Hitman Absolution Schadenfreude

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Carmel Useted

unread,

Aug 3, 2024, 5:38:56 PM8/3/24

to dipapinear

Mobsterism was always, at least in the minds of the participants, a close relation of war: It operated by a code different from that used to police the streets. The movies, while not shying away from the brutal truth, still elided much of the moral meaning of these realities. They offered a quality of evasion. Even when the antiheroes came to bad ends, their offings were somehow steeped in sexiness.

The Irishman was financed by Netflix (where the movie will stream starting November 27, following a short box office run). It is a magnificent achievement. The Irishman is about guilt without remorse, violence as a kind of language, friendship as a limited contract, and death as something that exists beyond human contemplation until it looms right up ahead. But above all the movie is a meditation on the notion of culpability carried without the possibility of absolution.

Once again, Scorsese shows violent, premature death occur due to the workings of greed, obedience, and fear. His characters have few of the trappings of rich men. They do what they do for the reasons other men paint houses for real: to feed their families and keep their wives in the style to which they have become accustomed. But money is not their primary object. What might that be? Status? Deterrence? Respect? Perhaps all of the above.

The Irishman brings these seemingly immortal figures face to face with the facts of death. Such a radical misunderstanding of reality could end in no other way. But this is a first-time cinematic journey, into uncharted terrain.

We who have been with the Scorsese gang since the beginning are accustomed to going away with a mixture of excitement and schadenfreude. But this time we leave the cinema in a very different mood, our sense of mythology rattled.

Now the final curtain is already blocking his view of the gods, Sheeran feels pain rooted not in shame or guilt or even meaninglessness, but in a kind of surprise that the destination he intuited for his life did not exist and all the doors of heaven and earth are closing in his face. Like Fr. Rodrigues, he gets no answer to his calling out to God, on whose existence his bet is at most evens.