Having read the book it is based on (“I Hear You Paint Houses”) and the Steve Zaillian’s screenplay, I can assure you that Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” will be a film very different from his mob classics “Goodfellas” and “Casino.” Yes, despite Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino all being part of this much-anticipated movie, expect “The Irishman” to be more of a meditative 3+ hour experience, a culmination of every theme Scorsese has tackled over the years.
And yet, Speaking to Deadline, ‘Irishman’ producer Jane Rosenthal had to tell the masses the same thing yesterday, calling the movie “slower” than your usual Scorsese mob movie and, quite strangely, stamping some wokeness into it by saying it tackled “male masculinity.”
“I’m excited for the world to get to see it,” Rosenthal said. “What will surprise you is, as a Scorsese movie, it is a slower movie. It doesn’t have the kind of intensity, the visual intensity, as a ‘Casino,’ as a ‘Goodfellas.’ It is guys looking at themselves through an older perspective.”
She added, “What you do look at with something like ‘The Irishman’ is the toxic masculinity and what happens when someone chooses one family over their own nuclear family, and then tries to make repairs at the end of their lives. What happens to particularly men who make that decision.”
However, this explanation from Rosenthal, which actually comes off more as a warning, may be of interest to those fans hoping for just a typical crime drama. Regardless, We’ll have to wait and see how people react when the first reviews of “The Irishman” come after its debut at the New York Film Festival. I’ll be there filing mine for this site.
“The Irishman” will have a short run in theaters beginning on November 1st before arriving on Netflix on November 27.