by Cláudio Alves
Martin Scorsese's latest magnum opus is an epic in most senses of the word. It's one of the master's most dense exercises, using biography as a vehicle to explore the great social transformations of post-war American Society. The Irishman is a portrait of Death as an ever-encroaching certainty, a treatise on the painful passage of time and a theatre of memory where the spiritedness of youth is curdled by the self-image of the old men who revisit it.
That's heavy stuff but here's something lighter: As the film's very credits show, this gargantuan feat of cinema isn't called The Irishman at all…
Netflix's promotional machine might say otherwise, but Martin Scorsese's latest is titled I Heard You Paint Houses. That's the name of the book upon which the film is based and the words that flash on-screen twice. First, at the beginning of the three-and-a-half-hour epic, in little bursts that recall the audacious ways of the Nouvelle Vague brats. Secondly, it returns at the very end of the thing, after one of Scorsese's most powerful last shots. Sure, this second coming is accompanied by the dreaded The Irishman, but it's obvious which name the filmmakers involved are signaling as the piece's real title.
At the moment, we don't know why The Irishman isn't officially called I Heard You Paint Houses but it's easy to speculate. After all, the venomous banalization of film tittles is a widespread disease among Hollywood studios and worldwide distributors. Remember when the beautiful Can A Song Save Your Life? was rebaptized as the terminally generic Begin Again? Perhaps something like that happened to I Heard You Paint Houses, an evocative title that may have been deemed too weird by clueless committee of executives.
Which title do you prefer?