The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Martin Scorsese · a film · 2019 · 209 minutes · the one cut, as released · screenplay by Steven Zaillian, from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses
Mode
Gangster chronicle turned elegy; confession, labour history and a study of obedience carried in one telling
Mythos
The friend who betrays the friend who loves him; the servant between two fathers, who must kill one for the other; confession without contrition, and an absolution that fails
Phase
From a meat truck in Philadelphia in the 1950s to Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975, held inside a car journey of that year, and both inside an old man’s telling in a nursing home, which the film reaches and ends in
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 209 minutes, in one cut; Rodrigo Prieto’s photography, Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, Robbie Robertson’s music; the principal actors digitally de-aged through most of its length; a freeze-frame caption giving each gangster’s death as he enters
Register
Anecdote and deadpan for two hours, then a cold and administrative dread, then age; violence quick, flat and without pleasure
Scale
One obedient man, two fathers, a union, a crime family and the state, across half a century and down to the choice of a coffin
Governing Proposition
An old man in a nursing home tells how he drove a meat truck, killed for a quiet boss, worked for a loud one who ran the Teamsters, and, when the two could no longer share him, shot the loud one in an empty house in Detroit. The film tells it inside a car journey toward a wedding and inside the old man’s telling, so that every scene is already a memory of the dead. Its wager is that a gangster picture, made at three and a half hours by the director who taught the genre its pleasures, can turn those pleasures into obituaries, and make the viewer live through time until time is shown to be the sentence: a life of obedience ending in a solitude it cannot even recognise as punishment.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a camera moving down a corridor in a nursing home, past the old, until it finds one of them. Frank Sheeran, played by Robert De Niro, is very old now, and he begins to tell his story, to the camera or to someone the film does not show. In Goodfellas Scorsese’s camera once followed a young man and his girl through a kitchen into a nightclub, and the life opened in front of them. Here the same kind of shot walks among the dying. Before any of the story has been told, the film has said where it ends, and who is left to tell it.
What follows is built in three nested times. The outer frame is the old man in the home. Inside it is a car journey in 1975: Frank and Russell Bufalino, played by Joe Pesci, drive with their wives toward a family wedding in Detroit, stopping along the road so the women can smoke. Inside that is the long past, from Frank’s years driving a meat truck in Philadelphia in the 1950s, through his work for Russell and for Jimmy Hoffa, played by Al Pacino, to Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975. The middle frame converges on the long past at the day of the killing. After it the film runs forward with no frame at all, until it reaches the nursing home and ends there. Every past event is a memory of a dead man, told by a dying one.
The screenplay, by Steven Zaillian, comes from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses (2004). Rodrigo Prieto photographed the film, Thelma Schoonmaker edited it and Robbie Robertson wrote the music, with Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Stephen Graham, Jesse Plemons and Anna Paquin in the company. It was produced for Netflix, first shown on the opening night of the New York Film Festival on 27 September 2019, given a limited run in cinemas from 1 November and released on the service on 27 November: 209 minutes, in colour, in one cut. The book, and the disputed truth of Sheeran’s claims about Hoffa, are not part of the work. The film is a fiction built on a confession, whatever the confession’s truth.
Movement II
Frank starts as a driver, hauling meat in Philadelphia, and passes into the service of Russell, the quiet one, who never needs to raise his voice to be obeyed. He brings to the work a grammar he learned in the war in Italy, where he killed men who had dug their own graves because he was told to. The film shows him carrying that grammar into peacetime without friction. The jobs are done, the money is paid, and nothing in his face registers a difference between an order in uniform and an order in peacetime. Pesci plays Russell almost without movement, a stillness unlike anything he had done before, and the quiet becomes the film’s moral weather.
As each gangster enters, the image freezes and a caption gives his name, and the date and manner of his death. The device is comic at first, a deadpan footnote to a lively scene, and the first hours are full of comedy: anecdote, quarrel and men arguing over a fish carried in a car. But every caption is an obituary written over a first appearance. The film’s jokes are told among men already marked, and the viewer, who reads the marks, laughs in the shadow of an ending the men cannot see. The captions that are jokes here will be the same fact as the coffin at the close.
The principal actors are made young by digital means across the decades, and the film asks the technique to carry most of its length. It does not wholly succeed. The faces sit oddly on bodies that move like old men’s, most plainly when Frank beats a grocer and stamps on his hand. His daughter Peggy sees it as a child. She will say almost nothing for the rest of his life, and from this scene on her silence is built as the film’s judgment on him, the one witness who does not forgive what she has seen.
