Made Men

by Glenn Kenny

  One infers that Smith is being at least one-quarter facetious here. He’s a conservative, so he can’t really believe that the criminal path is an ultimately desirable way of life. I guess.

  But his how-is-it-funny argument is rooted in a fallacy, the one where the guys “will always have your back.” Always have your back as in Tuddy Cicero shooting you in the back of the head? Or, conversely, as in ratting out your former crew to save your skin?

  Smith’s insistence on seeing the film strictly as a male fantasy is in keeping with an overall attitude among a large percentage of contemporary reviewers: that film is not really an art, or “art” form with potentially universal or at least broad-scale pertinence. That it ought not be taken too seriously. Smith ends his piece with a speculation:

  “What would GoodFellas be like if it were told by a woman?

  “Meet an at-risk youth called Henry Hill. Victimized by horrific physical abuse from an early age, and traumatized by the responsibilities of caring for a handicapped brother, he fell prey to criminal elements in his rough East New York neighborhood in a time when social-services agencies were sadly lacking. At an impressionable age, he became desensitized to violence when a gunshot victim bled to death in front of a restaurant where he was working. His turn to the Mafia was a cry for help—a need to find a family structure to replace the one he had never really known.

  “And who would want to watch that movie?”

  The general misogyny on display notwithstanding, this ignores the fact that the Martin Scorsese picture Goodfellas is a story that is to a not-insignificant degree told by women. Thelma Schoonmaker. Barbara De Fina. Kristi Zea. Lorraine Bracco. And so on. Smith insults them all.

  * * *

  In 2019 the online publication The Ringer posted a video program called “Shea Serrano’s 15 Best Gangster Movie Moments.” Meant as a promotional tool for Serrano’s book Movies (And Other Things), it offers precisely what its title promises. Serrano is primarily a sportswriter who came to prominence via Grantland, a website founded by Bill Simmons, who had been a columnist for ESPN. Both men are what you might call polymaths, or multimedia enthusiasts; in any event, they both apply a dudes-talking-about-the-game informality to all their discourse, regardless of the topic. As the title of Serrano’s book suggests (this volume is a follow-up to Serrano’s bestseller Basketball (And Other Things); you see a pattern emerging here) movies are a frequent topic.

  “We’re going to draft actual moments from the movies,” as in an NBA draft, Serrano says at the video’s opening, after which he lists a few of the arbitrary rules he’s applying as a form of diktat. One of these is there can be no Robert De Niro moments among these moments, because then you’d have nothing but Robert De Niro moments. Another is that there will be no films prior to The Godfather because while “Gangster movies stretch all the way back to the 1930s...we’re not going to include those movies in there because most of those movies aren’t that much fun to watch.”

  His pals, internet personalities Van Lathan, Lilliam Rivera, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan, all chiming in via cutaways, raise mild objections—Ryan tries to stick up for older movies—but it’s Serrano’s show. When I say informality, I do not kid; discussing the film New Jack City, Serrano refers to its protagonist as “the main person.” The video runs a clip from American Gangster and follows it with Serrano describing the action of the clip—inaccurately. The panel hits on some truths; Charles Stone III’s Paid in Full is indeed an underrated gem.

  But overall “15 Moments” provides arguable proof that cinema is a failed art form. Serrano and his crew reduce movies to anthologies of “cool” or shocking moments, as opposed to fictions whose circumscribed worlds aspire to create beauty or sorrow or horror or joy in some formally coherent whole.

  As when Serrano drones, “The number eight pick is the ‘hand or foot’ scene from City of God,” a scene in which poverty-ridden children are goaded into shooting one another. “How do you pick that, Shea?” Lilliam Rivera says, laughing nervously.

  In any event: “The number three pick is when Joe Pesci was ‘funny like a clown’ in Goodfellas,” Serrano says. “Joe Pesci again”—he was previously featured in a Casino clip—“doing all of the things that Joe Pesci does, but this is the best version of him that we saw...ever. He’s leaning on Ray Liotta, he is, again, intimidating a guy, but finally we get to watch him do it, with one of his friends, as a joke.”

