The Irishman - I Hear You Paint Houses

The Irishman directed and produced by the legendary Martin Scorsese basing the book "I heard you paint the houses" by Charles Brandt one of the best masterpieces came out in 2019. Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino are one of the few legendary actors starring in this movie, and Robert and Joe had already worked with Martin in a mob type movie called Good Fellas. The Irishman is about the life of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran starred by Robert De Niro, a meat deliverer in Pennsylvania at a Food Fair in his 30s'.  Then he met Russell and became a contractor who eliminates people for orders. The movie runs for 3 and a half hours making it one of the longest-running movies in the recent history of Hollywood.

As I said the movie runs for more than 3 hours but it felt like 2 and a half hours because of the Directing and the performance by these legendary actors. Their acting is like a meditation to the viewers and that makes them engaged in the character's life. The majority of the time I felt I was carried away from the acting by these guys and couldn't focus on the mechanics of the movie I usually do.

Let’s talk about the story

“I heard you paint the houses” is narrative nonfiction written by Charles Brandt one of the lead detectives in the homicide of Jimmy Hoffa starred by Al Pacino in the movie. Professionally Charles is a detective and a defense attorney who was leading the investigation for this case. Later he wrote the book using the confession made by Frank Sheeran.

The title of the book speaks for the whole story because ‘painting the house' means, cleanly executing people and dirty works for contracts and getting away from the authorities cleanly, That's why in the movie Russel Bufalino uses this line to introduce Frank to the Jimmy Hoffa. The story is narrative so Frank is telling the story and he’s going back and forth in the timeline to converge the story to the meeting of Jimmy Hoffa with Pro.

The character introduction

• Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran starred by Robert De Niro, a meat deliverer in Pennsylvania in his 30s eventually, he got fired from the job for stealing. Then he met Russell later became his closest friend and worked with him since. Frank is kind of a Hitman, but with a family and daughter that he cares a lot about.

• Russell Bufalino starred by Joe Pesci is a cold murderer who does contracts for others but most of the time he keeps his hands clean and Frank takes care of the dirty work for him. At first sight, Russell doesn’t seem to be the person he is but as we go through the story, we discover how cold he really is.

• Jimmy Hoffa doing politics wants to help the truck drivers and fought for the place of presidentship in Teamsters. For the help of his campaigns, he hired Frank as a security guard/assistant

And I must mention one other character that is important to the movie and her presence in the story adds another level of depth to it.

• Peggy Sheeran, a daughter of Frank Sheeran, a very quiet child and always concerned about her surrounding, listening to the elders talk to find what's going on in the family. from her childhood to elderhood she endured all the things her dads and friends did in the outside world and she doesn’t accept them. So sometime in the movie, you can see that Russell trying to make her like him because in the deep-down Russell knew that the kid was rejecting them because of their deeds.

Background Story

Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran is a truck driver in Pennsylvania who delivers meat to the pubs around the town. Then he met Russell and started working for him, where Frank had to do the contracts(dirty works) that given to him by Russell. Then Russell introduced Frank to the Jimmy as an assistant/security guard and described him as a one who ‘paint houses’ and Frank and Jimmy got along together and worked with him throughout the campaign where Jimmy fought for the president post of International Brotherhood of Teamsters where he represented the truck drivers in America. From here onwards we can see that the movie was character driven, basically focusing on the life of each person in the story and at the same time, the story acts as a background curtain where the actors are acting in front in front of that. This is where Martin Scorsese’s genius moviemaking skills stood out because somehow, he took this political story that happened in the 1970s’ and turned it into a character driven movie, where we are more focused on individuals in the story.

Source: Cinema Express

Mechanics of the movie

• The movie is 3 and half hours long but when you watch it doesn’t feel like that, it felt much less than that because we personally connect to the personal life of these characters. Great acting and the direction by martin Scorsese helps to achieve this connection.

• Another technique  I saw in this movie was character thinking on the screen. The director has used this technique in many places to let the audience to put themselves in the story so this allows the movie to have different effect on different viewers like, for some viewers, this is the story of Jimmy Hoffa and for some others this is the story of Frank Sheeran’s life story and for others it’s about the consequences of the deeds done by these characters. So, the audience has the freedom to think and manufacture their own version of this story.

• Martin Scorsese uses lots of J-cuts in the movie where the next scene’s audios comes before the visuals of that scene appear on the screen, so it gives the audience an insight into the next scene before so they can prepare for that.

VFX

The movie consists the scenes from 1950s where the Frank is in his 30s delivering meat to the restaurant and where he met Russell, for these the producers had to come up with a way to de age the characters because most of them have already pass their 70s. So Industrial Light & Magic came to the rescue with the deep fake technology, completely rebuild these characters' faces with an AI. But to achieve these effects ILM and producers had a couple of main problems to overcome,

• one thing was how big is the camera rig going to get to capture the motion, so they had to dial the size of the rig down to just 3 cameras, one main camera being in the center while two infrared cameras capturing the motion beside it. Because Martin Scorsese didn’t like the way modern way of capturing motion with lots of motion capture bands and suits all over the character.

• Other problem was the movement of the character even though the de age effects looks much deceiving the motion of these aged actors were slow so like standing up, walking and running kind of things were not matching to the age of 30 they were faking, so they had to do some post VFX to make these movement a bit speedy.

Salad scene

There are lots of iconic scenes in this movie like where Russell introduce Frank to Jimmy over the phone, and the sequence of Frank and Jimmy going to meet Pro, but the salad scene seems more powerful because it changed the phase of the movie.
“Frank we did all we could for the man” This single line tells what’s going to happen in the next 20 to 30 minutes, if its still sketchy the follow up scene will only make that line from Russell stronger.

Thank You! for Reading