The Irishman.

I had to get sick to watch The Irishman. 

At three and a half hours, it’s the longest movie I’ve ever watched in a single sitting at home or in a theater; I’ve watched longer films, including Lawrence of Arabia, but over multiple days, because my attention span’s normal limit is around two hours and it takes a lot to overcome that. This Friday, though, I was knocked out by a virus and had a fever high enough that I wasn’t leaving the couch, so we watched Martin Scorsese’s latest entry in his opus of films around organized crime, about a serial liar and trivial mob figure who, near the end of his life, ‘confessed’ to numerous murders, including that of Jimmy Hoffa.

Taken from a dubious non-fiction book called I Heard You Paint Houses (which appears on-screen in an alternate title card), The Irishman follows the career of Frank Sheeran as he goes from a truck driver who delivers meat between Philadelphia and DC to consigliere to a local don, Russell Bufalino, and later to Hoffa himself. It’s a sprawling story with an epic scope but a focus on minute interactions, giving Scorsese’s three leads a chance to do what we all presumably came to see them do – and to see them as younger doppelgängers of themselves, thanks to digital de-aging technology, so Scorsese can use the same actors across a thirty- to forty-year span.

(By the way, Slate breaks down how Sheeran likely confessed to a slew of murders and crimes he never committed. The story is mostly fiction, with lots of real people in it.)

Frank is played by Robert De Niro, who probably looks the least like himself when he’s de-aged but whose voice and accent are unmistakable. (Although the characters are supposed to be from Philadelphia and Detroit, the accents sound a lot more like Brooklyn Italian-American to me.) Hoffa is portrayed by Al Pacino, also given away by his voice even when he’s also been de-aged. Both deliver solid performances, De Niro’s a bit more workmanlike yet a character a bit independent of the movie around him, Pacino infusing the bombastic Hoffa with the kind of bombast Pacino is known for giving his characters.

But this movie is dominated by a scene-stealing performance from Joe Pesci as Russ; I can’t say I ever forgot it was Joe Pesci, because how could you ever forget that, but of the three actors he is by far the most convincing and the most fully in character. Known for playing hair-trigger characters with on-screen histrionics, Pesci here is understated by comparison, measured, sounding well-reasoned even he’s asking Frank to take someone out (and I don’t mean for drinks). He seems the least like someone playing an archetype in a film about mobsters, even though that – and My Cousin Vinny – is what he’s best known for doing. It helps that the de-aging was least noticeable on him out of the big three. For him to come out of retirement – he’d last appeared in a live-action role nine years ago – and deliver this performance is remarkable, and I assume assures him an Oscar nomination.

The film indulges in those archetypes, both in characters and in plot points, although by the end it’s clear that Scorsese, at least, is making a much larger point about the pointlessness of such violence, and how it threatens to dehumanize the perpetrators in the long run. The various executions are gory but ultimately mundane for their frequency, and the ease with which Frank can deliver either a beating or a bullet is never explained even in the extended introduction to his character (which does introduce one of the many wonderful minor performances in the film, this one from Ray Romano). At three-plus hours, the repetitive nature of this cycle becomes clearer, and while the violence is stylized, it’s not glamorized – it’s ugly, and futile, and by the film’s conclusion, everyone involved is either dead or left with nothing.

Frank himself has been shut out by one of his daughters, played almost wordlessly by Anna Paquin in over 25 years in the movie’s present tense, and pleads with another daughter for her to help reconnect them, which she refuses to do. One of the most memorable, awful scenes in the film is when Frank goes to a funeral parlor and shops for caskets (the salesman is rapper Action Bronson, who literally doesn’t seem to know how to stand while Frank is talking to him); when the salesman asks who the casket is for, Frank reveals it’s for himself. No one else cares enough to do this for him. He will die unloved, and likely unlamented.

Paquin’s nearly silent role has come in for a lot of criticism, but the reason is so clear, and writing the character that way, as opposed to making her angry and voluble and demonstrative, is powerful in its own right and because it plays against stereotypes of women in films. The general lack of women characters of any substance in the film is a bigger problem, and not one about or limited to Paquin’s character; Frank leaves his first wife for his second and it barely merits a mention, while his wife and Russ’s are there on a road trip the four take from Philly to Detroit but they’re there for nothing more than comic relief and smoke breaks. And it’s not as if the film lacks room for female voices – there’s a fair amount of fat in this film, at least twenty minutes’ worth of overlong montages or scenes of old white men talking to each other too slowly. The entire sequence leading up to the murder of “Crazy” Joe Gallo, which eyewitnesses say Sheeran did not commit, and the murder itself could have been left out without hurting the film at all, since the murder doesn’t matter in the subsequent timeline of the movie.

The Irishman is going to earn a slew of Oscar nominations, obviously. It’ll get a nod for Best Picture. Scorcese will get one for Best Director. I think all three of my fellow paesani will get acting nominations. A movie of this length hardly exists without extensive editing, and while I have some quibbles with a few specific cuts, I think the sheer size of the job gets the editor(s) a nomination there as well. I won’t be surprised if it wins Best Picture, but little else, however, as the film is more than the sum of its parts, and if you like this film, you love this film. I’ll just personally root for Pesci to take a statue home as well.