You talkin' about De Niro? You talkin' about De Niro?
Thursday, December 5, 2019 at 9:00AM
It's a performance episode of "Contrarian Corner". Here's Ben Miller...
The narrative has been pushed. Robert De Niro is back! Al Pacino is back! Scorsese and Netflix are a match made in heaven! The Irishman is the Best Picture frontrunner. I'm not here to disagre with the critical acclaim. But, we need to have a talk about what is going on with Robert De Niro.
There are three main problems...
1. Everyone knows what young Robert De Niro is supposed to look like
The bulk of The Irishman takes place over the span of 25 years. The first act of the film utilizes digital technology to de-age De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. While Pesci and Pacino are de-aged to relatively normal levels, (Pacino from 79 to 49, Pesci from 76 to 52), De Niro is supposed to be in his early to mid-30s Frank Sheeran from his current 76 years old.
The biggest problem is De Niro doesn’t give you a break. He is present in nearly every minute of the film of the first act and you can’t help but not believe he is in his 30s.
Robert De Niro came on the scene in a big way in Scorsese’s Mean Streets as an actual 30 year old. He spent his 30s well in the public eye with a string of classics, from The Godfather Part II, all the way through The King of Comedy when he was 40. There is a well-establish precedent for what De Niro is supposed to look like in his 30s.
Even with the smoothed-faced De Niro, it doesn’t evoke the same feeling of 1970s-80s De Niro. Below is De Niro at 33 in Taxi Driver, and next to it is De Niro in the early scenes from The Irishman.
The Irishman De Niro looks like an old guy trying to act young. He doesn’t look young and it doesn’t help that De Niro has adopted a permanent scowl throughout the first act.
2. Body language matters when it comes to youth
Do you know the other big thing about Taxi Driver De Niro? He looked like this:
I don’t care how athletic you are as a septuagenarian, you just don’t move like someone in their 30s. Re-watch the scene where Sheeran beats up the grocer in front of his daughter. Does it look like anything other than a 76 year-old man?
I’ll tell you another thing. The Irishman really kicks up a notch when Sheeran advances in age and is in his fifties.
Look at this guy:
Much better. Not only does his face look more along the lines of what age his character should be, De Niro’s performance suits the age. The first hour of the film is like a well-tailored suit that is three-sizes too small. When we reach the second act, the suit is still one-half size too small, but it looks great and feels so much better on the wearer.
3. De Niro hasn't been the best actor in the world in a long timeThe first two plus hours of The Irishman feature Sheeran schmoozing with gangsters, driving a truck, performing gangster duties and eventually hits for said gangsters. All the while, he advances up the ranks because…why? Perhaps charisma and charm, but De Niro plays up precisely none of that.
There have been plenty of history buffs decrying the historical accuracy of some events the film portrays, but I’ll tell you the most unbelievable part. When we meet Sheeran, he is married and already has a bunch of kids. He then meets a restaurant waitress whom he leaves his wife for and eventually marries. Nothing about anything we have seen about Frank leads us to believe he was anything other than a robot. He has little to no personality. All Frank does is flash his weird smile and that was that.
There are defenders of the legacy of De Niro, and I am absolutely one of them. His performance in Taxi Driver is among the greatest male performances in the history of film. But, since 1999 and 2000 where De Niro had a back-to-back of Analyze This and Meet the Parents, and leaned into comedy in a new way, he has not been artistically challenged. Every film for the next decade refused to challenge the actor and he gave increasingly middling performances. If you want a recent example, look no further than his performance in Joker just a few short months ago.
The last hour of The Irishman is a terrific reminder of De Niro skill in his peak era but does it make up for the first 150 minutes of such an uneven performance?
Reader Comments (30)
Just gonna post a link to Michael Koresky’s excellent review in Reverse Shot which makes compelling counter-arguments for most of these points: http://www.reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/2590/irishman
Maybe Godfather 2 should have just yanked some hooks into Brando's face and use a fuzzy lens. Or different actors for different ages of characters is good, even with advancing technology.
