At the end of his life, Frank Sheeran looks back on the many people he killed. The pastor asks him if he feels remorse. Sheeran shakes his head. He did not know the families of his victims, mostly not. Repentance can be decided even if one does not feel it, replies the pastor. Sheeran thinks: really?
The mafia killer Sheeran, sitting here in a wheelchair, is played by Robert De Niro. Sheeran is the hero of Martin Scorsese's new movie "The Irishman," a brave foot soldier who does every dirty job clean.
The three-and-a-half-hour epic was produced by the streaming service Netflix and now comes to the cinema for a short time, before it can only be seen online. For some scenes, the 76-year-old director and his same-age star return to the site of their first triumph: New York's Little Italy district.
An elegiac epilogue, a last hurray
Here began the career of the two, 1973 with the movie "Mean Streets", which carries the German title "Hexenkessel". It's about shabby little gangsters chattering through their shabby little neighborhood, beating and shooting, trying to bite their way through the mafia's bloody food chain.
In 1990, in Scorsese's and De Niro's masterpiece, "GoodFellas - Three Decades in the Mafia," the movie thugs brought immense wealth to them with tremendous force. A feverish epic about men who sometimes bathe in money and sometimes in the blood, shoving the coke as if it were flour.
Read an interview with Martin Scorsese here
In 1995 then "Casino" with Sharon Stone. Scorsese's criminal heroes were now in Las Vegas in the gambling business. Expensive suits, beautiful women, glamor instead of gutter. But right at the beginning of the film, the hero played by De Niro flew in his car - and barely survived.
So now "The Irishman", an elegiac epilogue, a last hurray, which dies already on the lips. In the first scene, the camera moves in the tempo of a rollator through a nursing home and captured at the end of the rickety hero.
That's how much in "The Irishman", a quote from a previous Scorsese movie: In "GoodFellas" the director went through a nightclub in a similar setting. It acts as a celebration of the joie de vivre and the triumph of being a dreaded gangster.
In "The Irishman" the mafia killer Sheeran has to choose his own casket because his children do not want to have anything to do with him anymore. He sits in his wheelchair and talks about his life, but hardly anyone seems to listen to him. A rarely bleak gangster.
Scorsese is also a brand
"The Irishman" is based on the 2004 published book "I Heard You Paint Houses", which is based on reports of the Irish-born mafioso Frank Sheeran. He had claimed, among other things, the legendary trade unionist Jimmy Hoffa (in the movie: Al Pacino) murdered.
There is some evidence that Sheeran's accounts are largely untrue, that he styled himself a killer to sell his memoirs. But De Niro was thrilled with the book.
In 2008, he and Scorsese announced the film adaptation. The project was extremely complex and technically complicated. With many scenes playing in the '60s when Sheeran was in his forties, Scorsese decided to rejuvenate his star through a digital facelift.
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"The Irishman": A henchman for the worstWhen one of the investors stepped down in 2016, Studio Paramount stopped the $ 100 million budgeted project. Netflix jumped in. The streaming service was desperately looking for fabrics and renowned filmmakers. Soon after, "The Irishman" cost 150 million. No one knows exactly how much money it was in the end.
It has become Scorsese's most expensive, longest and saddest movie. "The Irishman" marks the end of an era marked by filmmakers such as Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. They had changed Hollywood in the sixties and seventies and today feel like marginalized there.
Superhero spectacles are not cinema, but rather filmed amusement parks, Scorsese and Coppola have recently announced. "The Irishman" is Scorsese's defiant attempt to show everyone that even his name is a brand that counts for something else.
He did almost everything differently than is usual in blockbuster cinema today. Quiet instead of tempo, meandering narrative instead of plot-driven tension dramaturgy, dirty murders instead of heroic action.
Does the director consider the viewer to be obtuse?
It is touching and sad to see a movie that often looks like a rough cut version. Everything had to go into this perhaps last great work, everything had to be told, once, twice, three times. Scorsese shows it in his pictures and explains it in words again.
In one scene, De Niro throws his pistol into a river after a murder. The viewer sees them slowly sinking to the bottom - where many other weapons are already lying. A strong picture that says everything. Why does the commentary have to add that this arsenal would be enough to wage a civil war?
Has Scorsese lost faith in his narrative mastery? Or did he think that the public was less concentrated in streaming than in the movie theater? The viewer sometimes has the impression that the director considers him obtuse.
But of course, Scorsese's earlier masterpieces somewhat obscure the view of "The Irishman". For all its weaknesses it is still a pretty powerful epic. To blame the director for making better films 30 years ago is a bit unfair, considering how good these films are.
Illusionless worldview
Maybe you have to get involved in "The Irishman" as in a meeting with now elderly friends who talk about the old days and with whom you should be patient because they have a lot to experience and important things to talk about.
"The Irishman" is steeped in the awareness that corruption and betrayal are omnipresent. He is not just about the underworld, but about America and its predatory capitalism. Scorsese shows a land of limitless possibilities, in which every one of his luck can be blacksmith when he is ready to slay his opponents with the hammer. The illusionless worldview of an old, wise man.
Over the course of the film, Scorsese repeatedly pauses, lingers on a character and inserts a text that informs the viewer when and where this person was murdered. When Sheeran opens his pill box in the nursing home, you feel like he's the only one of those gangsters alive. He was just unlucky. Now he has to die as God's most lonely man.
At the very end, he asks a nurse not to close the door to his room. Maybe that's the door Scorsese and De Niro will leave open.
"The Irishman" will be on theaters on Thursday and Netflix on November 27th.