(This article was first published on the WeChat public account of Muweier)
The real protagonist of The Irishman is time.
My take on Martin Scorsese's new three-and-a-half-hour work is that the wind is always blown away by the rain. Three and a half hours wasn't too hard at all, the soundtrack and the parents would occasionally induce sleepiness, and the sleepiness would be driven away by bursts of laughter in the cinema.
There's no violence and blood splattered typical of gangster movies. The only thing that portrays the brutality of De Niro's Frank is an incident that has nothing to do with the gang. When the tall De Niro kicked and kicked at the hawker, the camera zoomed out restrainedly, and he could only see the twisting of his body. And this is one of the most violent scenes in the whole film. Most of the murder plots are presented as a concise, restrained account, which in turn constitutes a kind of epic elegance: the faint mist on the river when the pistol is thrown into the river and the crisp sound in the silence, expecting. The blood shot suddenly moved to the delicate flowers.
More moments are the coziness of the tavern's implicit dialogue, the warmth of family gatherings, and the daily interests of my wife when you change your opponent. Everything progresses in a romantic and comfortable rhythm, and even the line of "going to prison in a certain year and dying in a certain year" when each character appears on the scene seems to have a kind of tenderness of "remembering the past, and the years are thick". —until the tragic, bleak ending that came suddenly.
Movies are a trick of time. If the various narrative techniques of the film (such as the "stitching" of the front and back shots to the eyes) are all establishing a myth of "recording what has happened", then CGI technology provides images that belong to the future - computer generated The images are not limited by the camera's depth of field, no out of focus, no noise, amazing sharpness, saturation, and clarity. In order to blend with the imperfect image captured by the camera, various processing is also required.
Advances in technology have made The Irishman truly an epic "Once Upon a Time". On the one hand, different films are used when shooting different eras to achieve the image quality in memory; on the other hand, the CGI age reduction technology seems to add a gentle filter to the whole film. I didn't know anything about the film's backstory and technology before sitting in the movie theater. Not expecting but gave me another perspective. In the first long shot at the beginning of the film, before De Niro appeared, I didn't even think the commercial was over - it was an unrealistic feeling of the collision between the "past" image and the future image.
Technology has taken away the transcendent position that the audience was in. I had a difficult time at the beginning of the film: Frank was so slow, why was his daughter so young? It was only later that I realized that the lagging pace belonged to De Niro himself, who was nearly 80 years old. Age-reducing technology eliminates wrinkles, but not the signs of more time. After realizing this, watching the movie immediately became an experience of contrast between reality and image: Martin was 77 years old, Pacino was 79 years old, De Niro was 76 years old, and Joe Pesci was 76 years old. Dedicating this solemn and grand work with professionalism, on the one hand, the camera can't help but get caught on the road to the end of life, and casts eyes on the past.
These confusions are a positive portrayal of time. The passage of time in Ozu's films in a gently shaking fan, or even in an unmoved still life, is an intuitive experience: we experience the same passage of time as the characters in the film. And "The Irishman" has repeatedly turned around in multiple time and space, with the switching between the three states of age reduction, real appearance and increasing age, which can be attributed to the energetic state of acting (Hoffa played by Pacino) The terrifying contrast between the old, slowness of the actual body, which has a shocking, provocative dynamism, both before and after prison — presents the horrific face of time on multiple levels. I keep going from the movie to the reality and from the reality to the movie. I even started to think, isn't most people's lives one can see the grave at a glance?
The end of the film portrays Frank as he slides into the abyss of death alone with brutal calm. The scariest thing about death is that everyone dies and you experience it alone. Frank lived through World War II, a state where killing became a necessity. Take orders and kill. The war; the unprecedented postwar boom; the baby boom; the fiery, "imaginative power" sixties and seventies, and The Irishman sporadically inserts historical images to indirectly recall these glories. And the reality is the sad, accusing look of the daughter who was very close to Hoffa, the polite but embarrassing rounder of the nurse, moments that forced Frank to look back. Hoffa's door has always left a line of space, and the door of the whole world has been closed to him.
Movies have more magic than any art. It doesn't capture you with a picture or a situation, it captures you with a whole world. So even though I was young, I could still feel the gaze of death in the world Martin created. Generally speaking, when we watch gangster movies, we clearly know that not every street corner is hiding a black hole, not every city is full of raging violence; but we want to see real life like a prison Be bombed to rubble, and then tell another saga in the past tense on the rubble.
Sadly, The Irishman is not that kind of movie. It is completely rooted in this prison and there is no escape. So when I walked out of the movie theater, I felt a sense of "the most unforgettable thing in the world", and I also had the courage to continue living in prison. At the end of the day, this is your life and mine: a journey toward death with increasing acceleration.
In the past two years, those directors we are familiar with have been looking back on their lives. Almodóvar portrays pain bluntly, while sliding into sweet, colorful, dreamlike memories. Quentin was joking and raving. In "The Mule", Mr. Dongmu played an American Zhong Yuemin-like character. He embodies a set of values that are no longer popular in the discourse of young American people. However, after watching the movie, you still feel his power. At the end, when he "sniffs the roses," you can even feel his charisma and forget that he is an old villain who is irresponsible to his family. And "The Irishman" goes even further, using the film to create a biography for a group of filmmakers. Here we see how lucky they are to think about film, life and times at this stage.
When Mr. Martin won the Oscar for "The Departed", the Academy sent a troupe of Coppola, Spielberg and George Lucas to present the award. When they pronounced everyone's expected names, Martin, who was already gray-haired at the time, shrugged, stood up vigorously, hugged the people around him vigorously, stepped onto the stage vigorously, and opened his arms to make a "that's it" , and hugged the presenters. He held the golden statue in his left hand, and waved a small note in his right hand to make a quick speech. Raise your arms up at the end of your speech. This is a scene that left a deep impression on me. He was a head faster than all the presenters, but there was a crisp vitality in that small body, as if he could start a road chase in the next second.
In The Irishman, this vigor overlaps with a dignified scrutiny. You can feel the happy look in his youthful eyes, and the cautious look he looks at death deliberately. This is also Martin Scorsese. He gives you images that belong to the past and images that face the future, and allows you to continuously produce images that belong to the present in this moving. Everything will pass and everything is being created.
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