The Unpopular Opinion: Okay, Let's Hear From Someone Who Doesn't Like 'The Irishman'

Who will run with me as I make my forward charge and die on this hill? Actually, what we're about to attempt is more like climbing down from a national monument in the manner of North by Northwest. Scorsese is the George Washington on my Mount Rushmore of filmmakers. It goes without saying that his cinematic legacy is secure. The misgivings of one underwhelmed fan certainly can't diminish it.

Nevertheless, as I watched The Irishman — a film that has received universal acclaim — I felt the contrarian rearing up in me, chafing against the idea that it was an instant classic on par with some of his other certified masterpieces. The cynic in me, which goes hand-in-hand with the contrarian, wanted to say that critics are being soft on this movie, because it's Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro and no one wants to look bad giving their swan song a negative review when the wind is clearly blowing the other way.

De Niro, if you're not acquainted with the particulars of the plot, plays the titular Irishman, Frank Sheeran. He's a mob hitman who gets a phone call from Jimmy Hoffa, inviting him to be "a part of history" based on his house-painting reputation ("paint" being sly mob code for the blood of human targets). He jokes about his prep for killings: "Sometimes with something like this, you might want to go to the bathroom first." We understand all too well that this advice for bladder care applies to the movie, also.

I'm taking for granted that the reader knows who Jimmy Hoffa is. If you don't, perchance, not to worry. We'll address that as this goes along and the diluted power of Hoffa's name will inform how we wrap this up.

In Gangs of New York, Scorsese used Bill "The Butcher" Cutting, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, as a mouthpiece for a line from the Book of Revelation: "I know your works. They are neither cold nor hot. So because they are lukewarm, I will spew you out of my mouth." In a nutshell, that's how I feel about The Irishman. Scorsese is in a moviemaking league of his own, so you can't really judge his filmography except in relation to itself. Going by that standard, The Irishman is nothing we haven't seen from him before. This is Scorsese at his most predictable, overlong, and self-repetitive.

When I say that, it's with full acknowledgment that I'm a little blogging ant whose accomplishments in life pale in comparison to Scorsese's. To paraphrase Casablanca: "The [opinions of a movie blogger] don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Sure, I could tell you what works in The Irishmen. But the main reason we're here is for the airing of some much-needed constructive criticism with regards to Scorsese's new 3.5-hour film, which hits Netflix on November 27. Time for some tough love.

Maybe I'm just a Luddite and need to get with the times and embrace the possibility of a digitally resurrected James Dean. Or maybe there's a layer of inherent visual artifice that comes with, say, a Star Wars film, which helps muddy the field, letting you know, deep down, that most of what you're looking at is fake, so you can more easily accept its otherwise bizarre CG resurrections (Peter Cushing) and "youthifications" (Carrie Fisher passed away a week and a half after the world saw her young digital likeness pasted on a body double in Rogue One).

Whatever the case, as an Internet nobody and lifelong Scorsese and De Niro fan, albeit one who's literally half their age (they're both 76 and I'm 38), I can only fantasize about what it might have been like if The Irishman had done things the old-fashioned way and brought in Scorsese's frequent collaborator, Leonardo DiCaprio, to play the young Frank Sheeran.

Retroactive fan-casting is the last refuge of the disappointed moviegoer. At the same time, to really make this constructive criticism, it needs to have a suggestion for how to make things better, even if it's a bad one. So let's go with the idea of Leo-led flashbacks, for posterity. De Niro himself convinced us that he was the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather, Part II (this, despite taking the stage after Marlon Brando, which was no easy feat, back then).

Across five movies with Scorsese, DiCaprio has already carved out a niche as a new 21st-century De Niro of sorts, and he's an accomplished enough actor that he or another actor of his caliber might have added a more seamless human touch to this movie. With Scorsese bringing back so many of his previous collaborators for The Irishman (De Niro, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, various Vinyl and Boardwalk Empire faces), it almost feels like the gang's all here, anyway, except for DiCaprio.