I like his performance in Joker and Silver Linings Playbook.
He's not supposed to look like young De Niro, he's playing a character. I don't really have a beef with the occasional old man movement/voices either. It's a foggy memory piece by an unreliable narrator. I think De Niro's performance in this is really remarkable, his best and most moving work in years.
I still don't know why The King of Comedy was such a flop at that time. For me it's Scorsese's best movie with De Niro's best performance.
You say "De Niro looks like an old guy trying to act young" and I agree. However, to me, that's a feature and not a bug.
The Irishman is a film about memory and the specter of Death so it seems fitting that even the remembrance of youth has been transformed by the self-image of an old man. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time thinking back to earlier years and not imagining my present self in the role of my past selves. It's a quirk of memory and self-image that I rarely see represented in cinema, but The Irishman evokes such conundrum rather perfectly.
Apart from the lack of charisma bit, I actually agree with most of this article. But, while De Niro's digitally smoothed ghost would be terrible in other settings, he seems to be in harmonious unison with the rest of The Irishman's tonal and thematic explorations. Because of that, I have no problem praising the first hours of his performance as well as the blatant mastery of its last acts.
You just didn't want to enjoy the movie itself. It's a fiction baby! Let yourself be the story told.
Well the movie never tells you how old he's supposed to be at any of those points.
So it's really just your problem.
The FX are not good. Such a bad choice from Scorsese, it takes you out of the movie every time.
And De Niro is okay, we've seen better but he is fine on those last moments.
Ben makes a lot of points he assumes we'd automatically agree with, as if they are obvious, and therefore doesn't bother to flesh them out. I was intrigued by the premise of this piece, and welcome different points of view, but it really needed to be fleshed out. Why is it so short? Even on a blog, we can read and engage with critical pieces.
To the first point: You're right we all know what young Robert De Niro looks like, but cinema has always required audiences to engage in suspension of disbelief. There are many films throughout cinema history featuring young actors with a lot of make up, so they can portray their characters in old age. As these young actors grow older, they don't look exactly the way the films made their characters, with all the old-age make up.
Do we then go back to these films and dismiss them as credible stories simply because the actors in them aged differently than the filmmakers imagined? In this case, we're talking about technology and not make-up, but don't the same rules apply for suspension of disbelief? Why is the technology held to a higher standard than traditional make-up in movies? A question worth considering, especially when Scorsese himself has compared the de-aging technology to traditional make-up, and argued that he opted to use the technology instead of the make-up because while it's better for a story to use make-up to make characters look older, technology is better to characters look younger.
I also don't think it's fair for you to use Robert De Niro's filmography to critique the way the younger Frank Sheeran looks in The Irishman. This is, after all, its own movie, and De Niro is playing a character, not himself. Maybe young Frank Sheeran in the film doesn't look like the actual younger Robert De Niro or any of his other characters, but why can't we accept that this is because De Niro is playing a new character, and this is what a young Frank Sheeran might have looked like?
Point 2: Out of all the point, this is the most persuasive, but again I think it needs a little more fleshing out. Are there other scenes to point to as well? Or is it just this one scene on the sidewalk? I ask because, surely one scene in the film shouldn't equate to "the first 150 minutes of such an uneven performance," as you claim it to be.
Point 3: Why does it matter if De Niro hasn't been great in a while? Shouldn't the performance be judged for what it is? A lot of the praise comes from the fact that, because De Niro hasn't been great in a while, it's a welcome surprise to see him remind us why he's such a great actor.
A few other points:
You write: "All the while, he advances up the ranks because…why? Perhaps charisma and charm, but De Niro plays up precisely none of that."
I think the film makes it clear that he moves up the ranks not because of any charisma or charm, but because he knows how to follow orders and get the job done, and doesn't ask too many questions about it. That's also his flaw as a character--he's at once passive and active. Passive in the sense that he doesn't really consider the consequences of his actions, nor take responsibility for them, but active because he is, in fact, taking these orders and committing these horrible crimes, without thinking too much about them. I think the point of the film is that, he doesn't have charisma or charm, he's more or less a robot going through the motions, and it's only later on in life that he feels the weight of this unexamined existence.