Movement III
Frank goes to work for Hoffa, who runs the Teamsters, as well as for Russell, and stands between two fathers: the quiet one who gives orders by not raising his voice, and the loud one who cannot stop raising it. Pacino’s Hoffa is the noisy centre of the film, vain, funny and furious, quarrelling over punctuality, and his excess is right for the man. Frank comes to love him. Through Hoffa the film reaches outward into the orders it holds: the union and its drivers, the pension fund that the mob draws on, the Kennedys, a Senate investigation and a presidential pardon. The union is the reason for everything that follows.
Here the form loosens. The middle hour runs by the logic of chronicle rather than the film’s own. The Bay of Pigs truck run and the Kennedy business pass at a glance and could go without loss; Hoffa’s rivalry with Tony Pro makes its one point, that his pride will not bend, several times over; convention scenes and a testimonial dinner are assembled rather than required. The comedy keeps the hour alive, and the captions keep it shadowed. But for a stretch the film carries events instead of knowing them, and in a work whose knowledge is time, an hour spent on chronicle is a cost.
Out of the chronicle the one necessary fact emerges. Hoffa’s pride will not bend, and the union, the reason for everything, makes him a problem the quiet father will solve. Frank cannot keep both fathers, and the film lets the viewer see the choice forming before Frank admits it. It never shows him deliberate. The servant does not choose between his fathers; he is told which one he will keep, and obeys, and the betrayal of the friend by the friend who loves him becomes the point toward which the whole construction converges.
Movement IV
The car journey of 1975 now returns as the present the past has been running toward. Two couples drive toward a wedding; the wives want to stop to smoke, and the men let them. The stops are comic and slow, and their slowness is the dread, since everyone in the car but the wives understands what the trip is for. At a roadside stop Russell has a quiet word with Frank. Nothing is raised, and everything is settled. The suspended time of the road has placed the viewer inside the car, approaching an act the film has prepared for three hours.
Frank flies to Detroit and back. In between, Hoffa is driven to an empty house, and in its hallway Frank shoots him twice. A cleaning crew comes in. Frank flies home. The killing of a friend is shown as an errand, quick, flat and administrative, without music to lift it or pleasure to excuse it, and that is the source of its cold terror. The film does not let the viewer stand outside the obedience, because the obedience has no inside: nothing in Frank resists, and so there is nothing for the camera to find.
Then the cost begins to show. Frank calls Hoffa’s wife after the disappearance, to say what a friend would say, and a man who kills easily cannot finish a sentence. The obedience that has carried him through every order has no words for this call. The middle frame has done its work: from here the film runs forward with no frame, and what it runs into is not punishment but age.
Movement V
The last forty minutes contain nothing but time. The men grow old; Russell, in prison and frail, cannot chew his bread. The captions’ promises are kept one by one. Frank, alone, chooses a coffin and a burial vault. Peggy will not see him. He goes to confession with a priest and says the words, and the film shows that he cannot feel what he confesses: the absolution is offered, and it does not reach him, because the grammar he lived by has no word for the thing he did.
In the home, at the end, as the priest goes, Frank asks him to leave the door open. The last shot is seen through the gap: an old man alone in a room, with nothing left of the life but the telling. The film has made the viewer live through three and a half hours so that this room can be felt as their sum. A shorter film could not know it, because what it knows is that time is the sentence, and that a man who obeyed all his life can serve it without recognising it as punishment.
