“I did it my way” – A Comparison of Narrators

No living director has explored the competing worlds of success and comeuppance as much as New York’s native son, Martin Scorsese. Out of the many candidates for his crowning achievement, I don’t think it’s too controversial to say that 1990’s Goodfellas stands alone. Henry Hill, previously lost to history as an anonymous mob associate turned informant, instead became the voice of the American life of crime. Unlike previous mob movies like The Godfather, which cast criminal organizations in a romantic light, Goodfellas was up front right from the very first minute about the brutality and immorality the mob life entailed. Gone were Marlon Brando and his lap cats, the talk of “honor”, and luxurious weddings. In Goodfellas, the audience is immediately witness to a callous, initially unexplained murder. When we see De Niro and Pesci pop Billy Bats in the car trunk, and immediately afterward hear Ray Liotta’s Hill utter that famous line, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”, we can’t imagine a possible explanation. 

And yet, Goodfellas is never somber: in fact, it’s one of the most exhilarating movies ever made. Scorsese never holds back the brutality, but he also seems to relish in the fun. The movie is frenetic, fast paced, a dream in editing. The subject matter is horrifying, but Henry Hill guides the audience through the story like a close friend, relaying every detail in a way that suggests that the real life guy just started talking and the crew decided to record it. The way they cut the garlic in prison; the VIP attention at the Copacabana; the fancy cars and clothes. These details are just as important to Henry as the murder, the intimidation, the corruption. From his perspective, he emerged from a life of anonymous poverty into a true force on the street, someone who demanded respect and wielded relative power. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Scorsese takes his side; after all, the movie does end with Henry cast off to witness protection after getting busted, all of his friends either dead or wanting him dead. But because of Henry’s guiding voice, it’s hard not to feel secondhand intoxication. The sanctimonious vibe of older crime films had been replaced by a more frenetic, observational energy. Scorsese may guide the audience towards moral judgment, but Hill couldn’t care less: all that concerns him now is that he needs to live life like a “shnook”, losing the freedom he enjoyed in criminal life. As a sloppy Sid Vicious version of “My Way” blares over the end credits, Henry literally slams the door on our face. Goodfellas is a loud, proud, messy descent into the underworld with a moral message that is purposefully clouded by the haze of excitement. 

So when Netflix tagged a release date of Scorsese’s long gestating The Irishman, also set in the world of organized crime, it was hard not to expect something a little similar. After all, Scorsese even got his main guy De Niro back in the fold, and somehow awoke resident madman-extraordinaire Joe Pesci from his acting hibernation. It’s a movie I’d been eagerly anticipating since the first rumors were flying nearly a decade ago. I had seen Scorsese’s post-Goodfellas crime sagas, Casino, The Departed, Wolf of Wall Street - they’d all delivered a shot of cinematic adrenaline. But something about getting the old gang back together (minus an always underappreciated Ray Liotta) made this one more special than the rest. I mean, 3 and a half hours? I was ready to give this one best picture before I even saw it. The untold story of Jimmy Hoffa? One of the most famous (alleged!) mob hits of all time? This was Scorsese comfort food in its purest form. But from the minute you press play, it’s clear Scorsese has a different story to tell.

Much has already been made of The Irishman being a cap on Scorsese’s gangster career, and it’s hard to disagree. The word “eulogy” appears in many of the reviews of it. The Irishman is a downbeat, somber movie. At the center of it all is our protagonist, Frank Sheeran. De Niro portrays him at various points in his life, from his start as a young man skimming a little extracurricular business to his dying days as an unpunished killer. But Frank is a very different storyteller than Henry Hill. Henry loved an audience, and craved the ability to share his story with the audience, no matter the moral judgment that might follow. Frank, on the other hand, can barely be bothered to remember important details. He stammers, and stumbles, and outright trails off at times. As an old man alone in a nursing home, you gather that Frank just wants something to do, someone to talk to. While the movie may start out stylistically similar to Goodfellas, with a criminal narrator recounting his life of crime, Frank is Henry’s opposite and the movie changes as a result.

Unlike Henry, who reveled in the excesses that came with being a successful criminal, Frank is a guy who simply does what he is told and doesn’t ask questions. A life of crime doesn’t provide any joy; ironically, the better word is structure. Frank is a military veteran who (under orders) committed heinous war crimes - when he gets an opportunity to ingratiate himself to the mob by doing hits, a moral quandary is nonexistent. For all Henry Hill was - a crook, an abuser, a snake - he was never a killer. It’s one of his qualities that makes it a bit easier for the audience to take his side. But Frank is a killer, and a good one at that. His narration matter-of-factly describes his hits as if they came off a shopping list. He uses the same enthusiasm describing Jimmy Hoffa’s favorite hot dog joint (remember they use beer on the grill!) as he does recounting his first cold blooded murder. When he murders an old associate in cold blood due to a misunderstanding? “A bad hit”. That’s it. There is no Copacabana scene here. No party in prison. We don’t get to meet the whole gang in a warm backyard party as they munch on sausage and cold-cuts. The music is sparse, more diegetic; Goodfellas had music so prominent it felt like a music video, but the standout in Irishman is the downbeat doo-wop hit In the Still of the Night that opens and closes the movie. Frank sulks through every scene without showing much emotion, even as it becomes clear that his best friend, Al Pacino’s Hoffa, is in deep trouble. This is one of De Niro’s best roles ever - he wields a world-weariness and deeply repressed pain that makes him just as enigmatic as the more expressive characters that made him a living legend.