  “That could be the greatest scene in movie history,” Van says.

  “I don’t really understand how the Mafia works,” Amanda says.

  “My cousin’s like that,” Lilliam says.

  Chris Ryan says, “For as much as Goodfellas is always zipping around, the camera’s always moving, the cutting, the voice-over, the music, it’s very cinematic”—!!!—“Scorsese just kinda gets out of the way and lets life play out.”

  The “it’s very cinematic” stuff and the “Scorsese gets out of the way” observations (as if the scene directed itself) notwithstanding, Ryan’s point manages to reach the heart of the matter for Scorsese: getting life into the frame. For better or worse. Even if it’s suicide.

  * * *

  After The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese, so much of a player by this point that he was neck-deep in HBO documentaries and series, ad work, and other endeavors that, among other things, paid his office overhead (which is not small), stopped entertaining offers for feature films and dug in his heels. He was going to make Silence, a movie whose gestation period had by this time been longer than The Last Temptation of Christ, before he made anything else.

  Based on a 1966 novel by Shuˉsaku Endoˉ, the story of seventeenth-century Portuguese Catholic missionaries suffering persecution in Japan had been adapted into a film twice already, once by a Japanese director, then by a Portuguese one. Scorsese had read the novel in 1989 and its themes, not just of faith but of doctrine, stuck. He scripted the movie with Jay Cocks. In 2012, as it had been for almost the past twenty years, it was a movie Hollywood had zero interest in. (Might that have been the case had there been a way to get De Niro or DiCaprio in its cast? One can’t really say.) Irwin Winkler came back into the fold (as he had been on Wolf), and tightening a variety of belts, Scorsese was able to make the complex, multilocation movie on a $50 million budget. It was distributed in the US by Paramount, and flopped; while for the most part critically praised, it is referred to by some younger assessors as Scorsese’s “boring priest movie,” and, again, summarily dismissed by those invested in characterizing Scorsese as only a director of gangster movies.

  * * *

  The Irishman (2019) is, of course, a gangster movie, and one that fits very snugly in the lineage of Goodfellas. Casino wasn’t definitely the last one, after all. This movie’s impetus was multi-headed. First, Scorsese and De Niro had not made a film together since Casino, and there was a feeling, on the part of director and actor, not to mention corners of the industry—not to mention a movie fandom that had grown more conspicuously vocal since the internet’s amplifications of such entities—that this might not be a bad idea. An adaptation of the 2006 Don Winslow hit-man novel The Winter of Frankie Machine was floated, to the extent that the project was greenlit by Paramount. As the title suggests, this was a look at a criminal lion in winter; both Scorsese and De Niro were interested in exploring old age in their work together. Scorsese was already looking at pictures such as Jean Becker’s Touchez-pas le grisbi, in which Jean Gabin plays a gang leader contending with certain modes of obsolescence.

  But then De Niro read Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses. The ostensibly nonfiction volume chronicled the life of Frank Sheeran, a teamster in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s who, to Brandt, confided that he had killed Jimmy Hoffa, the labor leader whose 1975 disappearance has never been officially solved. Brandt’s book is slightly in the mode of Pileggi’s Wiseguy, but it’s not as good. It feels unvetted, it has no index; this and other
features of the account fed into complaints about it (which accelerated mightily after it was made into a big-budget, all-star Martin Scorsese movie, of course) from other true-crime writers, and some survivors of the events described therein. Scorsese and De Niro have both stated that the veracity of the book was not their primary concern. (They did make a fiction film, in any event.) They felt this material had an even stronger potential than Winslow’s for what they were increasingly seeking to convey.

  Sheeran’s confessions to Brandt were made in old age; they unwittingly added up to a grim portrait of a “greatest generation” assassin (Sheeran bluntly states that his service in World War II taught him to kill without getting too worked up over it) who did as he was told. Not only by a mob boss like Russell Buffalino, but by society. He got married, raised children, and tried to “protect” them...without ever questioning what he was doing, or what he was doing it for. There was money, there was some comfort, there was power (meted out in small portions), and there was work, which he did without much reflection. Up to the point where he was ordered to kill the man whom he considered a close friend—and he did it. Sheeran tells Brandt about his estrangement from one of his children. Trying to reflect on his works before he dies, Sheeran can dredge up very little. He’s a cipher.