The film received ten Academy Award nominations in the 2019 cycle and won none. It became the case for the streaming service as patron of the expensive auteur film, and the case in the dispute over theatrical windows; its de-ageing became the reference point, praised and mocked, for that technique. Readings have gathered around it as Scorsese’s reckoning with his own genre and as a Catholic film of failed contrition. What it adds to the gangster cinema its maker shaped is an ending: the captions turned to obituaries, the voice-over given to the last survivor, the nightclub walk turned into a corridor of the old.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure and on the length, which is argued, and argued well where it matters. The last forty minutes after the killing, in which nothing happens but age, are compelled by the whole: Russell in prison unable to chew his bread, Frank choosing a coffin and a burial vault, a daughter who will not see him. Without them the film is another rise and fall. The car journey is required too, since its slowness is the dread. The subtractive test bites in the middle hour, on about a tenth of the film. The Bay of Pigs truck run and the Kennedy business are glancing and could go without loss; Hoffa’s rivalry with Tony Pro makes its one point, that his pride will not bend, several times over; some convention and testimonial-dinner scenes are assembled rather than required. In a film whose knowledge is time, an hour that spends time on chronicle is a real cost, and the figure carries it.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a life of obedience, in which loyalty is a set of orders received, ends in a solitude it cannot even recognise as punishment. Frank learned in the war to kill men who had dug their own graves because he was told to, and the film shows him carrying that grammar into peacetime without friction; the killing of a friend is shown as an errand. The truest disclosure is in the last act. He goes to confession and cannot feel what he confesses; he calls Hoffa’s wife after the disappearance and cannot speak; his daughter Peggy, who saw him beat a grocer when she was a child, withholds herself for the rest of his life, and her near-silence is the film’s verdict. Image and sound carry it fully: the old man’s face, the door left ajar. Held at the figure because the social disclosure, union pension money with the mob and the state entwined, is real but familiar from the genre.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The film refuses elevation by design for most of its length. Its manner is anecdote and deadpan, the comedy of men arguing over a fish carried in a car, and through the first two hours it is lively rather than elevated. It rises late, and then repeatedly: the drive to the empty house in Detroit and the two shots in its hallway, a cold dread the more terrible for being administrative; the telephone call to Hoffa’s wife; Russell’s decline; the old man alone, asking the priest to leave the door open, and the last shot seen through the gap. These are summits of a quiet and dreadful kind, and they count. But the axis weighs frequency with height, and two hours of a film of three and a half pass almost without a summit. The figure is the late height, discounted by that long level stretch.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The betrayal of the friend by the friend who loves him is load-bearing: the whole construction converges on the hallway, and the car journey is built as a road to the sacrifice. Frank stands between two fathers, Russell the quiet one and Hoffa the loud one, and must kill one for the other; the pattern of Judas is there without allusion, built rather than named. The confession frame and the priest make the Catholic structure of sin and absolution part of the architecture, and the absolution fails. Peggy, the silent child who will not love the father, has the shape of Cordelia. What holds the axis below the gate is that the archetype is built but narrow. The film makes one man’s fall the pattern of every obedient servant, not a figure who grows larger than himself as Kane or Michael Corleone does. Frank is deliberately small, and the figure records the choice.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The departure is from Scorsese’s own manner more than from the genre. The tracking shot that opens the film turns the Copacabana shot of Goodfellas into a walk among the dying; the voice-over that once sold the life now comes from a man who has outlived everyone; the freeze-frame captions that once introduced a crew now issue obituaries; violence is quick, flat and without pleasure. That is a real turn against his own most imitated idiom, and the stake was large: an unproven technique for de-ageing three leads across decades, a running time no studio would release, and a budget the studios declined, which took the film to a streaming service and kept it from most large cinema chains. What holds the axis down is the form. The elegiac gangster epic had been made before, by Coppola in The Godfather Part II among others, and in genre terms the wager is placed on a proven path: the turn is against one director’s idiom, not against the form he inherited.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The three nested times make every past event already a memory of a dead man told by a dying one. The car journey places the viewer in suspended time, approaching an act that everyone in the car but the wives understands. The freeze-frame captions convert each living gangster into his own death notice the moment he appears, so that the comedy is shadowed throughout by the ending. Duration is the instrument: three and a half hours make the viewer live through time until the last act cashes it as age, and a shorter film could not know that time is the sentence. The withholding of Frank’s inner life is formal too, since the man who obeys has no interior to show. Held below the top by the middle hour, where the form loosens into chronicle and carries events rather than knowing them.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Seven years of evidence, so the axis is mostly forecast, and a forecast weighs less than a record. The forecast is good. The film has already sustained readings as Scorsese’s reckoning with his own genre, as a Catholic film of failed contrition, as a portrait of American labour and power, and as a film about the ageing of the cinema, its cast, its director and its release. Peggy’s near-silence has been argued in incompatible ways, as a failure to give the character life and as the film’s moral centre. Return yields: the captions and the wedding journey read differently once the end is known, and Pesci’s stillness rewards attention. What holds the figure is convergence. Once the elegy is seen the main reading is settled, the sharpest dispute concerns one character, and much of what returns is texture rather than an open question.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2010s. Intrinsic force: high within its genre. The film is the gangster film’s self-revocation by its leading maker, with the cast that defined it, and it closes a line of American crime cinema by showing where it ends. But the force is spent inside one genre and one director’s line. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in seven years the reach has been institutional and technical rather than artistic. The film became the case for the streaming service as patron of the expensive auteur film and the case in the dispute over theatrical windows, and its de-ageing became the reference point, praised and mocked, for that technique. What later films do has not demonstrably changed because of it; Scorsese’s own next film continues the late manner, a continuation rather than a redirection. Ten Academy Award nominations without a win are evidence of standing, not of reach. Delayed influence may come, and is not credited in advance.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric, and this is the axis that holds lowest. Form: whole. The film survives complete in its one cut, held digitally by its distributor, with no loss of any kind. Presence: continuous since 2019 on a streaming service of very wide reach, but contingent on that service; its theatrical presence was limited at release and remains occasional. Span: seven years, which the step for age holds at 7.9 or below. And the surface carries a charge fixed to its moment. The de-ageing is a technology of 2019 and already reads as one, young faces on bodies that move like old men’s, most plainly when Frank stamps on the grocer’s hand. What holds the axis here is the three together: a short span even for its band, a presence lent by one service, and a surface of the kind the axis penalises by name, a technology.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Command of the medium is high across most departments. Rodrigo Prieto’s photography shifts its colour and grain by period without drawing attention to itself. Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting holds three and a half hours, with comic timing in the anecdotes and patience at the end. The design and costume are exact across five decades. The performances bear weight: Joe Pesci’s quietness, unlike anything he had done before, is the film’s moral weather; Al Pacino’s Hoffa is the loud centre, his excess right for the man; Robert De Niro’s closed face is made to carry the end. Held below the top by a failure in the making itself. The de-ageing never wholly succeeds: the faces sit oddly on the bodies and around the eyes, and the film asks it to carry decades. In a work where the making is load-bearing, that seam is a real cost, local to faces and movement and most visible in a few scenes.