The Irishman is a morality tale in a far more direct sense than Goodfellas, as Frank’s defining characteristic is moral passivity. The ultimate irony of the viewer’s engagement with the film is that we are listening to the narration of the least self-reflective protagonist imaginable. The audience has to do the heavy lifting in parsing out the lessons of Frank’s tragic life, a life where shreds of humanity are sacrificed for the sake of following orders. This a trickier proposition than Goodfellas, where Henry’s charisma is the fuel that keeps the engine running. 

As Irishman settles into its ludicrous runtime, it can at times feel dull, lacking the color of the typical Scorsese fare. Frank gives us the bullet points as he methodically moves his way up the criminal ladder, but he rarely injects much personality. It’s an aloofness we can excuse when he’s a two-bit criminal pawning off stolen meat off his truck, but as the violence ramps up so does the dissonance with the audience. As Frank moves through his life, the body count becomes staggering, as new characters are introduced and killed off almost immediately. Diversions to his family life, where Frank plays the role of the committed father, ring hollow as he can’t escape the judgmental gaze of his silent daughter, who is just as aware of his wrongdoing as the audience. The lone warm constant in Frank’s life comes in Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa character, a ball of charisma who sees Frank as a close friend and confidant whom he can rely on personally and professionally. But as anyone familiar with Hoffa’s fate knows, this too will have a violent end. Frank never pauses to look pack on his crimes, and their impact on his psyche. The film hurtles towards its inevitable conclusion as Frank and Jimmy get closer and closer, showing Frank’s closest thing to a soft side when he chats with Hoffa. 

When we reach the climax of the movie, the grim Hoffa tale we know is coming, the pace of the movie slows to a deliberate crawl. Narration is dropped entirely. So is music. Scorsese deliberately charts the course of the ultimate betrayal without an ounce of sentiment, and without the filmmaking flourishes that we’ve seen so many times. Instead, we get the most unsexy road trip imaginable: Frank and Pesci’s Russell mozey on up the highway, stopping at quiet hotels for rest and salads. When Russell breaks the news to Frank about how he is the guy who must off Hoffa, the film begins to savor every moment. In the minute detail that follows, we get the truest recollection of Frank’s POV: the drive to the quiet suburban house, the look inside at the tear-away carpet, even the conversation about the damn fish. When Frank and Jimmy enter that plain house together, there is no question of what is about to happen, even if one isn’t familiar with the real life story. This is in every sense, the dramatic peak of a gargantuan movie, pay-off for hours of build up. And yet, when the shot rings out and Jimmy slumps to the ground, the movie doesn’t stop to ponder what happened. Frank wipes the gun, and bails. A short montage follows: some anonymous men clean up the scene. Frank drives back to the airport and gets on a plane. And that’s that. 

Frank picks up where he left off. Our narrator has returned. He rattles off the fate of other criminals in his orbit, but conspicuously avoids acknowledging what we have just seen him do. As he slowly ushers the audience into the present day, we can’t help but wonder about Frank’s feelings. We see the gut-wrenching call he gives to Hoffa’s wife where he plays dumb and reassures her that Hoffa will be fine, without letting slip the guilt he wears on his face. Does he have any regret, any remorse? He stubbornly trucks on, recounting as each one of his former friends and allies pass away, from causes both criminal and natural. Frank goes to jail for unrelated crimes, dismissing the reasons even as Scorsese gives us a helpful list of the charges on the screen. After serving his sentence, Frank takes us to the nursing home where we began our tale, now estranged from his family. He grapples with a patient priest, who becomes the audience surrogate in practically begging Frank to show even an ounce of contrition for his wasted life. As he begins to grapple with his own mortality, Frank still lives in denial; he likes the idea of a coffin, for as he says it’s ““not as final - you’re dead, but it ain’t that final”. One can’t help but compare it to the image of Jimmy pushed into an incinerator, who wasn’t lucky to avoid the same finality. The camera twists and turns in his nursing home in a sickly comedic nod to the tracking shots that helped make Goodfellas so engaging, and Frank settles in for the home stretch. But there is no parting shot, no fiery soliloquy a la Henry Hill. There is no joy to rub in, no revelry in a life of crime. Frank won’t be shutting the door on our face with a sly smile. Instead, Frank sits in his wheelchair, silent in thoughts that we can only imagine. The door to his room is left open a crack, and we cut to black. His door may be left ajar, but he’s still a prisoner, left with just his unresolved regret.

The jarring contrasts of Henry and Frank’s last moments reflect the undoing of Scorsese’s gangster mythos that makes The Irishman such an affecting work. By consistently and stubbornly denying the audience a look into Frank’s psyche, Scorsese makes the argument that Frank has led an empty life devoid of agency. Frank is a man who never even attempted to tap into his free will, who let himself be trapped in a cycle of crime that has taught him nothing about himself while closing off his humanity to all around him. Unlike Henry Hill, who could at least point to superficial joys in his life before things came crashing down, Frank is left with nothing but dark memories. The intoxication of Goodfellas gets close to suggesting that the criminal life is all about freedom, but The Irishman flips this around entirely. Frank’s criminal life is one of passivity, of letting others tell him what to do, no matter the damage it does to his soul. It’s a fascinatingly self-aware move by Scorsese that paints all of his past gangster epics in a more cautionary light. Most Scorsese protagonists don’t make it to old age; the ones that do are likely to end up like Frank. If Goodfellas was guilty of making criminal life look rewarding, The Irishman makes it look like the most miserable existence on earth.