‘Irishman’ a throwback to Scorsese’s golden age

“The Irishman” is a melancholy ode to the Mob. It feels like a memory play about the not-so-good old days when being a mobster meant the drudgery of mechanically carrying out violent tasks that seemed more compulsive than meaningful.

Netflix shelled out a record $150 million to finance Martin Scorsese’s riveting yet deeply introspective farewell to the mobster genre he helped usher into the 1970s. The movie is a majestic, pulse-pounding epic that is also startlingly intimate. It lacks the nihilism of “Goodfellas” (1990), but that picture was a different animal. A quiet feeling of sorrow lingers here a long time after the credits roll.

Steven Zaillian’s thoughtfully constructed script is based on the life of Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman whose memoirs were collected and adapted by lawyer Charles Brandt into the 2004 book “I Hear You Paint Houses,” code for a hired killer.

Sheeran (Robert De Niro) was a Philadelphia meat delivery truck driver who was influenced by two Mob bosses, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and Angelo Bruno (Harvey Keitel). Among the movie’s many intriguing implications is that Sheeran’s time fighting in Italy in World War II and an appetite for following orders without question or conscience turned around his moral compass. Sheeran was the go-to guy if somebody wanted the dirty work done. He ended up working for Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), leader of the powerful Teamsters Union, with deep ties to America’s criminal organizations.

Rodrigo Prieto’s smooth, elegant camerawork fits perfectly with Scorsese’s signature visual style. The violence explodes in short, sharp bursts. Zaillian’s script realistically dramatizes the details of mobster business, including a lesson in what to do when the target of a hit flees, seriously wounded, from a restaurant to the street.

In this sense, “The Irishman” harkens back to Scorsese’s golden age of “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull” and “Goodfellas.” This movie reunites two of Scorsese’s greatest actors, De Niro and Pesci, and adds Pacino, who has never worked with Scorsese before. It’s like watching the Mount Rushmore of cinematic mobster lore together for the last time.

De Niro and Pacino haven’t been choosing quality scripts recently, while Pesci is today best remembered as the comic con man of the “Lethal Weapon” series. But here, Scorsese has lit a fire in their bellies again. These are powerhouse performances. De Niro is quiet and sturdy, which conveys Frank’s menacing presence. Pacino feels more alive than he’s been in years and his acting here never collapses into self-parody. Pesci is a revelation; his Russell Bufalino is at his most powerful when he doesn’t say a word. An imperceptible nod of the head and a quick flash of the eye is enough to seal a man’s doom.

“The Irishman,” at nearly three and a half hours, is direct and intense, but it’s different from what Scorsese has done before. The opening tracking shot is not of a casino or nightclub crackling with energy, but through the hushed, austere white corridor of a nursing home, where Frank tells his anecdotes directly, sometimes disturbingly, to Scorsese’s incisive camera. In a way. Scorsese has made his wiseguys more human. Some live long lives, some die young, some go to prison and still others watch helplessly as their worlds crumble around them. “The Irishman” tells us, in ways more elegiac than in any of Scorsese’s earlier movies, that a mobster’s most terrifying executioner is advancing age.