Same and Story

Once again, I'm doing two films in this review, largely because of the nature of them, i.e. directors doing the same thing means I don't really have that much to say. It's an interesting side note to Hollywood's obsession with IP, where everything is a sequel to something that came before (Frozen 2!), rather than an original idea/setting/character.

Right from the start, I will admit to not being much of a Pedro Almodóvar fan. I like his films because they're always well-crafted and his storytelling technique is a solid one. His characters are human, they react in very human ways, and there's always a solid foundation to build from. My detachment comes from the fact that it very often seems to be the same story, despite variations in setting and characters. Pain and Glory, his latest, is no different.

All artists draw from themselves and their own experiences. Given the semi-autobiographical nature of Pain and Glory, it probably shouldn't be that surprising that it seems like a rehash of themes that Almodóvar has used before. And, again, that doesn't mean it's bad because the final product is a good one. It's an interesting film and the story moves well and there's the usual passion from the characters that are, again, emblematic of his films. But it's also largely like the films he's done before. You know how the story is going to proceed and even the little meta twist at the end isn't anything that's particularly memorable. This is Antonia Banderas and Penélope Cruz and, especially, Asier Etxeandia doing really well with their parts and creating believable people with genuine emotion attached. Those performances alone make it a good film. But the story is still regular Almodóvar and if you've seen one you've, unfortunately, seen most of them. If you're a fan, it's definitely worth seeing. If not, it's an Amazon or Netflix choice.

Speaking of Netflix, we come to Scorsese's latest, The Irishman, which suffers from exactly the same circumstances, except worse and longer. The film is based on Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran's book, I Heard You Paint Houses. I read it years ago, around the time of its release, on someone's recommendation for an insight into "actual" mob doings. It's a good book. Unfortunately, the film is also basically a note-for-note retelling that often saps the life from the story. Sheeran wasn't trying to craft a story when he wrote it. He was just offering up an experience that he'd lived and allowing people to draw from that what they might, including the details on the Hoffa situation. Scorsese chose to highlight that moment with Hoffa by using two framing devices when telling the story: one from Sheeran's perspective waiting to die in a nursing home and one from his perspective while taking a drive to Michigan a couple days before Hoffa was sitting outside the Machus Red Fox in 1975. That turns what could have been a tight two-and-a-half hour film into an occasionally tedious three-and-a-half hour film. Scenes of the drive were repeatedly presented to try to drive home the "mob life" point that we'd already gotten and the emotional impact that Sheeran was suffering because of the nature of the task before him, which we'd also largely already gotten. That meant that they felt like filler.

What's worse is that this is the same ground that Scorsese has trod many times and with the same actors. DeNiro? Pacino? Pesci? Romano? The gang is all here and you can throw in Harvey Keitel along with them. There comes a time when a director has used an actor in the same type of role so often that all you can do when seeing the new film is be reminded of the old ones. Witness anything Clint Eastwood has done directing himself in the past 20+ years. This is what happens here, when all we think about through most of the film is how similar it is to Goodfellas or Casino. This is a Scorsese gangster film! Anyone excited?

Like Pain and Glory, the performances are somewhere between solid and excellent, although Pacino's booming voice is a marked deviation from Hoffa's which was a real problem when trying to look at him as anyone but Al Pacino. It was interesting to see the CGI effects that made them appear to be 40-year-old versions of themselves, rather than attempting a ridiculous amount of makeup. Problem is, making someone look like they're 40 doesn't affect the fact that most of them still move around the set like they're 80, because they are. So even 40-year-old Frank Sheeran made you feel like you were just seeing the same scenes that you'd watched before. And this is the root of the problem: We've all been here before. This film gives us nothing new. It's just more "mob life" stuff. They even include dates and methods of death for a lot of the minor characters, most of which had absolutely nothing to do with Sheeran's life in general or the Hoffa situation in specific, but were actually connected to the Philly mob war in the early 80s. What does that detail offer us, except "This is another Scorsese mob film"?

In a film industry that is obsessed with mining the familiar in order to guarantee ticket sales from those who seemingly never seem to tire of watching the same stuff, over and over, like sitcom reruns, these two films, despite not following that trend of "IP first, story second", actually end up doing so, anyway. It sounds incredibly ageist to suggest that these two masters of the craft should probably rest on their laurels and open up space for others if Almodóvar and Scorsese still want to work and others still want to work with them. But I'm pretty much done with the experience that they're offering and I'd much rather see something else by someone like Bong Joon-ho, if only because it won't distract me by reminding me of everything he's done before.