I watched the opening half-an-hour or so of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman when we were last in the UK, back in December 2019. At the time we were staying in an apartment in Liverpool that happened to have Netflix. I grabbed the opportunity to watch a fair amount of his film of Dylan's The Rolling Thunder Review but rather less of his gangster epic. I enjoyed the early scenes but thought the pacing a bit ponderous and, since time was not on our side, knew as I was watching I wouldn't get to see all that much and would need to put my viewing on hold.
I can't quite explain why I didn't catch up with the film when we got access to Netflix here. I suppose it relates to my general lack of ability to watch anything on the telly that is time-consuming. But I decided I should do something about my neglect today and, somewhat to my surprise, ended up watching The Irishman all the way through. To be absolutely honest, I didn't really focus completely on the movie in its early stages, but I was completely gripped by the last couple of hours and entered 'just can't stop watching' mode, a very rare experience indeed these days.
It just got better and better. The final sequences, with De Niro's character as a very fragile old man, struck me as perfect, doing something rare in cinema - providing an ending that didn't just conclude the story in a way that felt right but added meaning to what had come before. The dialogue with the priest as Frank repents but honestly cannot feel remorse told us things about him which we already knew but got to experience almost from the inside.
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