David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, new
each Friday.
APPETIZER (Reviews: The
Irishman and The Aeronauts)
The Irishman
Unlike many towns, mine got a
theatrical run of Martin Scorsese’s The
Irishman (bless the Bijou). On
the big screen it’s definitely a movie, though taffy-stretched for “epic” TV
streaming (three hours, 29 minutes). On a home screen, where I saw it again on
Netflix, it seems more uneven, episodic and time-ticking. How Scorsese is it? Very. Top Scorsese? No. It’s a Marty Gras mob rally, and something of a bloated
scrapbook. Despite Thelma Schoonmaker’s expert editing there is seldom the
potent wallop of Jonathan Hensleigh’s Scorsesean Kill the Irishman (2011).
But Marty has the old gang!
Robert De Niro is East Coast Irish hustler turned syndicate gofer, then killer
Frank Sheeran. Joe Pesci, sprung from golfing retirement, plays Frank’s Mafia “nice”
but icy mentor Russ Bufalino. Original Marty star Harvey Keitel is hood Angelo
Bruno (make that Mini Cameo). The royal recruit is Al Pacino, preening as
infamous Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic autocrat who got
“whacked,” possibly by Frank Sheeran, his bodyguard buddy. Around them is a
rogue storm of mostly ugly crooks and creeps. The veteran stars got flashback help
from digital “youthing” (no, not Pesci’s “yutes” in My Cousin Vinny). Still, as Steve Zaillian’s script hatchet opens
up the rotted wood with abrupt transitions, info bulletins and manly blasts of
macho double-speak, these guys are mostly just old. De Niro wears his sturdy, upholstered flesh well, anchoring
everything as Frank, doomed to realize that serving two corrupt overlords (Russ
and Jimmy) will make him a Judas. As he rots, Frank shows cool nerve, low
cunning, few scruples and blank silence for his family. Morally the story is a
cesspool, an ash-hole of toxic despair. The almost mute Sphinx of judgment is Frank’s
daughter Peggy (when grown, Anna Paquin). Her X-ray stares are unforgiving, and
pity is on short rations.
Stride with Scorsese in his goombah
work boots and you find predictable rewards: vulgar restaurants, barbaric
thugs, mob wives like potted plants, arias of f-talk, croon tunes (salute to
Jerry Vale), big cars to die in (don’t take the front seat!) and a brutal hit
parade – “Crazy Joe” Gallo has a stunningly fast finish, while Hoffa’s exit
gets a long, meditative prelude. Era markers flash: the Albert Anastasia hit, JFK
in confetti, Bay of Pigs, Nixon at golf, Dallas ’63. For comedy there is non-boozer
Hoffa’s love of ice cream. A solemn shot of Umberto’s Clam House is followed by
one of equal piety for the WTC towers. Pesci, using his age superbly, becomes
the toughest little clot of cynical conniving since Lee Strasberg in Godfather II. Pacino is not truck-built
for Hoffa like Jack Nicholson in Hoffa
(1992), yet he is awfully good at bristling, impatient egotism (the Trucker’s
Best Friend figured he could beat the mob and the feds).
This pizza is stuffed with
old tabloid headlines (a 1992 slice, thinner but juicy, was John Mackenzie’s Ruby, with Danny Aiello oddly touching
as Oswald assassin Jack Ruby). The
Irishman attains some visceral grip, yet in the last half hour it becomes TV
wallpaper, a dull mood-drip of Frank’s dazed, wintry guilt, with a green casket
his last gasp of Irish cockiness. Jack Goldsmith, a writer who has turned over
many rocks on Hoffa’s death, believes with key FBI agents that Sheeran did not
himself cap Hoffa. Well, as the prevailing lingo would say: wha-duh fuh. A necro-nostalgic exhumation,
this saga is no genuine comedown for Scorsese, despite being caught in the
Netflix net (streaming 24/7 also involves the choking of theaters). No pro
lasts in movies without making many deals. But does his spirit sag because he has
not equaled Coppola’s The Godfather?
“Never put a fish in the car” has a fine ring, but it doesn’t equal “Luca Brasi
sleeps with the fishes.” (Footnote:
This retro crime cafeteria has won the New York Film Critics Circle Award as
best movie of 2019. Wha-duh fuh.)
