For Martin Scorsese, making 'The Irishman' was about 'learning to die'
Martin Scorsese knows them well. Men in suits with gleaming hair, whispering violence. They are older now, their voices smoke-cracked and bruised. They walk as if their bones no longer fit. They feel the weight. The inevitable. In film after film, they have killed. But now, like the director himself, they glimpse mortality and wonder, somewhere between reckoning and redemption, how it all came and went so fast.
Scorsese's movies tread between the sacred and the brutal. Bibles written by fallen saints and wiseguys. What is the cost of desire? Who is a man stripped to his essence? Can absolution be granted if forgiveness is not sought? His latest film, "The Irishman," starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci, which Netflix opens theatrically Friday, explores those questions in an intimate parable of mobsters, unions, the sins of a country and the perilous ways our creeds and loyalties deceive us.
His earlier works, including "Mean Streets," "Goodfellas" and "Casino," were tales of young men with quick tempers and
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