NOTE: Contains some spoilers about the ending of The Irishman (2019).
There’s a scene early in the new Martin Scorsese film The Irishman that perfectly establishes the tone and internal logic of the film. Our protagonist Frank Sheeran, truck driver turned up-and-coming mob hitman, has just returned from a “business trip” (you can guess the kind) to find his young daughter Peggy sitting alone at the dining room table of their working class Philadelphia home, silent and distraught. Frank’s wife explains that Peggy knocked over a display at her job in the neighborhood grocery store, a mistake for which she was first berated, and then shoved, by the grocer.
Frank responds in exactly the way we might expect a stereotypical mobster to react: he drags his daughter back to the store, then has her watch as he metes out a brutal beating to the grocer, throwing him through a glass door, stomping on his face and back and then, finally, smashing the man’s hand beneath the heel of his shoe.
All the while, his daughter looks on with unconcealed horror.
There’s a lot in this scene that is difficult to adequately convey. The dread as Frank’s family realizes what he plans to do. Frank's own singleminded focus on brutality, and instant disengagement once the deed is done. The screams of the grocer, the escalating violence, the dead-eyed stare of his young daughter witnessing an act of brutality no child should see.
It’s an incredible scene in an equally incredible film – but not one that has met with universal acclaim, and often for the exact same reasons it’s being praised elsewhere. Alongside the expected (and deserved) plaudits, The Irishman has been accused of minimizing and side-lining its female characters; reducing them to cardboard cut-outs and victims, empty vessels who move silently in the background as the Big Important Men of Cinema play out another white, male power fantasy.
Peggy, Frank’s daughter, has been the focus of much of the criticism. Portrayed by Lucy Gallina as a child and Anna Paquin as an adult, she's been called a silent presence in the movie, a character played by a pair of talented actresses but given nothing to do but stand around watching other characters act and engage.
And taken at the barest surface level, it's easy to understand why. In a movie of incredible nuance and powerful if understated performances (consider the scene where the normally bombastic Joe Pesci conveys volumes of meaning to Deniro's just-fucked-up hitman with a few glances and eyebrow movements), Peggy is most often seen watching from afar, or avoiding her father and his mobster friends. In a movie of big performances, she seems at first glance to mostly just be an observer.
Why not give her some lines? Why not find out what she feels? Why rob her of agency? Haven't we had enough of one-dimensional female characters who serve only as sounding boards for bad men, and on whom their vile deeds reflect?
In reality, this is a bad faith criticism of a powerful performance for which Paquin and Gallina both deserve a great deal of credit. It's an obsession with signifiers of empowerment over substance, holding up Peggy's comparatively few lines while overlooking the fact that she exerts incredible agency on a terrifying man who even the strongest people in the film are afraid to go against. (It would be absurd, for instance, to level the same criticism at George Miller's The Road Warrior, a film where the protagonist barely speaks and to whom the plot so often happens TO. Clearly there's more to consider than wordcount.)
It’s true that the viewer never gets to truly connect with Paquin’s character – but of course, neither does Frank Sheeran. And despite her silence, the audience can guess what she’s thinking – what she thinks about her brutal, distant father and his creepy, gift-giving friends – and we can see the consequences. Peggy remains a mystery to Frank, as she does to the audience, and he’s visibly embarrassed when his mob friends witness this lack of affection and connection. After all, family is at least nominally important to the mob, although you can’t help but notice that they’re more concerned with the appearances of family and kinship than they are with real connection, and more distraught over an embarrassing moment in front of fellow mobsters than by the missed connections of an entire childhood.
But it’s not just the bad, baffling takes that are the problem. A more troubling issue is that dismissing a film like The Irishman as a “dudes movie” with nothing to add to the discourse about gender equality is missing out on fully half the battle. Because while it’s true that The Irishman has little to say about the lives of women, it has volumes to say about the lives of men who pursue an ideal of toxic masculinity at the expense of real connection, engagement, and family.
In many ways, Frank Sheeran lives the sort of ideal male life that was held up for much of the 20th Century. He is powerful, he is feared, he is wealthy, he has a beautiful family waiting at home. But the audience bears witness to the consequences of these priorities – social isolation, disconnection from family and friends, hatred and disgust on the parts of the people he’s failed and never been there for.
