Film criticism and the purity of ignorance

That may sound like an alternate subtitle to Birdman, but I'm actually thinking about the ignorance of the viewer, rather than the creator, today.

Spoilers for The Irishman to follow.

I have long assumed that one of the keys to being a good film critic is preparation. That's not to say that I prioritize being prepared, as I have never been someone who particularly thrived on research. But I aspire to being prepared. If there's a prominent adaptation of a literary classic, I at least think about whether my review would be improved if I read that classic first. And at times I've actually done so. Then there's the type of preparation that just comes from being well-watched, meaning you can draw on the influences of similar films in the filmmaker's or others' filmographies.

But watching The Irishman prompted me to wonder whether it's not best just to know nothing.

I only learned that The Irishman was based on a true story maybe last week, when I learned that one of the people involved -- it was either Martin Scorsese or Robert De Niro, but the internet refuses to confirm for me -- had met Frank Sheeran and was "moved" by his story. (Having seen the film I wonder if I'm also misremembering the part about him being moved.)

Suffice it to say that I had no idea that this was the story of how Jimmy Hoffa allegedly died, or that he was even a character in the film.

Now, most critics would know this. They would do their due diligence by gobbling up all the material they could get on the new Scorsese film. And they're not wrong to accord Scorsese that kind of respect.

As it happens, I didn't. So when it only seemed possible that the story was leading toward an actual portrayal of the death of Hoffa -- played in this film by Al Pacino -- I wondered if Scorsese was engaging in Quentin Tarantino's brand of alternate history.

I still figured the film would just leave a hole in the story, at which point Hoffa/Pacino would disappear, with only theories to explain his disappearance. So qualify it as a genuine surprise when I saw De Niro take Pacino into an empty house, in a clear echo of Tommy DeVito's death in Goodfellas, and pop caps in the back of his head.

I think I might have literally sat up and said "What???"

In a quick google, I found that Sheeran confessed to having killed Hoffa shortly before his 2003 death, and the book on which The Irishman is based, I Hear You Paint Houses, is the dramatic portrayal of the story Sheeran told. (An account which is disputed, by the way.)

I might be the only guy who went into the movie not knowing this, but it allowed that scene to give me a true jolt. It was a delightful twist in a movie that had been kind of plodding along, not disagreeably, but not in a way that fully engaged me either.

I might have given the movie a half-star more just as a result of the surprise of that scene. Whereas if you knew going in that Sheeran confessed to Hoffa's murder, the actual staging of this scene might qualify as bit of an anti-climax.

So yeah, maybe sometimes it's better just to know nuthin'.

In terms of film criticism, I think my point is that you are trying to put yourselves in the shoes of a potential viewer, who probably also would not have researched The Irishman and known it was about Jimmy Hoffa. A less engaged viewer, anyway. And I think ideally, it's the less engaged viewer you are trying to reach when you write reviews. Engaged viewers probably don't need your opinion anyway, since they've already used other factors to determine whether they're going to see the movie or not.

(It's an academic argument anyway as I am not actually reviewing The Irishman for my site.)

All five hours of The Irishman

I managed to get through the movie better than I would have thought I would. My concern about the length of this movie was the basis for an entire post, which you can read here.

I talked in that post about coming up with a strategy to watch the three-hour-and-29-minute movie during the daytime. In the end, I just picked a random Thursday night -- and not even one where I'd had a good night's sleep the night before. I did the math between now and Christmas and calculated that this was my best opportunity to watch it before then, an important matter particularly because I'm recording a best of the year podcast next Friday night. (A podcast that will be premature by a few weeks, but I'll discuss my best at that juncture, anyway, and maybe ask you not to listen until I've posted the final list here.)

Anyway, I got started soon after eight ... and didn't finish until 12:47 a.m.

Did I fall asleep? No. Well, yes. Twice. But each time for less than two minutes, and pausing both times.

Did I take long breaks? Again, no. I stopped for two or three minutes a couple times to get something for my wife, who is recovering from having wisdom teeth removed.

What really did me in was that in the last hour of the film, my shitty internet decided to remind me of how shitty it is.

When it comes to its own technology, Neflix is a great streaming service, almost never buffering when all else is equal. All else is not equal, though, when your internet is shit.

The weird thing is, we're talking the hours between 11:30 p.m. and 12:45 a.m. I'd expect the internet to be bad during peak viewing hours, but not after most of my competition had packed it in for the night.

And yet, for the last hour of this movie, it would stop about every two minutes, and the spinning wheel would climb toward 100%, a value it would reach after maybe 45 seconds. No way to watch what is already the longest movie I will watch this year, and probably the only one to cross the three-hour mark. (If Avengers: Endgame crosses it, it's only by a minute or so.)

The point is, the screening is now behind me, at long last. And I'm proud of how I did.

I'm even more proud because the movie did not enthrall me. I ended up coming out positive on it, but only after struggling to find the "there" there. I didn't like the lighting, I thought Thelma Schoonmaker's editing was notably lacking in certain scenes, and I thought the whole thing felt a bit "elderly," for want of a better word. (A notion Scorsese drives home in an admittedly very clever scene at the beginning, where his camera travels through a retirement home in the way it once traveled through the Copacabana.)

So I'm saying Scorsese made better films when he was 49 than he does at age 77? What a shock!