By Nicolas Rapold (Film Comment)
Translator: Xiaoluohao
For Frank Sheeran, the loyal gangster in Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman," the end of life was just a matter of time. However, is this also true for us?
In tone, Old Horse's The Irishman is a peaceful road trip. In 1975 Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), his boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and their wife set out for a family wedding. There's a bit of business to deal with, and it's dirty business, despite the grandpa's request (no smoking in the car).
Who framed the journey and told the story of Frank's rise as a gangster mercenary and Jimmy Hoffa's right-hand man, it was Frank himself, an old man in a wheelchair who only An amiable old man who can stay in a nursing home. In his words, he seemed to be standing on the graves of the graves, or at least the graves of those who had been dealt with by him. But with the friendships, fights, killings, comical misunderstandings, and a few underworld deals throughout the film, the melody of the journey—intensified in the switching of the title card (I heard /you/paint the house)—continues repeat. Afterwards, the fateful concerto of playful blues drums and the cello's extremely deep bass plays out, and life is nothing but that.
Frank's biography shows the arc of achievement and change in the bright side of the 20th century: a GI in World War II, a thriving truck driver, a leader of a truckers union, a proud father to a family of five, a pillar of his community. Frank moves neatly from stop to stop through the personalities and networks he meets along the way that make up his career. The 209 minutes filled with a lot of strange anecdotes powerfully restore the true trajectory of life. With the help of Charles Brandt's original book "I Heard You Paint House" ( I Heard You Paint House ), before everything is close to dusk, the old horse vividly portrays and retraces the iconic events that happened in those years and the work time of those years. each special period.
At first, Frank was just doing Bufalino a small favor (they met by chance at a truck stop). Until these aids - these missions - turned into assassinations of various targets: traitors, creditors, intimidators, and others who turned against them. The moments of these killings are portrayed concisely and crisply. In the camera position and scheduling, the camera is kept at short and medium distances, and the violence is displayed without any playful lay-out or inductive gaze. Perhaps it would have been more chilling to linger a little longer in the hallway where the tragedy took place, but the old horse chose to let the movie move on. Our attention is quickly drawn back to the periodic review of Frank's daughter, when Frank's young wife is in the picture, and we begin to observe the growth of Frank's family. As a taciturn child, she sensed something strange very early, until she entered adolescence (Anna Paquin), and as a witness, she could only silently endure the cruelty that kept her family stable. For most of the film, however, this secret life of crime is more of a joke than a horrific spectacle to Frank's friends and accomplices.
The violent landscape has become the soil of contemporary mythology, thanks to Scorsese, Coppola and, of course, David Davids, whose Man in the Rivers and Lakes spiritually recreated the gang leader. Patriarchy issues. The thugs who staked their lives on sin and redemption made this drama even more intense. In "The Irishman", Lao Ma chose to use the protagonist of the worker instead of the boss as the main line of the film without hesitation. As a soldier, there is no regard for justice in the execution of tasks, and it is in the form of assignments that Frank serves his two friends, Bufalino and Hoffa (and historically obeys both Hoffa and JFK at the same time). the dispatch of forces) until the end. You might even feel bad about the deformity, because this whole-hearted job happens to start with him getting up for his daughter, though his daughter in the film is more of an invisible self-blame than an independent individual. In his humble and loyal service, Frank put his faith in a system that seemed to go on forever, and it was just that, which evoked his military spirit: "Obey orders and be rewarded."
Even so, what he did and what he got rewarded was killing. After a while I started thinking about what these deaths mean in the context of their distinct criminal underworld. What is certain is that there is a pure contagion in Frank's fate, because he must inevitably destroy everything that comes close to him; the TV series "Man in the Rivers and Lakes" has followed the same over the years. The tunnel comes to this fading point. While family issues are often an overcompensatory constraint in gangster movies, The Irishman isn't so constrained by family issues that it doesn't even care how we're going to step away from Frank's victims.
"He's not a psychopath," Ma said of the leading man, in response to the first critics' preview of "The Irishman" in September. It was odd to hear that on the morning of the world premiere of "The Irishman" at the New York Film Festival. I was immediately reminded of Tom Stall (Vigo Mortensen), the former hitman in A History of Violence (2005), when he was accused of being "too good at killing." In Cronenberg's work, Tom's unexpected heroism becomes a legend, a return to the oppressed. But Frank didn't return - he never left. Over the course of more than three hours of viewing, Frank followed his familiar career path, as always, routinely, until finally leading the audience to a climax in the logic of the law of the jungle, at least through this kind of gangster film. The type understands these laws.
After learning of Lao Ma's evaluation, a film critic revised his opinion: Frank is not a psychopath, but an anti-social. In either case one might ask what Frank in The Irishman should have been like. Oddly enough, people have spent a lot of time watching killer and usually out-of-the-judgment stories over the years. After revisiting some of the most sought-after TV shows, I can't help but wonder how many people have fallen prey to the rules of killing: "Man in the Rivers and Lakes," "The Americans," Barry, Mindhunter, Killing Eve, Dexter. (Also there are apocalyptic ones where everyone is dead at the start, like The Leftovers; or no-living ones, like The Good Place, or magical ones. One's death keeps repeating itself, as in "Russian Doll.") Often these shows fall into a kind of life-destroying and double-life void. Mindhunter themed interpretation of serial murders. Season 2 opens with a psychology professor admonishing a recently recovered FBI agent when counseling him: "When we empathize with psychopaths, we actually deny ourselves." After the homicide expert show, The Irishman or otherwise, this friendly exhortation hits my sore spot); perhaps it is this sense of emptiness that is the best solace in the addiction to these series.
