You feel every one of De Niro’s years in his haunting performance, as well as those of Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Harvey Keitel, who are “de-aged” for flashbacks via computer-generated imagery as well as analog makeup and hairpieces. De Niro was 75 when he played yet another of those characters in Martin Scorsese’s 'The Irishman,” which feels like a summation of a rich subset of De Niro's long career.Īdapted by screenwriter Steve Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) from Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, and clocking in at three-and-a-half hours, the movie is an alternately sad, violent, and dryly funny biography of Frank Sheeran, a World War II combat veteran who became a Mafia hitman and then a union leader, and who had a long, at times politically fraught friendship with Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa ( Al Pacino). Robert De Niro excels at playing closed-off, unreachable characters-hard men who might seem a bit dull if you met them for the first time, but have inner lives that they rarely let anyone see, and are mysteries to themselves.

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