THE IRISHMAN

The Irishman is the film that many fans of the genre wanted to see from Scorsese: a majestic summation of the toll that a life in the mob exacts – not only on the mobsters and stand-over men themselves but the price paid by their families. It’s meta at times – Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci & Al Pacino  - bringing the baggage of their previous roles with them and it has many echoes of Scorsese’s previous mob films, but it also takes us on a very different journey.

When considered alongside Martin Scorsese’s previous gangster films, The Irishman does have a decidedly more melancholic and somber tone. The Irishman is written by screenwriter Steven Zaillian (Schindler’s List, American Gangster, Moneyball)  and for this film he’s adapted the 2004 memoir I Heard You Paint Houses which tells the true story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a World War II veteran and truck driver who had a talent for thievery and casual brutal violence. In the 1950s, he meets Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), who is the boss of a Pennsylvania-based crime family. Sheeran becomes a trusted foot soldier and hitman for Russell Bufalino and he’s given many jobs, proving himself pretty reliable as a blunt instrument, though Frank is given one job in particular that ends up taking up a huge part of his life – when he is asked to work for Jimmy Hoffa (played by Al Pacino), whose Teamsters Union was extremely powerful, had billions of dollars in its pension fund and which Hoffa controlled and gave loans to mobsters from.

So, Sheeran served as Hoffa’s right-hand man for many years as well as his muscle-for-hire and the hook for Frank Sheeran’s memoir and its notoriety, was that Sheeran claimed to know what actually happened to Hoffa - who’s disappearance in 1975 has never been officially solved.