You write: "The last hour of The Irishman is a terrific reminder of De Niro skill in his peak era but does it make up for the first 150 minutes of such an uneven performance?"
Again, I'm not sure if your critiquing the performance or the technology. Can they be separated? Perhaps not. But, all of your points relate to this idea that, because the technology doesn't make YOU believe certain things, the performance therefore isn't good for the first 150 minutes or so. But you're not really engaging with the character for what it is, you're bringing a lot of your pre-conceived ideas about what a younger Robert De Niro is SUPPOSED to look like into this film, and using that to criticize the performance.
I'm surprised Nathaniel said yes to this article - such negativity and ignorance coming from this writer (not the normal spirit from thefilmexperience)
My biggest gripe with The Irishman is the distribution.
I started it on Netflix, got bored/distracted. Finishing it feels like a chore. I will—but for someone with such strong opinions about "cinema" Scorsese should know that Netflix isn't a good platform for his 3.5 hour baby.
My three cents on the Irishman:
1.) Pacing was atrocious. What happened Thelma!?
2.) The de-aging effects were obvious, poorly done, and detracted from the story by breaking suspension of disbelief. (Why do people keep acclaiming this film technique?!?)
3.) I agree that DeNiro's performance is ... better... in the last hour, but not so mind-blowingly so that I'm going to ignore the non-performance in the rest of the film.
Really enjoyed both Pesci's and Pacino's performances. (ufff... and Paquin, damn she deserved more screen time!)
These de-aging effects remind me of the ONE thing that I dislike about Age of Innocence... the aging makeup on DDL in the last scene. It's just ... not great.
First, I forgot how ripped De Niro was in Taxi Driver.
Second, I don't think it's fair to cast aside his post-2000 performances just because they're not breaking new ground. He's still very good, and he gave pretty fun/great performances in Silver Linings Playbook, The Family, and has even carved out a type in his David O Russell films. What's important is that in those films he still sets the screen on fire and is able to give genuine star performances.
I thought he was good here and played the scenes where he's reflecting and his relationship with Hoffa really well. The de-agining parts didn't bother me, but for the first third of the film is just world-building, so there isn't that much to play and he's not as electric. If he missed out on an Oscar-nom it wouldn't bother me.
The biggest issue with DeNiro are the eyes. When he’s younger his eyes are EXTREMELY blue. It’s too much and too unbelievable. The scene where Pesci fixes his truck is ridiculous. You see Pesci being younger with great special effects on his face and regular looking brown eyes. Then you turn to DeNiro and his face looks okay but his eyes look like blue lights. Horrible and easy to fix mistake.
I agree with the walk though. Young DeNiro did actually walk like old DeNiro.
But you can’t really fault the whole process since Pesci and Pacino look very real with the effects.
I 100% endorse Ben's post.
Nothing about this awards season is as baffling to me as the praise and prizes for The Irishman and for DeNiro's performance as a "lock" for an Oscar nomination.
The movie is miscast (stunt-cast?) and just basically felt like warmed-over Scorcese. This film did something I never expected I'd say about a Scorcese film: it bored me.
"The first two plus hours of The Irishman feature Sheeran schmoozing with gangsters, driving a truck, performing gangster duties and eventually hits for said gangsters. All the while, he advances up the ranks because…why? Perhaps charisma and charm, but De Niro plays up precisely none of that."
Sheeran moves up in the ranks not because he's charming or charismatic, it's because he's unerringly loyal. He does exactly what he's asked to do and never questions it. His job is to kill people when asked to do so, and he excels at doing that. The whole point of his character is that he's not a particularly charismatic or interesting man; he's of value because he's willing to kill, and it's this situation that damns him and makes the final hour so tragic as we see him grow into a pathetic, lonely old man.
Can we talk about what Pacino was doing in this,too much Al as usual,only thing I saw was vaudeville.