And again, Peggy is at the center of this. Through the course of the movie, we see her grow up, make friends, get a job, and become a person unto herself, but neither we nor Frank have any real understanding of her life. Is she happy? What's she like? What are her dreams and goals? We don't know, and neither does Frank. And ultimately she comes to hate Frank, and hate the world he lives in, which she has no real desire to understand – and Frank has little interest in spending any time in the real world, not when the life of a mobster has consumed every inch of his being.
The fact that Peggy comes to see her father not as a person but as a force of terror, then a nuisance, then ultimately as a traitor and a disgrace is devastating in and of itself. Children are almost pathologically programmed to love their parents. It's something that victims of abuse struggle with their entire lives, this in built sense that their parents deserve love and respect even as their actions show them to be reprehensible, despicable, unworthy of these feelings.
So, why not make this same point from Peggy's point of view? The most obvious answer is that the damage is done by Frank, not Peggy. He is the one who cuts her out. He is the one who puts everyone and everything else first. And it's essential to understand why he's done this, why he made the choices he did, what he found so appealing and ultimately chose over his family.
In short, The Irishman is not a film about feminism. But it is a film that grapples with toxic masculinity and its ramifications. Scorsese is laying out an ideal male power fantasy, then turning it into a nightmare. He’s grabbing us by the hand and saying, “See what happens? See what you really get?”
There's a real challenge to reforming the visibility and depiction of women on screen. Women receive fewer starring roles, fewer roles over all, less work directing, less work writing, and they are unfairly compensated when they do receive those opportunities. And so cinema MUST move to center the experiences of women.
But let's be honest with ourselves. No amount of representation will solve the sickness at the heart of masculinity on its own. The actions that Frank follows, the single-minded focus on violent masculinity, the culture of respect and machismo, these aren't regimes that are perpetuated passively through a lack of representation. They are actively supported by men, and to a large extent it is only through a change in the fundamental nature and understanding of masculinity - or, better yet, the destruction of masculinity as a desirable concept - that they can be eliminated.
And that means that men need to see the consequences of their actions, speaking to them from their own point of view and in their own language. And that is where the value of a film like The Irishman lies. Frank Sheeran is in many respects a man’s man – obsessed with violence, respect, appearances, and navigating the institutions of power for his own enrichment – and he suffers for it. He is a man who can only engage with his family in the “language” of toxic masculinity – violently beating a grocer, “providing” for his family, winning affection through gifts and respect but never from real engagement and emotional connection – and it leaves him utterly alone. He rushes through life on a path that leads nowhere, and it takes him exactly where expected.
Yes, crime dramas have made the point over and over again that this life of easy money and braggadocio has dire consequences. Scorsese’s own filmography contains enough examples of mobsters who suffer for their flirtation with power and vice, from Mean Streets through Casino. But so often that end comes in a blaze of glory, or a sudden betrayal, that ends their life as the gangsters they believe themselves to be – or at least ends with our “heroes” looking back fondly on their time in power in a way that might still leave audiences thinking it was better than the alternative, better than living the rest of your life as a schnook.
But I challenge you to sit through the final 20 minutes that Scorsese has created and come away feeling that Frank Sheeran’s life in the mob was remotely positive, or that he’s left anything but a broken, destroyed old man. An old man who stumbles up to the teller window at a bank, waits awkwardly in line, barely able to stand, only for it to be revealed that he's desperately trying to reconnect with a child that wants no part of him and nothing to do with him, and to watch her look him in the eyes and walk away. Or who tries to brag to his nurse about having known Jimmy Hoffa, only to discover she has no idea who he is, and that the life that was so important to him has been forgotten by the world.
These are the real costs of a life lived in a culture of masculinity and toughness, where families are an inconvenience and connecting with others a chore. But men don’t need to be Frank Sheeran to ruin their lives by immersing themselves in a toxic culture, nor does the culture in question need to be organized crime. It could be business, art, partying, whatever the pursuits of your life are. If we forsake our families, our human connections, our responsibilities, we are nothing and we will be forgotten.
Frank Sheeran lived his life in the model of the old fashioned man, and suffers for it. That’s the message of The Irishman. And what better moral tale could there be for men in 2019?