Name: The Irishman
Director: Martin Scorsese
Released: 2019

The Irishman is a faithful adaptation of a book whose central claims are not supported by anything outside the book. Both halves of that sentence matter, and the verdict on this page follows from holding them together.

Scorsese films Charles Brandt's account of Frank Sheeran almost exactly as Sheeran gave it: the friendship with Russell Bufalino, the work for Jimmy Hoffa, the killing of Hoffa in a house in Detroit on 30 July 1975, and the killing of Joseph Gallo in Umberto's Clam House three years earlier.

What is solid

The world around the confession is well documented and the film gets it right.

Sheeran was a Teamsters local president in Wilmington. Bufalino ran a small Pennsylvania family with influence far beyond its size. Hoffa went to prison, was released, and was trying to return to the union presidency against the interests of people who preferred the arrangement they had. Angelo Bruno was killed in Philadelphia in March 1980, and the film shows it as it happened.

What is not

The two confessions

No one has ever been charged over Hoffa's disappearance. Investigators examined the Detroit house Sheeran identified and tested blood found on the floor. It was not Hoffa's.

The Gallo shooting was witnessed, investigated at the time and attributed to a Colombo crew. Sheeran's version requires all of that to be wrong.

Sheeran gave both accounts near the end of his life, after every person who could have contradicted him was dead.

The verdict

Loosely based, rather than dramatised. A dramatised film takes a documented sequence and heightens it. This one takes an undocumented sequence and films it with total conviction, inside a setting reconstructed with real care.

That combination is what makes it worth a page here. It is the most persuasive piece of filmmaking in this archive about events that most likely did not happen the way it shows them, and the persuasion is doing something the evidence cannot.