And you feel them in Scorsese’s direction, which is more contemplative than his gangster movie norm (at times as meditative as his religious pictures), and which deftly shifts between eras, using dialogue and voice-over to make the time-jumps seamless. The frame-within-a-frame-within-a-frame structure is one of the most complex of Scorsese's career. But it's realized with such grace by Scorsese, Zaillian and longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker that it never feels fussy or overdetermined, gliding from one thought-path to another as a recollecting mind juxtaposes the distant past, the recent past, and the present.
The opening shot glides through a retirement home, finding Frank sitting alone in a wheelchair. He’s such a rock-like presence that, seen from the back, he looks as if he could be dead. Then the camera circles around to reveal his lined face, cloudy eyes, and white hair. He starts to speak. His statements become the film’s narration. We don’t know who he’s telling this story to. Very late in the movie, we see him talking with a priest. But the audience is us, really.
The concluding half-hour—an immersion into this now-old man’s life, fuller than we’re used to seeing in any American film not directed by Clint Eastwood—provides a clarifying framework. This is a film about the intersection of crime and politics, Mafia history and Washington history. It touches on Fidel Castro’s rise in Cuba and the CIA’s attempts to overthrow him, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the mob wars of the 1960s and ‘70s. But it’s mostly about age, loss, sin, regret, and how you can feel like a passive object swept along by history even if you played a role in shaping it. If Sheeran’s account of his life is to be trusted (and many crime historians warn that it isn't), he was intimately involved in a handful of pivotal moments in American history. And yet we might still come away from "The Irishman" seeing him as a passive figure: the Zelig or Forrest Gump of gangsters—because of how he tells the story, as if he's in denial about what it meant and what it says about him.
Although he's capable of violence, and can mete it out on a moment's notice, Frank seems mostly content to hang in the backgrounds of Scorsese’s wiseguy murals, behind louder, more eccentric men (especially Jimmy Hoffa, played with wit and gusto by Pacino, in hoarse-voiced, shouting-and-strutting mode). Frank is muted and reactive for the most part, and great at talking his way out of tight spots by pretending not to understand the questions being asked of him. He comes into several defining tasks and jobs by virtue of being in the right place or meeting the right people at the right time. As he describes his inexorable march through time and life, he characterizes choices that he made of his own free will (including several murders) as things that just happened to him.
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