The Irishman
“What kind of man makes it to the end of his life without ever really choosing it?”
Introduction: A Film About What Remains
The Irishman (2019) is not a gangster film in any conventional sense. It contains the rituals of the genre — hits, bosses, unions, loyalty, betrayal — but drains them of their usual intoxication. Where Goodfellas seduces and Casino dissects, The Irishman exhausts. It asks not how power is taken or maintained, but what it costs to carry it quietly for decades.
This is Martin Scorsese’s most honest film, and his most merciless. Not because it condemns violence — it barely bothers to — but because it refuses to redeem obedience. The central tragedy of The Irishman is not that Frank Sheeran kills Jimmy Hoffa. It is that Frank Sheeran lives long enough to understand what that obedience has erased.
If the earlier films are about momentum, The Irishman is about drag. Time is no longer a background condition; it is the dominant force. The film unfolds like memory itself — repetitive, meandering, unadorned — until meaning collapses into silence.
Frank Sheeran: The Tyranny of Obedience
Frank Sheeran is not ambitious. This is crucial. He does not hunger for status, recognition, or control. He wants to be useful. Scorsese constructs Frank as the perfect instrument of institutional power: reliable, unreflective, and emotionally vacant. His defining trait is not cruelty, but compliance.
Frank’s moral framework is logistical. Killing is not an ethical problem; it is a task. The film repeatedly emphasizes this through its language: “It is what it is.” Decisions are framed as necessities, not choices. Violence becomes clerical.
This is a radical departure from the traditional gangster protagonist. Frank is not corrupted by power — he is hollowed out by it. His obedience makes him indispensable, and that indispensability slowly erases his interior life. He does not choose his path; he accepts assignments.
The genius of De Niro’s performance lies in its restraint. Frank is not conflicted in the dramatic sense. His conflict is deferred. It is postponed for decades, only arriving when there is nothing left to distract him from it.
Russell Bufalino: Power Without Noise
Russell Bufalino represents the most refined form of power in Scorsese’s cinema. He is not charismatic. He does not posture. He barely raises his voice. Russell understands that true authority does not announce itself — it waits.
Russell’s power operates through proximity and implication. He never orders Frank directly; he frames inevitabilities. His genius lies in making obedience feel like destiny. Frank does not serve Russell out of fear or love, but because the structure of his life slowly closes around Russell’s expectations.
This is institutional power at its most insidious. Russell does not need to threaten Frank; he simply reminds him of how the world works. Once you understand the system, resistance feels childish.
Russell’s calm is not kindness. It is certainty. He knows that everyone, eventually, will choose the path of least existential resistance.
Jimmy Hoffa: Charisma Trapped in Time
Jimmy Hoffa is the last ghost of an earlier era. He believes in loyalty as a personal bond, not a structural convenience. Hoffa’s power is performative — built on presence, speech, and emotional allegiance. He needs to be seen, heard, affirmed.
This makes him magnificent — and doomed.
Hoffa cannot understand a world where power has become invisible. He mistakes history for permanence. He believes past authority entitles him to future relevance. In doing so, he violates the cardinal rule of institutional systems: adapt or be removed.
Hoffa’s refusal to compromise is often framed as courage, but Scorsese treats it more tragically. Hoffa is not wrong morally — he is wrong temporally. He does not belong to the world that replaces him.
The tragedy is that Frank understands this — and still kills him.
Violence Without Theater
The Irishman deliberately strips violence of spectacle. Hits are brief, clumsy, and emotionally vacant. Bodies fall with no punctuation. There is no adrenaline, no operatic release.
This aesthetic choice is not restraint; it is indictment. Violence, Scorsese suggests, does not feel dramatic to those who commit it regularly. It feels procedural. Forgettable.
By refusing to aestheticize brutality, the film denies the audience the usual pleasures of the genre. We are not invited to admire efficiency or toughness. We are forced to confront repetition.
Violence becomes labor.
Aging, Memory, and the Collapse of Meaning
The film’s much-debated digital de-aging serves a thematic purpose. Frank does not feel young in the early sections; he merely looks young. His emotional register remains flat throughout. This creates a dissonance that mirrors memory itself — the way the past feels distant even when vividly recalled.
As the film progresses, the pace slows dramatically. Scenes stretch. Conversations repeat. This is not indulgence — it is simulation. The audience is made to experience time as Frank does: heavy, recursive, unavoidable.
When youth finally gives way to visible age, nothing changes internally. Frank does not soften. He does not repent. He simply continues.
And then, eventually, there is nothing left to continue for.
The True Punishment: Survival
Frank Sheeran is not punished by the law, by rivals, or by fate. He is punished by survival. Everyone who mattered is gone. Institutions move on. Rituals end.
The nursing home is the film’s final revelation. It is not hell — it is worse. It is emptiness. Frank is surrounded by caretakers who do not know him, priests who cannot reach him, and family members who refuse to engage with him.
His daughter’s silence is the most devastating judgment in the film. She does not accuse. She does not forgive. She withdraws. In doing so, she denies Frank the one thing obedience promised him: belonging.
The Open Door
The final image — Frank asking for the door to be left open — is not hopeful. It is infantilizing. He does not ask for absolution. He asks not to be alone.
This is the ultimate cost of a life lived without agency. When meaning collapses, there is no language left to articulate regret.
Frank cannot even fully name what he has lost.
Scorsese’s Final Statement on Power
The Irishman is Scorsese’s anti-myth. It dismantles the gangster fantasy not by exposing its brutality, but by exposing its emptiness. Power does not grant identity. Obedience does not grant peace. Loyalty does not grant meaning.
What remains is time — and time is indifferent.
This film does not ask the audience to judge Frank Sheeran. It asks something more uncomfortable: to recognize how easily a life can disappear into function.
Conclusion: The Silence After Power
In the end, The Irishman is a film about what happens when history forgets you before you die. There is no reckoning, no grand moral closure — only the slow realization that a life spent serving systems leaves nothing personal behind.
Frank Sheeran does not die onscreen.
He simply waits.
And that waiting — quiet, endless, unresolved — is Scorsese’s most devastating image of all.
