“It is a landscape of the terminally ordinary, here made splendid,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien in his Criterion essay.
I think it’s also the case that The Irishman is the longest and most expensive of all the films I’ve mentioned, and the least accomplished. My problem with The Irishman is that it has much the same feel, with less glamorous trappings. But in both Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street that glitziness made sense because those movies were dealing with a slick and glitzy world (casinos, high finance). In my notes on Casino I mentioned how it was seen as being the third part of a trilogy of mob movies made by Martin Scorsese, the first two being Mean Streets and Goodfellas, and that it showed a further development toward a “slick and glitzy” direction Scorsese was heading in with Casino and The Wolf of Wall Street. I guess the way to begin is by backing up a few steps.
