Death Trip: Wrestling with mortality in Martin Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN

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“I am Roman Catholic; there's no way out of it.” Martin Scorsese once told Roger Ebert in an interview.  “I am living in sin, and I will go to hell.”

Anyone who has kicked around this planet long enough to see experience fade into memory, friends and family shuffle off this mortal coil, and youth sag into bad backs and frown lines has probably grappled with the question: “Am I a good person? Have I made the right decisions in life?”  With The Irishman, Scorsese sifts through his own past and career to grapple with personal mortality and guilt. Does snorting a bunch of blow once upon a time and getting several divorces really condemn the arguably greatest living American filmmaker to an afterlife of fire and torment? Does hell even exist? Scorsese seems to think so. But if Satan is real, and actions have consequences pressing his scale, can one repent and be saved?

Both mafia hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert de Niro) and Scorsese ruminate on the twilight of existence. Frank’s murders pop fast and shocking and unglamorous. Bodies drop dead with glazed eyes as blood seeps into dirty carpet and grime-slathered sluices. Quick titles flash next to every wise guy detailing how and when they died. Three shots to the face here, a strangling there, a car bomb down the road—a blur of faces and names piling into one mass grave.

“I like this,” Franks says while picking out his final resting place in a mausoleum, “It’s like you’re still here. Not totally gone.”

Confined to a nursing home near the end of his life, Frank meets with a priest often and begs for God’s forgiveness. But can the sins Frank committed for the mob wash clean with a few halfhearted prayers? Can the family he scared away with cold blooded violence ever stop seeing him as a monster? If we live in sin, Scorsese seems to ask, but repent hard enough and genuinely regret our actions can we be saved? Does being consumed by guilt redeem the damned?

As the years stretch into decades and Frank’s body breaks down, shots grow longer, quieter, more morose. A man who once fought on the gangland frontlines falls alone and helpless in his own hallway. Empty houses painted with the blood of friends and associates linger like a specter of death. Frank’s nurse doesn’t even know who Jimmy Hoffa was.

“Watching these guys dig their own grave,” Frank says of two men he’s about to kill, “Were they thinking if they do a good job maybe the guy with the gun will change his mind?”  

Does Frank following orders on the battlefield and the streets absolve him of mortal sin? He was just doing a job to provide for his family. Killing was nothing personal. Can Scorsese convince God to lower a ladder by pumping out movie after movie denouncing bad boy ways?

The Irishman contains a lot to unpack in its immense run time. Joseph Frank Pesci comes out of jazz retirement to deliver a devastating performance! Thelma Schoonmaker’s masterful editing moves from buck-wild young gangster crime to weary long takes steeped in existential malaise. Pacino yells primo! The director of tough guy bro pictures like The Last Temptation of Christ, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and The Age of Innocence throws down a challenge to anyone dismissing his work as facile or out of touch.

But most strikingly, The Irishman feels like (heaven forbid) Scorsese’s final film. It’s a sad difficult reckoning of an entire life wracked by Catholic guilt and sin. Scorsese rounds up his crew of collaborators both in front of and behind the camera to stretch the crime picture into a stark and sprawling death march. He cribs from the world art house influences he champions to distend time and leave room in the frame for The End to weigh heavy. Hopefully Marty has a few pictures left in him before he’s interred in the cinema pantheon. But if he’s folding up his director’s chair, The Irishman is an unforgettable way to go.