The fate of Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters union is the historical anchor for “The Irishman.” The mob, corruption are there. But here is the part of history left out — the Teamsters as part of the militant working-class movement that “created the middle class.” Here, Teamster truckers battle police in Minneapolis, June 1934. National Archives. 

He is called the Irishman not because he’s Irish, but because he’s not Italian, yet still a trusted hit man for the mafia. Scorsese gives us Frank Sheeran, a hit man who doesn’t have much to say, doesn’t seem to have an inner-life, has no emotion when he kills. He’s asked, Do you paint houses, code for the splatter on the wall after a hit, and he might be painting houses for all the emotion he shows when he shoots people. This lack of affect leaves us with one of the oddest of all gangster movies.

Odd most of all because the main character is a cipher, neither a hero nor an anti-hero, defined as much by his lack of personality as by his peculiar speech and behavior. An incongruous puzzle leaving us to wonder, This is the man who changed history by killing Jimmy Hoffa? You can also wonder, Can a film with characters and story-telling so drained of emotion hold the interest of an audience for three-and-a-half hours?

Just a working class guy, doing a job
Played by Robert De Niro, Frank is a working-class guy, a truck driver, who accidentally connects with mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Russell is impressed when he learns that Frank came back from World War II, where he had no problem with orders to kill German prisoners. Clearly, talent to recruit for bigger things.

Frank works his way up through petty crime to become a hit man. Scorsese’s treatment of the murders is unusual. The camera doesn’t dwell on them. They take just a second. Frank will walk by a target and shoot without stopping or even slowing down. Painting houses really is a fitting metaphor for what he does — he’s just a working-class guy doing a job.

Usual suspects, unusual characters
De Niro is joined by Scorsese’s familiar cast of mobsters. Each from iconic crime films, their acting here is flattened — Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci, no less than De Niro, playing against type in an understated and unemotional style. They convey more than they say, but, really, not much more. What they say is odd also; just as we never saw a gangster movie with the look of “The Irishman,” we never heard dialogue like this. The language is marked by euphemisms as odd, opaque and understated as the characters. Murder is “painting houses,” “carpentry” is disposal of the body, “some people are concerned” means someone might get whacked. “It is what it is” means it’s too late for him, no turning back. This is so peculiar it lends character and authenticity to the film, even if the language could only be found in the book on which the film was based, the dubious confessions the real Frank Sheeran told to his lawyer.

Out from the sidelines of history

Hoffa’s Teamsters, when militant labor was “a national threat” (to employers) in 1959. Photo: Detroit Historical Society.

The centerpiece, and the raison d’être of the film, comes when the mob introduces Frank to Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, who needs someone who “paints houses” to watch his back. Frank becomes his assistant, confidant, then close friend, conscious he has now moved from the sidelines to the main stage of history.

Later, Hoffa, out of prison, tries to claw back control of the Teamsters and the Teamster pension fund from mobsters and mob enablers. Frank is told to kill him. Hoffa may be the person he was closest to, but killing is, after all, what he does best.

There is a long buildup to the murder, with mobsters and Frank trying to talk Hoffa into stepping back into retirement ease on his $1.7 million pension. No dice; Hoffa is not like the gangsters. For him, it’s not about the money. But when Frank finally lures him to his death, the camera spends no more than a few seconds on the shooting, no more than on any of the other hits. How does Frank feel about any of his murders, even the murder of his friend? Hard to say. Maybe hard even for Frank to know, though when it’s Hoffa’s turn, De Niro’s face shows discomfort for the first time.

The emotional palette of “The Irishman”
Frank’s lack of affect provides the emotional palette of the “The Irishman,” another aspect of the film’s odd place in the genre. The gangster film in Scorsese’s hands is methodically drained of all intensity and meaning — mafia without mythmaking. There is no romantic immigrant saga, no struggle to protect the family, no code of honor, and odder still, none of the thrill and excitement, no luxury and conspicuous consumption in night clubs and casinos, no women or sex, no fraternizing with entertainment stars.  But most of all, there is no hero or antihero, no tragedy, and pathos only when you look hard for it in the small details. Frank is odd, the film is odd, and Scorsese makes no effort to explain the oddness. In his mobsters’ argot, “It is what it is.”