Adapted from the work of John Douglas of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Group -- a pioneer in serial killer research -- "Mindhunter" attempts to dramatize and historicalize some of the investigations into established motives. Through the dispatch of the detectives' intuition or rational dialogue and case investigation, the play has completed the depiction of the contours of social normality and abnormality. This treatment is completely different from some other extreme murders (atypical serial murders). At the risk of misclassification, watching "The Irishman" came to my senses that Frank's innate ability to segment characters—good breadwinner father and cold-blooded killer on call—was more than that of gangster-based Goodfellas. ) or "Casino," more psychologically like the characters in "Taxi Driver" and "The King of Comedy." Did I miss out on identifying crime genre films, or did Frank—through observation of the film’s plethora of ruthless, farting dialogues and constant encounters—found the very basis of his actual existence. a little weird? As always, De Niro has made that role possible, through his free-spirited performance and his innocent and candid image, even at the age of 76. (Mind Hunter also has this meaning, and found the childish Jonathan Groff to play the role of Holden, a curious college student who is different from most detective routines.) But at the last moment, in the victim When his wife called, Frank's confidence from the image of a worker still defeated himself: like repeating the voice samples of a gasping fish in different paragraphs, Frank almost lost his voice in the stuttering choking, and kept talking. Self-deceiving lies.
The moment of repentance comes too late, but it haunts the protagonist until the end of the day of the meeting with the priest. But will I have deep sympathy for Frank when his foolish allegiance to a seductive and ruthless political clique finally inevitably takes over his entire life? Lao Ma emphasized the inevitability of this complete control, introducing each mafia and its associated members through subtitles that describe their death date and cause of death on the screen. These subtitle cards are meant to prevent the audience from having a rosy imagination of power and characters; everyone goes back to dust after all. As for the deaths directly caused by Frank, the valence of each murder is as literal as metaphor: each represents a sacrifice, a hard choice, a responsibility to someone else or something more important. The commitment to the top - in a broad sense, it may be more ethereal than we can perceive it.
After a life devoted to others, Frank was left alone and forgotten in a nursing home. This isn't a spoiler, because that's how the movie begins, with Rodrigo Prieto's (DP) camera down the hallway past other old men and a statue, stopping at the source of the war story. Or rather, those post-war stories, because Frank followed the trail of a WWII veteran and did what he could, only to be disappointed in the end. His partnership with Jimmy Hoffa and subsequent betrayal seem to coincide with the decline of unions over the last century. (One more note here, in Fredric Jameson's far-reaching formulation, he also described The Godfather as an allegory of total consumption, unforgivable, norm-destroying capitalism). Through Old Ma's orchestration and condensation of these eras, The Irishman becomes a sort of summary of slices of American history mixed with business, culture, and family in his past films. In this sense, it has to be said that CGI technology has played a role in engraving history in rejuvenating and helping actors span decades of historical events, and this is also an interesting persistence. It can be said that it created a combination of technology and drama, expressing the generation's unwillingness to let go of its own past. Tender-skinned truck driver De Niro tends to recall a photo of a recolored postcard card rather than a 20-something, and I can't explain why the rejuvenated grocery store riots De Niro, looking more like a 70-year-old star than a fiercely protective 30-something father. That said, from Frank's perspective, it's a neat filter, as the memory of him occupies his other self as an adult.
Anxiety about age fuels the plot as Hoffa feels deteriorating and threatened. The threat comes primarily from a young mob boss named Tony Provenzano (Stephen Graham), who is also a slick peacemaker in the union. The addition of Tony Pro gives the film a more familiar taste, like a brief return to classic gangster flicks. But Pacino's portrayal of Pacino's friendship with De Niro, and the rapport between Pesci and De Niro, provides the film with an emotional core that eclipses all the usual attractions of the genre. In Hoffa's hotel conversation with Frank, Hoffa's constant chatter to his second-in-command before bedtime is unexpectedly tender and true. And in other scenes, when De Niro's mission to blow up the laundry is spotted by boss Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel), through Pesci's focus on De Niro, the film simply shows the power of that ordeal. These are the fetters that Frank feels the most, but how much did it cost? Frank's more than three hours of rivers and lakes, what makes him immortal is not the traditional narrative of "gangster epic", but somewhere in the long history, he adopts a killer's perspective as the fulcrum of his art.
"But you're completely indifferent about it?" the pastor asked the dying Frank as he confessed to Frank's entire life. If I was doing this kind of confession for others, maybe I myself would have the same question at this time. When I finally get tired of listening to Frank's long narration, will I go into nothingness like him? Or was it because I was so adept at watching the killings that I got used to it all? For me, The Irishman is becoming a stranger to Scorsese's world, its pulse clear and powerful on screen and a calm aftertaste when it's over. After so many years, I feel that, as a signifier of crime films, murder has exposed its limitations, perhaps just out of fear of talking to death. Or maybe, to borrow what Bufalino said on this very different occasion, referring to the colleague who always made things go too far, it's over, the dust is settled.
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