Scorsese already directed De Niro and DiCaprio in a 2015 short film entitled The Audition. The 16-minute, $70-million film was bankrolled by a Chinese casino. Wikipedia tells me that it's never had a commercial release. Since most people outside Asia haven't seen it and the novelty factor's still there, imagine how brain-melting it would have been to see DiCaprio join the cast of The Irishman, in addition to all these other legendary performers. A real, flesh-and-blood actor like him, instead of a video game approximation of De Niro in a World War II helmet, would have been such a simple, graceful solution. It would have rescued this movie from expensive CG fakery and filled in a big missing face hole in the reunion pic from Scorsese's filmography.

As it is, what Scorsese gives us with The Irishman is an unglamorous return to mob movie territory, where the men's half-CG faces are now fraying at the edges, skin-walking in unnatural ways. It's as if the production itself forms a metatextual recrimination of itself, bolstering Scorsese's lesson on human frailty and mortality with the lesson that you really can't turn back the clock, even with the most advanced filmmaking techniques.

I can see where an apologist for The Irishman might use this to prop up the argument that the film's flaws are a feature, not a bug. They feed directly into its theme, you see. To that, I would counter that "the play's the thing" wherein Scorsese's own conscience, or the universe itself, perhaps, has caught him as a filmmaker. Actors aren't Benjamin Button: they can't age in reverse, and maybe it's vanity to think you can convince us otherwise in the context of a drama with an ostensibly human focus.

Since Disney owns everything now, let me hit you with a metaphor ripped straight from the animated world of DuckTales. The Irishman is Scrooge McDuck swimming in his vault of gold coins, the accumulated treasures of a filmography spent hammering home the same artistic point. At the heart of their work, most great artists have one driving impulse, an idea they keep returning to again and again. Scorsese is no different. Men are sinful yet redemption eludes them, he tells us.

So what else is new? The Irishman sees the aging auteur belaboring this point, repeating himself in a more overt fashion than he's ever perhaps done before. Parts of it feel like a Goodfellas remake, just as parts of Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street did.

When a grocer shoves Sheeran's daughter and he goes to confront the guy, we have a pretty good idea how the next scene is going to play out, because we've already seen an earlier iteration of this scene with Henry and Karen and Karen's across-the-street neighbor in Goodfellas. The Irishman winks at us when it shows sides of beef hanging in the back of a freezer truck, as if to say, "See what I'm doing here? This, too, is a callback to Goodfellas." Likewise, a tense scene in the driver's seat of a car, where a paranoid woman stops short of turning the key in the ignition, plays upon our knowledge of and nostalgia for Casino, a vastly superior film.

In this way, The Irishman cinematically recalls TV mobster Tony Soprano's perceptive notion that "remember when" is "the lowest form of conversation." It's surreal as all hell to see Scorsese reduced to that level of discourse with his audience. It's unbecoming and meta, is what it is. You might argue that, in this instance, "remember when" is all too appropriate given the plot of The Irishman ... but with so many other samey movies floating around out there in the cinematic landscape of the 2010s, did we really need one more, here at the end (and from Scorsese, of all people)?

In a weird way, watching The Irishman almost feels like seeing Scorsese show up late to a party in L.A. and start trying to dazzle the folks there with magic tricks that he's pulled from the J.J. Abrams remix bag. I like Abrams but when I go to a Scorsese film, I don't expect to see him following the same derivative playbook.

Hollywood, in general, now obeys the law of the Terminator franchise: no film but what we remake. Scorsese isn't immune to that, it seems. Sheeran's life in the nursing home recapitulates Henry Hill's life in witness protection, which itself recapitulates Jake LaMotta's post-boxing career in a Miami jail and the dressing room of a New York comedy club.

Be it the San Diego house where Ace Rothstein retires, or Jordan Belafort's New Zealand sales seminar after his minimum security prison stint, Scorsese loves to show us men who are on top of the world — who seemingly have everything they could ever want — only to lose it and go into exile. The players and the setting may change, but the basic fall-from-grace arc his characters undergo remains the same. Instead of "Die Hard in a [new location]," Scorsese likes to do "Paradise Lost in a [new context]."

