Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Irishman’ Is Three-And-a-Half Hours Long
The Irishman is a project decades in the making. And it seems like after all that time, the guys who made it had a lot to say.
According to the official website of the New York Film Festival, where Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman is making is world premiere as the Opening Selection, the film runs “210 minutes.” According to highly advanced computational knowledge, that’s a cool three-and-a-half hours. That wouldn’t be the longest film of Scorsese’s career — he’s made a couple music docs longer than that — but it’s certainly up there. Casino was 178 minutes. The Wolf of Wall Street was 180 minutes. This is a Casino plus another 30 minutes!
I guess on Netflix, where this movie will live forever, length really doesn’t matter. People can pause it and come back whenever they want. And hey, they binge a whole season of GLOW in a night. This is still about 90 minutes shorter than that! So it’s nothing! It’s a cup of coffee!
Here’s the film’s official synopsis:
The Irishman is a richly textured epic of American crime, a dense, complex story told with astonishing fluidity. Based on Charles Brandt’s nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses, it is a film about friendship and loyalty between men who commit unspeakable acts and turn on a dime against each other, and the possibility of redemption in a world where it seems as distant as the moon. The roster of talent behind and in front of the camera is astonishing, and at the core of The Irishman are four great artists collectively hitting a new peak: Joe Pesci as Pennsylvania mob boss Russell Bufalino, Al Pacino as Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, and Robert De Niro as their right-hand man, Frank Sheeran, each working in the closest harmony imaginable with the film’s incomparable creator, Martin Scorsese.
The Irishman opens in select theaters on November 1 and premieres on Netflix on November 27. I don’t care if it’s 3 hours or 30 hours. I can’t wait.
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