No film director is more associated with rock and roll than Martin Scorcese. Leaving aside The Last Waltz, the tedious love letter to the Stones and that sophomoric Dylan stunt, many of his most celebrated movies are so infused with the spirit of rock as to be almost inseparable from the movement. You got all your mob goombahs stealing and killing and generally having fun and it’s all “Monkey Man”… and then it all turns to shit and it’s “Gimme Shelter,” it’s the “Layla” coda. Roll credits.
So I found it interesting that The Irishman is completely devoid of the swaggering classic rock anthems that are de rigueur in Scorcese’s customary mob outings, despite the fact that the film is otherwise so much in keeping with his blueprint, a heavily V.O.’ed nostalgia piece about Irish and Italian gangsters primarily set during the 1960’s and 70’s.
Instead of cock rock there’s a lot of doo wop and Latin big band (Dirty Dancing!) with some moody instrumental soundtrack material mixed in (there’s also Miami Steve as Scorcese favorite Jerry Vale lip-synching “Al Di La” – click here for an excellent breakdown of all the music in the film). Of course, 50’s and 60’s doo wop is often used by Scorcese as well, usually in a scene-setting rather than scene-stealing mode. In The Irishman, the opening and closing track is “In the Still of the Night” by The Five Satins, an eerie doo wop classic that has appeared in a lot of movies (Dirty Dancing!). No doubt here it is meant to hearken to the mental state of Deniro’s wizened assassin now left alone with his memories through the long nights of assisted living hell.
There’s also much more silence in the film than the usual Scorcese outing, an option that always pleases me for the ways it allows us to live with characters for long stretches without music’s intrusive emotional cues. Combined with the choice of popular music that is in The Irishman, the presiding quiet seems like a conscious choice in keeping with what I think the aim was – to make a film about murderous gangsters that does not swagger, but rather has an elegiac, demythologizing purpose along the lines of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece, Unforgiven.
That is exactly the film that I’d want Scorcese to make at this late point in his career, that no one else but him could make. The fact that it’s an utter failure confirms suspicions I’ve had about him all along. It also makes me think of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another overly long and often boring revisionist epic (let’s be frank about Frank Sheeran… he no more killed Joey Gallo and Jimmy Hoffa than an acid-tripping Brad Pitt killed the Manson murderers) in which a ballyhooed director of cock-rock “cinema” finds himself in a mood to actually say something and comes up empty, likely because he never had anything to say in the first place.
I’m reminded here of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs lecturing the teenage dork version of Cameron Crowe in Almost Famous: “We’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts… the only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
Sage advice. Some talented nerds, however, choose the easier path and hide behind thinly veiled odes to coolness in the hope that some of the shine rubs off on them (remember David Webb Peoples’ Western writer in Unforgiven?). Just throw in a bunch of gratuitous violence and hollow visual sturm und drang and call it “art.” Trust me, the French will love it.
On that score, I find it ironic that what your average millennial associates with Scorcese right now is that he’s the “ok Boomer” old fart who told superhero movies to get off his lawn. “Cinema is an art form that brings you the unexpected,” he writes. “In superhero movies, nothing is at risk.” Hmm, is that so? Physician, heal thyself. I too am an unapologetic old fart who hates superhero movies, and you know why? Because they’re cartoonish morality plays with a childish take on the nature of good and evil and an over-reliance on the nerdy adolescent male’s preoccupation with visual chaos and retributive violence, all of it masquerading as substance when in fact it is so much sound, so much fury, and so very much nothing. I’m uninterested in such films whether they’re set in Asgard, Gotham or the mean mean streets of a would-be auteur’s mind.