Billionaire recluse Howard Hughes stands in front of the mirror, obsessively-compulsively repeating the line, "The way of the future," and he, too, is in exile. Even Rodriguez, the Jesuit priest played by Andrew Garfield in Silence, follows this arc when he becomes an apostate, forced to sit and identify Christian objects at a Dutch trading post in Nagasaki. It's as if Scorsese, the guilted Catholic and Hollywood royal, has been training his whole career for the day he forfeits his earthly paradise and enters some grey purgatory in some unknown afterlife.

Beyond the self-admitted cash grab nature of it, Scorsese's contemporary and fellow mob-movie purveyor, Francis Ford Coppola, once said that he originally conceived of The Godfather, Part III as an epilogue akin to, "The Death of Michael Corleone." The Irishman makes a similar bid for an addendum to past filmic achievements, and I'll shoot you straight: young Sofia Coppola's Valley Girl accent notwithstanding, The Godfather, Part III might actually come out looking better on this side of the table. Stick these words in the poster blurb: juxtaposed with the computer-generated floundering of The Irishman, The Godfather, Part III would easily have my vote for "best inferior mob threequel."

There's a scene in The Irishman when Sheeran's nurse sees an old photo of him with Jimmy Hoffa and doesn't know who Hoffa is. My final takeaway was that this is the film's single most important scene. The day before I saw the film, I had a similar experience in real life. I was talking to a 23-year-old co-worker of mine who is fresh out of college and hails from Ohio, and when I mentioned the names Scorsese and De Niro, she gave an unimpressed shrug, not knowing who they were.

That really burst my movie-loving bubble and put things in perspective for me as a citizen of Earth (which extends beyond the reach of Hollywood and Film Twitter, as it turns out). It made me realize that for all the accolades heaped on him, Scorsese hasn't ever quite achieved the level of household-name recognition that his more populist filmmaking contemporary, Steven Spielberg, has. As cinephiles, many of us hold him in high regard ... but not everyone on this planet is a cinephile.

The "Hoffa who?" scene highlights the fleeting nature of things we tell ourselves are important, be they our allegiances to Teamsters and mobsters or our allegiances to brand-name filmmakers. On some level, perhaps, it's Scorsese recognizing that his films have forked no lightning in the grand cosmological scheme of things. For now, at least, he can rest on his laurels as the greatest director of his generation, but that generation is fast-approaching its curtain call. He and his fellow movie brats thrived in the 1970s, but now they're in their 70s, age-wise.

Scorsese is the rare auteur who has been able to stay at the top of his game, even while playing the young man's game of moviemaking. The Irishman shows that even a modern master like him is destined to come up against his own limitations somewhere. Age is a natural limitation imposed by our bodies; perspective is another limitation that can be expanded on but that often circles back and peers through the same crusty lens filter without knowing it. Scorsese's last film, Silence, may have adhered to the same loose thematic template (woe, the plight of the fallen man), but at least it switched up the plot and setting so that it didn't just feel like it was hitting the same beats with the same stable of actors. It was refreshing to see him venture outside his usual box into a film with some new leads and Japanese actors. The Irishman sees him retreating back to the box.

I'm not going to re-litigate the whole Scorsese vs. Marvel debate here, but I will say that I read his New York Times op-ed immediately after I got out of my screening of The Irishman, and it made for an interesting afterword, or epilogue, to the movie. The essay strikes the note of a filmmaker who has already lost his big-screen paradise and entered the streaming purgatory of Netflix. It made me think both the movie and the man are grappling with obsolescence, like we saw Tarantino doing this summer in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The old guard is waving goodbye. Give it a few hundred years, and the name Scorsese might mean even less than it or Hoffa do to some people now. That's the fate of all living names, The Irishman reminds us. The grass withers, films fade. Terrence Malick — another religious filmmaker and contemporary of Scorsese's — foresaw this, too, when he opened The Tree of Life with a verse from the Book of Job: "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?" The Irishman answers that question, conclusively, by saying: I was living life in the fast lane with my buddies. We were the bad guys, but "we always called each other goodfellas." Until some of us died and my blood thinned and life slowed down and I wound up old and alone in a nursing home.