The opening scene of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman drops the viewer into a dim and dreary nursing home as the camera slowly hovers through the mundane halls of lives that are nearly over. The whiz-bang opera of gangster films is deflated as Robert Deniro’s Frank Sheeran is revealed to frame, talking directly to us, or perhaps more-so, to himself. Consider how Henry Hill is introduced in Goodfellas as a man who achieved his devilish dream, or how Jordan Belfort immediately boasts about his insidious kingdom of wealth in The Wolf of Wall Street.
