Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ Backed By Netflix Wows Audience At London Premiere

Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, starring the biggest names in Hollywood Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino and Harvey Keitel, had its international premiere in London, closing the BFI London Film Festival on October 13. This was by far the biggest event of this year’s festival.

With financial backing from Netflix, when no other showed any sort of enthusiasm to finance the project, the film had been in development for many years, with fears at times that it would never be made. Netflix acquired the film in 2017, after Paramount and STX dropped out.

At the festival’s press conference, Scorsese said that he and De Niro had been looking for something to enrich what they had done together in the 1970s and 1980s. We can safely say that this has been achieved. The Irishman has a superbly crafted script with some extraordinary performances from its cast. Added to that, the film has some interesting special effects, very much in its early stages, enabling the cast to look younger.

Based on real-life events in 1970s Philadelphia, screenwriter Steven Zaillian adapted Charles Brandt’s bestseller I Heard You Paint Houses, about the mob murderer Frank Sheeran, known as “The Irishman,” and his potential involvement with the disappearance of Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

The Irishman is, of course, reminiscent of Scorsese’s earlier films with De Niro and Joe Pesci, in Casino or Goodfellas, but it is here heightened to another level. While preparing for the film, De Niro says that Scorsese advised him to watch French gangster films from the 1950s and 1960s, mainly films starring the great French actor Jean Gabin, and films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, such as Le Doulos. These films created a cinematic language of its own depicting this underground world, which The Irishman here emulates.

It is a tightly written script, that interweaves different periods of time in Frank Sheeran’ life so brilliantly that the audience never gets lost in the story.

The film begins with Frank as an old man in a wheelchair in a care home, recounting his past life. He began as a truck driver, but quickly moved to making deals with a mobster, giving him the steaks he is meant to be delivering. This is how he meets the Buffalino family—and Russell Buffalino, played by Joe Pesci, one of the most powerful mobsters in Philadelphia—and starts to work jobs for him. Through Russell, Frank begins to work for union boss Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino. Besides the crimes, the film achieves in depicting the sort of relationship these men had. The growing friendship between Frank and Jimmy is especially well portrayed. 

The CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) effects isn’t perfect. This is still the early stages of the special effects, so it is noticeable, but it works. For Scorsese, “the CGI is really an evolution of make-up.” The aging of an actor with make-up is an illusion in cinema which the audience has learnt to accept. The same applies here with the CGI.

Of course, there are certain glitches. The posture of an old man is not the same as a thirty- or forty-year-old. But, personally, the performances of all these actors were so convincing that I quickly forgot the special effects. De Niro joked at the press conference that this new technology will extend his career another thirty years.

For Scorsese, Netflix and the other streaming platforms are redefining cinema. “I think it’s not just an evolving of cinema, it’s a revolution. I mean it’s even a bigger revolution than sound was for cinema,” he said.

Netflix backed the project when no others in Hollywood would, partly due to the cost of the CGI effects, which were rumored to have caused the budget to increase to $200 million. Scorsese continued: “Having the backing of a company that says you know you will have no interference, you make this picture as you want, the trade-off is it streams with a theatrical distribution prior to that. I figured that’s the chance we take on that particular project. What streaming means and how that’s going to define a new form of cinema I’m not sure.” 

While TV series, and other long-form TV, appeared at first to Scorsese to be the new form of cinema, he now thinks otherwise, as it is a different viewing experience. For Scorsese, cinema is a singular experience, ideally shared with an audience.

However, films such as the Marvel series, which Scorsese terms “theme park” films made for theaters that have become amusement parks, are not cinema, there are something else. “Whether you go for that or not, we shouldn’t be invaded by it,” he continued, “so that’s a big issue, and we need the theater owners to almost step up to allow theaters to show films that are narrative films. A narrative film can be one long take, three hours, two. It doesn’t have to be a conventional beginning, middle and end.”

Scorsese’s new film The Irishman is certainly not a theme park, but a narrative film that uses the cinematic language effectively to tell a story of real human relations, with some truly amazing performances. In so doing, the film conveys so well the protagonist’s guilt in his actions, a shame he feels every time he sees his daughter Peggy who looks at him with both fear and disapproval.

The Irishman is released in movie theaters on November 8, and will then become available on Netflix from November 27.