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For Sight & Sound another of my occasional attempts to get Danny DeVito’s film Hoffa wedged into the conversation for being a vital spark of 1990s American culture, as well as an authentic leftist film. The first of those was the most important to me for a long while; but then mainstream US films became fixated on Chosen Ones and the whole machine changed into a straight neo-liberal broadcasting service and film criticism gave up trying to read the signs, so it might be time to preach the second one for a bit.
The hook for all this was due to be The Irishman, which in the end doesn’t concern Jimmy Hoffa’s labour roots at all and isn’t particularly left of centre. Mid-range Martin Scorsese might still be above the current median mark, but the hosannahs being rained upon The Irishman are a stretch. The film leads up to a final hour of solid inertia and regret, but you need to buy that the expressions on Robert De Niro’s face are bottomless pools of inner life turning foul and fetid. If you don’t, and if the CGI rejuvenations strike you as throttling human faces to a standstill rather than unleashing their inner power, then the film might be a weirdly grey restatement of things said elsewhere, sometimes by this director. Then there’s the theory that The Irishman is a Culmination Of All Scorsese Pain, a bold claim considering his last film was Silence which really was a summary of the entire faith-based department of his output and was utterly agonising, deploying exactly the romanticism and poetics I was talking about with Hoffa.
Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci may win Best awards—not Al Pacino I would think—but while I was still pondering whether they should I happened to see Tracy Letts in Le Mans ’66. Letts being obnoxious and ruining the dreams of young people is one of the few things that still gets me out to a film’s opening weekend. But even I rocked back in my chair a bit at the scene in the middle where Henry Ford II has an emotional meltdown that starts off in Humiliated Troll territory before turning into something closer to debilitating euphoria mixed with some of that middle-aged regret, if not actual envy of the young, all emerging from a face at the very opposite of a standstill. Letts spends two minutes doing what the combined resources of The Irishman have decided to eliminate for three hours, but it’s debatable which one comes out ahead in the long run.
