bonds. The accuracy of Sheeran's published memoir is widely disputed, but in this dense script by Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York), it hardly matters. Martin Scorsese's 3.5-hour mob epic The Irishman is an elegy to male friendship and a tragedy of divided loyalties, centring on union functionary Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and the story of his increasingly fraught role as intermediary between the Philadelphia mob and Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). ![]()
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