i would say that this is essential for anyone who loved scorsese’s The Irishman, though it’s also generally an object lesson in screenwriting and adaptation.
reading this after having watched the film is like reading with scorsese against the grain of the printed text. i don’t say that to sell brandt’s work short: he’s happy to refer you to his credentials as an established investigator, negotiator and criminal prosecutor and you’re happy to buy them after following this clinically efficient autobiographical trail through some of the major national and international events in 20th century american history (the great depression, wwii, cuba, the kennedy brothers and their crusade against organised crime, nixon and watergate, and of course jimmy hoffa and the midcentury rise of union politics). i say autobiographical because brandt astutely foregrounds sheeran’s telling of events, which is rich and rangey in its cartography of mob culture (the book’s most obvious affinity with scorsese’s more classic work). brandt’s purpose here is in the book’s full title – to close the case on hoffa’s disappearance – and while he has the sense to preserve wholesale sheeran’s juicy and evocative illustrations of the procedures, etiquette and family trees of ‘la cosa nostra’ (all the more inviting because sheeran, the sore-thumb irishman, retained something of a lifelong outsider’s perspective), the book’s general trajectory and concluding passages make it clear that all this digressive colour is essentially grist to brandt’s mill, evidence for the candid authenticity and authority of sheeran’s confession.
this was palpably not the major focus of scorsese (or more properly the filmmakers behind The Irishman, allowing for reports of de niro’s advocacy for the tonal shift in its final act): his is a film about the story of america, the soul of america, told through the recollections and regrets of a man who followed a familiar path from disenfranchised obscurity, through military obedience and psychological conditioning, on to ruthless opportunism, illegitimate political ascendancy and finally the haunted isolation of age and a reckoning with faith and conscience. brandt will cover moments like the aged sheeran’s fear of closed doors with the simple fidelity of a rapport built with painstaking care and trust and the respect for a dying man’s humanity and agency (as opposed to the truman capote school of journalistic consequentialism); scorsese lingers on such moments of isolation because in visually evoking more sociable scenes from sheeran’s past (eg. pacino’s wary hoffa turning in for the night next door to sheeran, leaving the connecting door between their hotel rooms ajar) they suggest the power of memory and the perseverance of its ghosts. brandt’s naked presentation of a brief comment from sheeran about his regretful alienation from his daughter peggy gestures towards the difficulty and perhaps the justification behind this extended confession; scorsese expands her role (contra detractors’ complaints that anna paquin was short-changed with so few lines in a film largely about men) to one of constant reticent observation, uneasy and accusatory association, the gaze of the next generation as it learns to count the cost of its fathers’ actions. brandt and scorsese are two master storytellers working at perpendicular angles through this quite remarkable personal account.
but while the book is really a fascinating companion to the film, it’s also absolutely worth reading for its own sake. whether you buy all of its accusations, the story it tells of the scope and scale of organised crime is absorbing enough even without the historical appeal of such an efficient account of the rise and fall of jimmy hoffa, a man on temporary parity with the potus in terms of wages and, perhaps, power. though the tensions between the two adaptations of sheeran’s account are absorbing, the book makes space for details from sheeran’s past that push in similar directions to the film: the account of a young sheeran, freshly returned stateside from his harrowing experience of the war in europe, taking up dancing, then earning a bit on the side as a nightclub bouncer and then earning a bit more on another side taking commissions to floor pugnacious partygoers suspicious of his fair-skinned appeal to their african american girlfriends and unaware of his proficiencies as a bare-knuckle boxer – this sketch of an opportunit economy of violence, entertainment and race relations can only have been left out by scorsese to avoid his film exceeding three and a half hours (or perhaps because of the limits of the de-aging technology). despite its overall efficiency and reasonable length, the book expands richly (if laconically) on sheeran’s upbringing and wartime experiences and (with as much resonance with the later films of clint eastwood as scorsese) his psychological conditioning through poverty, nonconformity and national service.
in all, a book that’s great on many fronts including sensitive biographical characterisation, informative historical journalism, true-crime intrigue, textured social drama, linguistic colouring, and political and legal scandalousness. i felt like i was both chugging it down and savouring every mouthful.
♥︎
widerthanpictures 