Mmmhmm, I really struggled to get through The Irishman. De Niro neither looks 30-something nor Irish. (Those ridiculously blue contacts are almost as bad as Johnny Depp's in Black Mass.) In fact, if I hadn't read that De Niro was *supposed* to be 30-something at the beginning of The Irishman, I don't think the de-aging would've even really registered as such.
As much as I love Goodfellas, Scorcese has proven to be more of a one-trick pony within the tired, over-played gangster genre. I guess the impulse to revisit your bread and butter is understandable, but three and a half hours is so self-indulgent, which may be why major studios turned him down. (His last film, the also overlong Silence, bombed hard).
Who doesn't miss the well-paced, brisk days of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Cape Fear, and The King of Comedy?
Who cares what DeNiro looked like in the film! Didn't bother me, never took away from the story. DeNiro's performance was OK but Joe Pesci was the standout for me, MVP of the film. I enjoyed The Irishman a lot and can understand the rave reviews.
That curb-stomping scene was embarrassingly bad. The Irishman is a low point for all involved. With the inexplicable and criminally undeserving praise it keeps getting, I fear this is going to be a disappointing and long awards season (though not as disappointing and long as this never-ending lifeless movie).
They should have gotten a younger actor to play the role- I was never convince DeNiro was younger- it was distracting specially when Joe Pesci calls him kid
If you want to see DeNiro at his peak looking young hot and giving a great performance just watch "The Deer Hunter" in which the character clearly has the hots for his Christopher Walken you would think they would end up on "Brokeback Mountain". "The Irishman" is a good movie but if they had cut an hour it would have been a lot better
The real miracle for me as Joe Pesci being subtle. His entire performance was like a 180 of his past Scorses film performances. This tiny old man never raises his voice because he never has to. Pesci contained and not unhinged is somehow still frightening.
Maybe it was the FX work that made his face look the same during the first half. Facial expressions are hard to duplicate, and when he is unencumbered by this during that last half his performance does seem to improve. But I completely agree about the movement. That particular scene of him attacking a man outside the store- he was moving like a man in his 70's. De Niro is still pretty athletic but did not move like a younger man.
Paquin's performance seems to be about her presence. She has screen charisma and you can feel exactly what she is feeling onscreen, and you feel it when she is not there like Frank does. I also give De Niro credit for defending Paquin and her performance against criticism.
The whole time I was watching I did not even realize it was visual effects. It was done smoothly imo and De Niro’s best performance in years.
Preconceived notions are lazier than rewarding the obvious.
The de-aging was a massive distraction, I'm shocked that so many are finding these frail, bird-like old men convincing as men in their 30s/40s. The film itself is a slog, but much like Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood, the prestige of those involved with making it seems to disqualify the film from criticism for many.
I saw " Taxi Driver" last night - now that's a movie!
More of doing the same ^, goodness.
I apologise in advance to those who have commented above as I haven’t read any other comments; but I just had to jump in and completely disagree with the author’s points.
I just finished watching The Irishman. First up - the very thing that makes De Niro’s performance so appealing to me is that he is not acting like a a young De Niro. I found myself wanting to know about this Frank Sheeran guy not thinking: hey young De Niro didn’t look like this. Or: De Niro was so good in Taxi Driver.
Secondly, Frank Sheeran was not Travis Bickle so therefore why should he have a Travis Bickle body? He may have moved less athletically, but later on he mentions he has a degenerative back issue which could very well have been manifesting in his 30’s. Or whatever. He moves like his character moves not like a young De Niro.
Finally - the reason they all liked and trusted Frank was because he shut up, listened, showed respect to all these “tough guys” and did what the f—- he was told. That’s how De Niro played it. When he was a Teamsters President in his own right he had achieved the level of respect required to speak up, express his opinion and try to act as a mediator; and so De Niro’s performance reflected this in the final part of the film.
De Niro may no longer be the best actor in the world (having watched A Marriage Story yesterday, I’m inclined to think that may be Adam Driver) but he still capable of carrying this three hour epic and providing the centre around which all the other brilliant character actors revolve.