Martin Scorsese and Netflix’s long-anticipated gangster film The Irishman has been given its first trailer and it’s a doozy.
Based on Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, The Irishman tells the story of Frank Sheeran, who admitted killing 25 men for the mob, including his friend, the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Pesci plays Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino (who according to Sheeran’s testimony ordered the hit), Al Pacino plays Hoffa, and De Niro plays Sheeran. Steven Zaillian wrote the script.
The supporting cast includes Anna Paquin, Jesse Plemons, Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Jack Huston, Sebastian Maniscalco, Domenick Lombardozzi, Stephen Graham, and Tommy McInnis. The trailer sticks pretty close to the three principal leads, who are featured all heavily at some point in the teaser trailer, which spans decades as it tells Sheeran’s life story in the mob.
Check out the first trailer for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman below:
The film’s trailer also gives us our first look at the hefty de-aging process that has been one of the main sources for growing production budget. The film has been Scorsese’s most expensive project to date, nearing $200 million. The CGI on De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino that we do see looks convincing enough but, again, we begin to enter uncanny valley territory. The Irishman is still months away and could be tweaked accordingly, but when it comes to a Scorsese film, you know he won’t let it out of the gates until he feels comfortable with it. Rest assured, if the film does end up having some distracting de-aging, we are still getting a massive gangster movie from Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro. The Irishman is Scorsese’s ninth collaboration with De Niro, and his fourth with Pesci, but is the first time that he has directed Pacino. De Niro and Pacino last acted together in 2008 in the rather forgettable crime thriller Righteous Kill.
Before the film lands on Netflix and select theaters, it will premiere in October as the opening film at the New York film festival. Festival director Kent Jones said The Irishman is “funny, troubling, entertaining and, like all great movies, absolutely singular”. He added: “It’s the work of masters, made with a command of the art of cinema that I’ve seen very rarely in my lifetime, and it plays out at a level of subtlety and human intimacy that truly stunned me.” The Irishman attracted some controversy after it was purchased by streaming giant Netflix in 2017 in the wake of the poor commercial performance of Scorsese’s previous film, Silence (history will have the last word on that film though).
The organizers of the Cannes Film Festival lobbied hard to try and land the film back in May. However, they may have avoided some further controversy as the French festival has refused to screen Netflix films due to regulations designed to ensure it champions strictly theatrical releases.
Netflix will release Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman in select theaters and streaming sometime later this fall.
Source: Netflix
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