Though “The Irishman” has received near-universal acclaim, among the few main criticisms of the film, one has stuck. Rather than have his three main characters played by age-appropriate actors in the scenes showing their younger years, or try to de-age his septuagenarian stars with movie makeup, Scorsese decided to use CGI to adjust the faces of De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, in what he calls a “youthification.” Whether or not the CGI is successful has been a topic of contentious debate.
When the director and his three stars discuss the CGI de-aging in Netflix’s supplemental roundtable, “The Irishman: In Conversation,” De Niro admits, “The intention was to make it the best it could ever be, state-of-the-art”—and it is. But when Pacino suggests that it looks almost as if they found old footage of the actors, Scorsese says, “I don’t know. That would be interesting to see juxtaposed with other images.”
As a connoisseur of cinematic images, Scorsese has to know that the CGI isn’t that good—that it couldn’t hold up when placed next to the actual images of the actors at those ages. The more I watch it, the more Scorsese’s “I don’t know” reads as a sly admission that this juxtaposition would only highlight the technology’s inadequacy, making the uncanny valley that we feel when we view these de-aged stars that much more pronounced.
The concept of the “uncanny valley” is the idea that objects meant to mimic human appearance and achieve verisimilitude tend to provoke some uncanny eeriness in people because they can sense there is something missing, something off, something askew. The closer the representation is to an actual human likeness, the more intensely felt the revulsion. One theory for the cause of this reaction is our discomfort with death—which is ever unknowable and ultimately unrepresentable—and the subsequent suspicion that humanoid representations trigger our innate fear that we may be nothing more than machines without souls. The uncanny valley, then, is a distance perceived between the human and the almost-but-not-quite-human, but it’s a distance that recognizes the disturbing possibility that there may be no distance there at all.
Whereas most have assumed this to be a failed experiment in an otherwise phenomenal film, it’s possible that even the uncanny valley ushered in by Scorsese’s so-called “youthification” is there by the director’s elaborate design. In fact, the film can be read as precisely about this uncanny valley. In this reading, Scorsese uses the de-aging technology and the uncanny valley it elicits as a visual metaphor for the movie’s underlying thematic interests.
In an early scene where Sheeran knocks around a store clerk in front of Peggy, his horrified daughter, the way the actor looks and moves reminds the viewer that we’re watching old De Niro digitally made up as young De Niro, doing the physical intimidation routine that young De Niro would have done in an earlier Scorsese mob movie. Except we can still see the stooped shoulders and weak knees of the real-life older De Niro underneath the strange soulless smoothness of face. CGI can only do so much.
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