  This personality and its circumstances provided riches for Scorsese, De Niro, screenwriter Steven Zaillian, and subsequent cast members such as Al Pacino, who plays Hoffa, and Joe Pesci. (The “getting the gang back together” aspect of the film was also part of its draw. Most specifically the teaming of icons De Niro and Pacino, who both appeared in The Godfather Part II, but had only been on-screen together in two other films: Michael Mann’s landmark 1995 Heat—an epic crime picture whose tone is the ice to Goodfellas’ fire, you could say—and the entirely less distinguished Righteous Kill in 2008.)

  During the making and editing of The Irishman, several friends and colleagues of Scorsese said to me, “It’s not Goodfellas.” This is true, but it has many more affinities with Goodfellas than it does with, say, When Harry Met Sally. After seeing it I began thinking of it as Goodfellas strained through Silence. Not just in terms of themes, but style. This is not a film with Goodfellas’ “zippiness.” And that’s not just because it’s a film about old men, made by old men (old men who are frequently de-aged via a complicated technology, the results of which were largely, but not unanimously, deemed successful by critics and viewers).

  At any of his ages, De Niro’s Frank Sheeran is not a good-time guy like Henry Hill, or the other wiseguys of Scorsese’s 1990 movie. Sheeran doesn’t much laugh, and doesn’t much make others laugh. He doesn’t fire a shotgun into the sky after hijacking a truck. He doesn’t try to keep a mistress. Instead, after having two children with one wife—just because it’s the done thing—he meets a woman he likes better, divorces his first wife, marries the other woman, and stays married to her. There is nothing raucous about him. Aside from killing and stealing, the most he misbehaves is in dipping prosciutto bread into red wine with his friend and sponsor Russell. (Scorsese and Zaillian relieved Sheeran in the film of the alcoholism he suffered from in real life, correctly intuiting it would cloud the issues they wanted to foreground.) The movie is at its most crushing when it adds everything up, once Sheeran is looking at the end of it all.

  Mortality, death—it’s the no-exit exit, the inescapable...um, dead end. This is known to all, you’d think. The aim of The Irishman, then, is to compel the viewer to feel that, to confront it. To question where you might be when you get to the terminal, and how you’ll feel when you get there. So, yes, another “boy movie.”

  In a January 15, 2019, interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, host Terry Gross brought up the opening Steadicam shot of The Irishman, which goes through the hallway of a nursing home before locating a wheelchair-bound Sheeran. She seems to take it as a refutation of the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas. Scorsese is slightly dumbfounded: “It’s not like now I look back and I realize gangsters are bad. I know they’re bad!”

  * * *

  Scorsese has spoken of The Irishman as a culmination. Not merely of the gangster theme in his movies. Where Sheeran is unreflective, the movie itself is profoundly reflective. Another thing Scorsese said to Terry Gross was that the theme of hospitals and/or nursing homes was one that resonated deeply with him because at this point in his life he spent a lot of time visiting them. Sitting in waiting rooms.

  The work is an attempt to come to terms. But The Irishman is not his last film. As the writing of this book finished up, Scorsese hoped to be in Oklahoma, shooting Killers of the Flower Moon, adapted from a book by David Grann, and starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro—the first time these actors have worked together since 1993’s This Boy’s Life, made when DiCaprio was in his late teens.

  * * *

  Scorsese’s persistence resembles that of the character he played in Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams: Vincent van Gogh. In the movie, a young Japanese man of the twentieth century, a Kurosawa surrogate, meets an uninterested, abrupt Van Gogh in a wheat field as the great artist chases not just inspiration, but means. “The sun! It compels me to paint!” Scorsese/Van Gogh exclaims. And he storms away. Following the light.