Score: 8.6 / 10
One physics governs: obedience and time, and everything is subject to both. Take the two most distant elements: the comic anecdotes of the first hours, the fish in the car, Hoffa’s quarrels over punctuality, the gangster captions played for deadpan, and the funereal end in the care home. They obey the same law. The captions that are jokes early on are the same fact as the coffin at the close, and the comedy is the sound of men who do not know they are dying. The range is wide, labour politics, Washington, Philadelphia kitchens, a war in Italy, a wedding journey to Detroit, and nothing breaks the law. A tenth or two is lost where the Kennedy material and the Bay of Pigs run by the logic of chronicle rather than the film’s own: a seam of the historical pageant, in a film otherwise governed by one man’s obedience.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: labour, in the Teamsters, the pension fund and the drivers; the state, in the Kennedys, a Senate investigation and a presidential pardon; crime as an economy; the family, in Frank’s daughters, the Bufalino marriage and the wedding the journey is for; war, in Italy and its prisoners; the sacred, in confession, the priest and burial; and age and death as an order in themselves. They are integrated: the union is the reason for the killing, and the family is where its cost lands. What holds the axis is consciousness, rendered from outside by design, since Frank’s interior is the closed room the film is about rather than a world it holds; nature is nearly absent, and the women’s lives are held mostly in glances. The structure carries more orders than Chinatown or Citizen Kane, but sees most of them from the same narrow window.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.8, then The Unconcealment and The Made at 8.6. A form of three nested times in which duration is the instrument and every caption a death notice; one law of obedience and time from the comedy of the first hours to the choice of a coffin; a disclosure that holds, that a life of obedience ends in a solitude it cannot recognise as punishment; and a making in which photography, cutting and three performances bear weight.
Limiting Dimension
The Imperishable at 7.6: seven years, a presence lent by one streaming service, and a surface fixed to a technology of 2019 in the de-ageing. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7, where the reach after seven years is institutional and technical rather than artistic, and The Swerve at 7.9, a turn against its maker’s own idiom inside an inherited elegiac form. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.0, mostly forecast, with readings that converge once the elegy is seen.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 7.9, Pressure on Tradition at 7.7 and The Imperishable at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: the lowest axis, The Imperishable at 7.6, clears the threshold of 7.5 by a tenth, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is closed by the Epochal Gate on four axes, and by the aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Irishman as produced for and released by Netflix, first shown at the New York Film Festival on 27 September 2019, in cinemas from 1 November and on the service from 27 November 2019, 209 minutes, in colour, from the corridor of the nursing home to the door left open: directed by Martin Scorsese from a screenplay by Steven Zaillian, photographed by Rodrigo Prieto, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, with music by Robbie Robertson. One cut exists and circulates, with no director’s or theatrical variant, and the release is the object. Charles Brandt’s I Heard You Paint Houses (2004) is not part of the work, and the disputed truth of Sheeran’s claims about Hoffa is neither credited nor charged: the film is read as a fiction built on a confession. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and no dialogue is quoted; everything said in the film is described. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the budget, the scene and shot counts, the share of the running time in each of the three times, the number of freeze-frame captions, the viewing figures, the film’s place among its director’s running times, the makers of the de-ageing, the model for the photography’s changes of stock, the home-video editions, and the placing of some of Peggy’s late scenes.