The Hoffa murder is the centerpiece of the film, and of Frank’s life. It was not his role in the mob that raises him from obscurity, it was his intimacy with Hoffa. That was also the emotional center of the film, if it can be said to have one.  Hoffa sees Frank as family, he and his wife go bowling with Frank’s family and he endears himself to Frank’s daughter Peggy. When Frank kills Hoffa, he not only betrays his friend, he betrays his family. Peggy sees who Frank is. When Hoffa goes missing, she looks at her father with silent judgment. Frank can’t understand why she cuts him off.

Scorsese’s silent women
Peggy, her sisters and mother hardly speak in the movie. Neither do Hoffa’s and Russell’s wives. The women are largely silent, sometimes to a point close to poignance in this film that has so little heart. The mafia was, after all, an exclusively male organization, in contrast to today’s Black and Latin gangs, 1/3 of whom are female. The Teamsters you see in the movie are also all white and male, looking a bit like the mobsters. But in the years Scorsese’s story took place, there were plenty of people of color in the union, and plenty of women, and in the decisive period of union growth in the thirties “women’s auxiliaries” were on the truckers’ picket lines along with union brothers. You have to wonder about Scorsese’s deliberate removal of women. It can be justified by saying this is Frank telling the story, but artists can choose to use the unreliable narrator technique to tell any story they want.

Frank tells another daughter, bewildered by their rejection, everything he did was to “protect the family.” But when Frank loses his family, it’s without the tragic dimension of the Godfather movies.

Critics have called Peggy Frank’s “conscience,” but that misses the point of her silence. He doesn’t have a conscience, and so to the end of the film, he is baffled by her rejection.

Testing the critical establishment
Here we come back to the challenge for Scorsese. How do you make an engaging movie from the point of view of a central character who is himself quite dull, inarticulate, incapable of showing feeling even to his family? How can you make audiences care about a movie if its characters deserve no caring themselves? Or endow a movie with meaning if your point is that the lives of the characters have little or none?

Scorsese’s challenge is also a challenge for the critics who exalt the film. Most of the critics don’t bother to support their high praise. No need, it’s by Scorsese. But the better writers dive into details of the filmmakers’ virtuosity. Like any Scorsese work, “The Irishman” is minutely crafted, with clever and brilliant details of camerawork, editing, dialogue, casting and even — especially — makeup that reward any close attention. The look of the film is plotted down to the minutiae of costume and set design, with the color palette changing as the story moves from one decade to the next. Netflix gave the auteur the millions to recruit a technical crew to match his mastery.

Who cares?
The large and small details, all of them fitting organically together into a whole, a cluster of themes in dialogue with each other. But the details are making the same point, again and again and again. They are telling us, this is a life and, through Frank’s eyes, this is a world without emotion and meaning. They are also telling us this is a gangster movie without the romantic mythmaking, without the codes of honor and loyalty, family, let alone thrills and excitement, glamour, nightlife … not even brilliant cinematic carnage. So why should we care?

This is a very cerebral film, with so much to say and so little to feel. It’s really not difficult for a filmmaker to move an audience. You can watch a third-rate sitcom or made-for-TV movie, and they can make you cry over something they put in just to make you cry. Scorsese has to know how to do it, if he knows how to do those tracking shots that so transport the critics. Critics love to have these things to talk about, but ask around and I think you’ll find quite a gap between the critical establishment and many of us ordinary moviegoers. We’re not afraid to say, “The Irishman” is a pretentious bore.

What then explains the near universal critical acclaim? The answer is obvious — the critical establishment has a canon, and Scorsese was canonized decades ago. The stature of his work is a given, and few of the reviewers even make an effort to justify their praise. But the better critics point to those carefully crafted moments. Do they add up to some larger meaning in the end? Is the film, as they say, really about “the inevitability of loss,” “the erosion of meaning that accompanies the fading of experience into memory and memory into nothing”? Is it “an elegiac farewell” to the gangster film by its master, “a meditation on loyalty and betrayal, family and abandonment, ending with the poignant wish for human connection”?

I missed all that. But I don’t begrudge anyone their love of Scorsese, or their high estimation of “The Irishman.” I can see the fascination, but I want to go back to the silence of the women in the film. The murder of Hoffa may be film’s centerpiece, but the silence of the women is its true hidden center. The women represent the opposite of the instrumental behavior that defines the men and their actions. Their silence is the removal of empathy — and this is what makes the film so cerebral and so hard to care about. Maybe “The Irishman” is just another grand project defeated from the inside by patriarchy.
—Paul Elitzik