  EPILOGUE

  MARTIN SCORSESE,

  MARCH 2020

  On the evening of September 18, 2018, I got an email from Jenna Chasanoff, a publicist with the firm 42 West, with the heading “Book Proposal.” The text of the email read, “Hi, Glenn—Marty has approved this. Please keep us posted on your next steps. Thanks!”

  This was most welcome news. While this project had not been conceived or pitched as an “authorized” account, obviously securing Scorsese’s cooperation was crucial. I had some big ideas. I would request three interviews, each focusing on a specific aspect of Goodfellas, that is, preproduction, shooting, and editing. I would ask to sit down with Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker and screen the film, in Scorsese’s office screening room, and ask about specific shots. In the almost thirty years since I first met Scorsese while he was editing Goodfellas, I had interviewed him a number of times, and had commissioned and edited an essay he wrote about the careers of Robert Mitchum and Jimmy Stewart shortly after those two icons of classic Hollywood had died. (This was all for Premiere magazine, where I was an editor and writer for over ten years, until the publication folded in 2007.) During these encounters I found that we had an easy rapport.

  My research for this book had begun in earnest just as Scorsese began postproduction work on The Irishman. In this phase of his career, Scorsese and Schoonmaker work on editing over the course of a year or so. In the case of The Irishman, the process was complicated by the digital technology that had to be applied to alter the appearance of the principal actors, who are depicted at various ages. In the case of Robert De Niro, who plays the lead character Frank Sheeran, he goes from a World War II soldier in his twenties to an increasingly feeble nursing-home patient in his seventies, at least. De Niro himself is in his hardy mid-seventies.

  And once The Irishman was finished, Netflix, the streaming service which backed the picture, would be rolling it out and promoting it. For its premiere at the New York Film Festival, the company even compelled the reclusive Joe Pesci to appear. The press conference following the screening featured much bonhomie and hilarity between Scorsese, De Niro, and Al Pacino, but the funniest moment was when moderator Kent Jones asked Pesci if he wished to recount how he had gotten involved in the project, and Pesci smiled (tightly) and said, “No.” And that was it.

  Scorsese was then obliged to spend a lot of time on the West Coast, to campaign for his film during awards season. While highly praised by critics, and deemed a success by Netflix, the movie did not garner much in terms of statuettes. What was the reason? I’m not an Oscar expert—my attitude toward the awards show is pretty much in line with what David Foster Wallace wrote in his essay “Big Red Son,” that is, “Underneath it all, though, we kno
w the whole thing sucks” (there was a lot more prefacing this obviously, but you might just want to read the whole thing of your own volition)—but two potential contributions to what some called a “backlash” were the social media participants fuming over Anna Paquin’s minimal dialogue in the film (a lot of really ridiculous “Scorsese silences women” takes out there), and film industry and “fanboy” resentment over Scorsese’s entirely reasonable comments concerning big-budget superhero movies, his view that they did not constitute “cinema” as he himself understood it. This moronic controversy climaxed when Disney CEO Bob Iger, whose pestilent corporation owns and finances films in the Marvel franchise and the Star Wars franchise, tut-tutted Scorsese and announced that he intended to take Scorsese to task at a “meeting.” Iger announced he would leave his position some months after this. When the time came for my meeting, I somehow neglected to ask Scorsese whether this summit had taken place.

  That time came on March 9, 2020, after much hurried juggling of appointments. Scorsese was preparing to start shooting Killers of the Flower Moon on location in Oklahoma. He and his staff at his production company, Sikelia, were also preparing to move their office, from the building that also houses the Directors Guild headquarters on West 57th Street, to a building several blocks east.

  The office was quiet when I arrived in the late afternoon. I was greeted by Luis DeJesus, an intern at Sikelia who, it also so happened, was in 2017 a student in my Language of Film class at New York University, where I am an adjunct professor. We had a pleasant chat in the screening room. The office in general feels, in the Monty Python term, “very woody” and is of course decorated by many vintage movie posters. Soon I met in person Lisa Frechette and Jana Heaton, the two Sikelia people with whom I’d been negotiating the interview for many months.