The Aeronauts
One of my boyhood thrills was seeing Fogg (David
Niven) and Passepartout (Cantinflas) aloft in a balloon over Paris and then the
glistening Pyrenees, in Around the World in 80 Days. Mike Todd’s hit, in
essence a deluxe travelog, was named Oscar’s best movie of 1956 (few watch it
now, but the bravura end-credits are still witty). The Aeronauts uses elements from Richard Holmes’s book Falling Upwards, mostly a gutsy 1862
flight in a coal-gas balloon by England’s James Gleisher and Henry Coxwell. More
than Todd’s episodic epic, it has the Victorian storybook charm of the Jules
Verne adventures. Eager, red-faced Eddie Redmayne has the role of young
scientist Gleisher, seeking to fathom weather by rising high. Felicity Jones,
as Amelia Wren, has womanized Coxwell’s job as the bold pilot. Her mourning a dead
husband, the balloonatic Pierre, is based on the French spouse of English lighter-than-air
pioneer Sophie Blanchard.
Director Tom Harper (of the BBC’s War and Peace) and adapter Jack Thorne make it all work. From the
entry of plucky, gung-ho Amelia, with dog and fireworks, the film treats early aerial
science as retro but fresh entertainment. CGI enhancements of sky, storm, clouds
and a Turner-worthy London sustain beautifully the seven mile rise and then
descent. Increasingly cold high-sky spaces are poetic, as when the balloon’s
shadow, circled by a rainbow aureole, is seen on a radiant cloud. You might
wonder about limited clothing and no parachutes (Gleisher was a fanatic to cut
cargo weight). This movie achieves genuine wonder and daring, without camping into
ye olde tech-kitsch like Irwin Allen’s silly Verne lark Five Weeks in a Balloon. It is much closer to the fable power of
Albert Lamorisse’s Parisian classic The
Red Balloon. Amelia pulls off nearly all of the rugged derring-do, so if
you have girls from about 8 on up, take them (boys, too).
SALAD (A List)
My 15
Favorite Gangster Movies
Marvels of organized crime (with star, director, year):
The Godfather (Marlon Brando, Coppola, 1972), Point Blank (Lee Marvin, Boorman, 1967), Scarface (Paul Muni, Hawks, 1932), Drunken Angel (Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa, 1948), White Heat (James Cagney, Walsh, 1949), Casino (Robert De Niro, Scorsese, 1995),
Little Caesar (Edward G. Robinson,
LeRoy, 1931), Ruby (Danny Aiello, Mackenzie,
1992), Le Samourai (Alain Delon, Melville,
1967), Godfather Part II (Robert De
Niro, Coppola, 1974), Key Largo (Bogart/Robinson, Huston, 1948), Al Capone (Rod Steiger, Wilson, 1959), Eastern Promises (Viggo Mortensen, Cronenberg, 2007), Mafioso (Alberto Sordi, Lattuada, 1962)
and Blast of Silence (Allen Baron,
Baron, 1961).
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
If
Frank Sheeran was a Judas to Hoffa, he certainly never heard the Judas take of
Orson Welles: “I think that Judas was the most passionately committed disciple,
and that he betrayed Jesus in order to fulfill the prophecies. Well, that’s my
theory. I think he took the 30 pieces of silver to convince the Romans that it
was a genuine sellout. I think he’s the greatest martyred saint of them all. At
least I had a play written on that basis once.” (From Barbara Leaming’s
indispensable Orson Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
Like
gangsters for laffs, Max (Zero Mostel) and Leo (Gene Wilder) are convicted for
bilking mostly very old ladies to finance their Broadway musical Springtime for Hitler. When the show is
a smash “the producers become convicts (and) soon cons are belting ‘Prisoners
of love/ Blue skies above/ Can’t keep our hearts in jail!’ Sing Sing never sang
better.” (From the Mostel/The Producers
chapter of my book Starlight Rising:
Acting Up in Movies, available from Amazon, Nook and Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A fine movie
image is more than a still, it’s a distillation.
Crime
king Rico (Edward G. Robinson) plugs another dapper tough in Little Caesar (Warner Bros. 1931;
director Mervyn LeRoy, d.p. Tony Gaudio).
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