Who is popular today?

Martin Scorsese has distilled a lifetime of expertise into this outstanding meditation on the mafia, ageing and the loss of agency
‘Three people can keep a secret only when two of them are dead.” This is the maxim of slot-mouthed hitman Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, the wintry and minor-key crime-conspiracy epic adapted for the screen by Steven Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s bestseller and directed by Martin Scorsese: produced by him and his star Robert De Niro, along with his longtime producing colleagues Irwin Winkler, Jane Rosenthal and Emma Tillinger Koskoff.
The three people with the terrible secret in this film are first Frank himself, second Russell Bufalino, the lizardly and quietly-spoken mafioso played by Joe Pesci, who brokers Frank’s promotion within the Teamsters union in the early 1960s, and third, the legendary Teamsters boss and Frank’s own father figure, Jimmy Hoffa, who famously disappeared in 1975: an ebullient, narcissistic grandstander played by Al Pacino. It is only when two of them are dead – Bufalino from complications following a stroke, and Hoffa from complications following getting shot in the back of the head – that poor Frank feels himself aware that he can unburden himself, if he wants, about the terrible secret that has been metastasizing inside him. Continue reading...