Write in front
In an interview with BBC Radio One on the eve of the release of "The Irishman", Martin Scorsese talked about the issue of the shortening of the audience's attention span (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OQ7HebQBIM ) , But he also mentioned that this film will be a movie worth investing time and emotion for the audience. I feel this after watching the film. The plot of the film is easy to understand. The focus of the film is to have empathy for the characters, so I hope that every audience can keep the paper blank before watching the film. A general and neutral cognition (don’t read any film reviews, including this one) to experience the movie and watch the movie without interruption.
Tip: This article will discuss a lot of key plots, so don't read on if you haven't read it yet. This article directly uses the actors' names to refer to their characters in the film.
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From the point of time, the film can be roughly divided into three stages according to the events experienced by De Niro's character:
① Middle-aged stage: From the time he was still working as a refrigerated truck driver until he was awarded the prize by Al Pacino
② Aging stage: From when he drove Joe Pessi to attend the wedding of his cousin until he shot Al Pacino and went to jail
③ The twilight period: from his oral memories at the beginning of the film to the last scene of the film
These three stages are strung together by De Niro's dictation in his twilight years.
However, the film did not adopt the traditional "(quasi) biopic" narrative techniques, such as opening the flashback with a person who opened at the end of his life and then began to tell his story in a positive order, or to tell a person's story in a positive order from the beginning of the film. It adopts a double flashback (the twilight years begin to tell the stories of middle age and aging at different beginnings at the same time) and the narrative method is inserted between the two passages of the past and the present. This kind of narrative first creates "three endings" for the film-because each stage has its own stage ending; second, through editing, the audience can see the next ending immediately after watching one ending. For example, the first stage ending is that Al Pacino expresses his unreserved trust in De Niro, but immediately after this ending is the second stage ending Rid Niro shot Al Pacino to give The audience brings a stronger emotional impact (Imagine if the positive sequence is used here, then after showing Al Pacino’s trust in De Niro, there will be a plot of De Niro carrying Joe Pessi everywhere collecting protection money for ten minutes. The plot will definitely affect the audience’s experience of the emotional coherence between these two people); third, this kind of narrative obscures the time gap between different stages, and a film that uses multi-line narration may completely ignore the existence of different plot lines. However, the ending of each stage of the film can be connected to the beginning of the next stage, so the internal timeline of the film is very complete and smooth, so that the audience will not be disturbed by the story jump and have an immersive viewing . The most fundamental function of this kind of narration has two, one is to prevent the audience from being bored by the prolonged uninteresting plot between each event during the viewing process, and the other is to give the audience the same mood as the characters in the film (see above) If the incident about Pacino weren't for two contrasting endings, the audience might not feel the same anxiety as De Niro was forced to kill Pacino).
But Scorsese wants the audience to enter the same state of mind as De Niro, not just to make the audience empathize with De Niro, because this empathy is just a kind of "drama feeling", it is completely an emotion that exists in the movie. . Scorsese actually wanted to use this empathy as a basis to convey to the audience an emotion that transcends the movie plot itself, is broader, and can intertextualize with reality-a sense of powerlessness that is abandoned by the times and is about to end. If an audience member near the end of the film hears the police telling De Niro that all the people he knows have passed away, he is the only one still alive at that time; or he shows a picture of Pacino to a nurse in De Niro and thinks Introducing Pacino to the nurse but discovering that the nurse not only doesn’t know who this person is and doesn’t care about it, he can feel a strong sense of shock. I think even if he receives what Martin wants to convey in a broader sense, beyond the movie itself. Information. Because the film is developed entirely from De Niro's subjective perspective, the audience will assume that the world in De Niro's eyes is the real world in the process of the movie. But these little things at the end remind De Niro, and at the same time, remind the audience that the world has changed, becoming completely different from the world in his mind. The world he lives in has not only been left behind by the times, but also has been almost forgotten by everyone. In fact, Martin used the same method in "Taxi Driver". At that time, he let the audience enter the driver's paranoid brain, and it was not until the end that he exposed and crushed a scene that happened to the driver, but also the audience, in fantasy. Story of heroism. What Martin wants to convey to the audience is that even people who were once stunned like De Niro will eventually become weak in the course of the times, and is this not the feelings of Martin and the actors who starred in this film? In addition, although De Niro became a master in the movie, he involuntarily killed his friend Pacino, and in his later years, he was eager to repair the relationship with his daughter who broke with him. This made the audience see how powerful he was. Everyone has things that make them feel powerless.
The last scene of the film is Christmas approaching. De Niro sits alone in a quiet nursing home after nightfall. The audience sees him sluggish through the half-hidden crack of the door. Just like the end of "Old Nowhere", he can’t understand the changes in the world and can only be sluggish. The sheriff staring at the camera; at this time, the door and the door frame suddenly resemble the curtain being slowly pulled down on the stage. Inside and outside the film, these old legends are also doing their own curtain call lonely.
Write at the end
In this movie, Martin changed the intense fighting scenes in the gang-type films of the past, and most of the fighting scenes were very brief and short. I think there are three reasons: The first reason is that this may bring a stronger sense of reality to the audience-because most gangsters in reality should be so simple and not that dozens of people are holding various weapons. Three hundred rounds of street and alley battles; the second is that too many fighting scenes will divert the audience’s attention, causing the audience to miss the delicate but important part of the character’s emotions; finally, Martin recently attacked Marvel for the action madness in the movies he made. Disliked bombardment, so Martin also set an example. However, although this film does not follow the genre of gangster movies, it still pays tribute to many classic gangster movies. After the film resources flow out, many people will probably summarize it, so I won't repeat it here.
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