In a way, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is a response to Pope Francis. Long hailed as one of cinema’s most accomplished directors, Scorsese’s work is some of the most recognizable in contemporary film history. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, Casino, The Aviator, The Departed. The list goes on. This is a body of work laced with violence, pervasive language, and morally offensive scenes. But it is in such messiness that Scorsese details conflicted characters riddled with guilt and sin. Inevitably they wind up alone and spiritually bankrupt. Redemption and forgiveness linger.
The Irishman, the 3 ½ hour subdued Netflix epic from 2019, is perhaps Scorsese’s most honest and most Catholic film to date. That’s saying quite a bit. Scorsese was raised in the Catholicism of New York’s Italian-American community of the 1940s and 1950s. His 1974 documentary, Italianamerican, chronicles this. He considered the priesthood well before his foray into film. His first marriage was a traditional Catholic wedding to a childhood sweetheart. Over time, practice of his faith wavered. He married four more times. The Last Temptation of Christ from 1988 ignited controversy and condemnation, if not excommunication. He found identity with Buddhism, evidenced in his film on the Dalai Lama, Kundun (1997), which is dedicated to his late mother. Scorsese’s last narrative film before The Irishman, 2016’s Silence, was a visually stunning and thematically complex portrayal of Jesuit missionaries in Japan.
Silence showed how much Catholicism remained rooted in Scorsese, artistically. Upon the film’s release, he personally screened the film for Pope Francis, of whom Scorsese spoke highly. Fr. James Martin, S.J. was a consultant on the film, and is featured in two pre-Vatican II baptismal scenes as a priest in The Irishman. Scorsese even spoke before the pontiff at the October 2018 youth synod in Rome. “It seems the world is marked by evil,” he said. “We also see the painful human failings of the institution of the Church itself. How can we elderly people strengthen and guide the young in what they have to go through yet in life? How, Holy Father, can the faith of a young woman or man survive in this maelstrom?”
At the time of the synod, Scorsese was deep into the long editing process of The Irishman. Starring longtime Scorsese collaborators Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, with Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa, and supporting roles from Ray Romano, Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale, and Anna Paquin, Scorsese employed extensive “de-aging” to portray his characters from World War II through the 1990s. The technology has garnered most of the attention about the film, but Scorsese uses it more than a gimmick, particularly with Robert De Niro’s character, Frank Sheeran. We see how one character over decades becomes desensitized to evil, and how age and death is unavoidable even to the most-hardened criminals.
Sheeran is a classic Scorsese character. While the plot of the movie revolves around his role with the mob and association with Jimmy Hoffa, Scorsese here is far more interested in Sheeran’s soul, cloaked amid the empty glamour of gangster life. Like many who populate Scorsese’s universe, Sheeran is only nominally Catholic. He is an adulterer, divorced, remarried. He’s surrounded by bigots and racists. He’s a cold-blooded killer. And he knows it. He recognizes his failings as a human being and father. His solution to problems is a brutal curb stomping and worse.
Scorsese is often criticized for glamorizing the world of crime. In The Irishman, that beauty is a veneer. As The Irishman enters a remarkable third act, one realizes this is not just a retread of Goodfellas or Casino. While both of those films showed crime doesn’t pay, The Irishman is more morose and reflective. Sheeran’s moral conflict, as played by De Niro, is subtle and progressive. Sheeran is a dutiful soldier, and his loyalty destroys him.
How Scorsese handles the Sacrament of Confession is also subtle, and startlingly realistic. I wonder if perhaps what we were seeing was an echo of Scorsese’s own confession, if indeed he took the leap. The scene in question involves Sheeran and a young priest, played by former Catholic priest Jonathan Morris. The dynamic between Sheeran and the priest reminded me of Scorsese’s quote at the synod: “I was fortunate to have good, loving parents and an extraordinary young priest who became kind of a mentor.”
After Scorsese spoke at the synod, Pope Francis thought about Scorsese’s words: “How, Holy Father, can the faith of a young woman or man survive in this maelstrom?” Then he responded in Italian to America’s greatest living director, a Catholic son of Italian immigrants, by encouraging him to show the “wisdom of weeping,” the Catholic notion of “the gift of tears.” Francis said, “Jesus, in his most heart-felt moments of his life, wept. When he saw the failure of his people, he cried over Jerusalem.” Indeed, one of Scorsese’s early film projects was entitled Jerusalem, Jerusalem.
The pope continued, “Empathy, closeness, non-violence, tenderness, [are] all human virtues that seem small but are capable of putting an end to the most violent of events.” With the film that resulted, Martin Scorsese seemed to answer Pope Francis. The Irishman is a world of blustering cowardly men, but it is in the silence of a Catholic nursing home in which Frank Sheeran finally becomes a man.
