Once out, he is back with his bodyguard, Sheeran, and the crime wars narrow to a duel with his foes (led by Joe Pesci’s wizened, glittering mob boss) and the disputed ownership of the Teamsters’ crown. This meld of Hamlet and Caligula anguishes over slights, gobbles up rivals, rages at perceived enemies (mainly attorney-general Bobby Kennedy), grabs passing plunder or payola, then not-quite-finally goes to jail. The alpha male among outlaws notionally observing the law is Hoffa, played by Al Pacino as if all his other braying movie baddies were just rehearsals. Here everyone knows everyone else, and everyone clambers over everyone else to try to reach the top. Sheeran survived the second world war only to be interned in the tarnished, claustrophobic glitter of the American crime world. We’re nearly dying for air in some party and restaurant scenes, but that may be the idea. The action is tight-framed so occasionally are the swirling social frescoes. We flashback to the same character, fortyish and older, also played by De Niro, as he switchbacks and switchblades through the century’s middle decades. The white-haired wrinkly voicing his story is Irish-American Frank Sheeran (De Niro). Scripted by Steven Schindler’s List Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s book about events leading to the 1975 disappearance and probable murder of powerful union leader Jimmy Hoffa, the movie starts and ends in an old people’s home. Which is better? To die in a bullet hail, a simple, ambushed sinner/criminal or to go to death slowly and unshriven, like bodyguard and career hit-man Robert De Niro, whose keeping of his most closely guarded secret is both his last vice and his last virtue? A three-and-a-half-hour journey through “Underworld USA”, as moviemanes and mythomanes have sometimes dubbed the gangster realm, the film is like a true trip to Hades. But how many are about death? That’s the wonder, originality and profundity of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. Simply sign up to the Film myFT Digest - delivered directly to your inbox.Įvery gangster movie is about deaths.

Goodfellas vs casino vs the irishman