When it comes to Martin Scorsese’s epic biographical crime drama The Irishman, it is safe to say that peoples’ mileage may vary. While full of craft, the movie’s 3-hour portrayal of the life of WWII veteran and mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and his friendships with crime boss Russel Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) is definitely a little fatiguing. Despite its length, the film has continued to stick with me since its release, so much so that I eventually decided to write something about it. While trying to fashion a workable thesis – never easy for yours truly – I encountered the writing of someone named Dom Nero and immediately found the basis for my own essay. The Irishman, Nero argues, is an important Martin Scorsese film for how it evolves the depiction of mobsters and criminals from being simply cruel to something else: sociopaths. Yet Nero’s extraordinary diagnosis of Sheeran as a sociopath ignores the film’s true achievement: which is its exploration of the gangster as an example of ordinary evil.   

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In his 2019 essay, which you can read in full here, Dom Nero wrote that The Irishman, and specifically the characterization of its main character, was a “career-defining” achievement for Scorsese, as well as one of the “most vital film he’s made in decades.” The crux of Nero’s praise is that The Irishman represents a bold shift in Scorsese’s thinking on the cinematic gangster. “In The Irishman, Scorsese finally surmises that these mobsters aren’t just heartless, but that they’re sociopaths,” he writes. The film’s protagonist is a textbook example of sociopathy because Sheeran is largely emotionless and seems incapable of extending empathy further than “his bulky shoulder pads.”

Nero’s essay asserts that Scorsese’s work has long focused on violent and basically amoral men, but these characters were still capable of feeling something. Additionally, even their most monstrous behaviors are rooted in relatable human failings. “In previous Scorsese films, we’ve seen angry loners like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, who is driven by political or ideological motivations,” says Dom, before offering another example. “There’s [also] Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas–that’s Joe Pesci’s character–who Scorsese portrays as so riddled with Napoleon Complex that he’s constantly on the verge of self-immolation.” I personally would also add Raging Bull’s Jake La Motta (also played by De Niro) to the argument, a man whose volcanic rage is clearly intertwined with almost unfathomably deep self-loathing. Dom sees no sign of similarly recognizable traits in The Irishman’s main character. Therefore, he reaches the conclusion that Sheeran represents something more inhuman or alien than these other cinematic men: “Like all gangsters,” he writes, a sociopath like Sheeran is actually “no man at all.”

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I can vibe with some of Dom’s takes on the film, particularly when he gushes about how Scorsese is still staging ambitious projects like The Irishman. Scorsese’s late period has been full of rich and diverse examples of this creative drive. The only real advice I have for him, really, would be more editing and less of that old lech DiCaprio. Similarly, I agree that Sheeran represents a different kind of Scorsese protagonist. I simply don’t think that the difference is that he’s a sociopath, especially when the two supporting reasons Dom brings up seem to rest on some pretty shaky ground.

Dom highlights, for instance, that Sheeran embodies the quintessential sociopathic quality: an internal emptiness and a total lack of guilt or remorse. Yet the film frequently showcases the man expressing almost familial warmth with both Pesci’s and Pacino’s characters. He even experiences what appears to be pain, distress and remorse when he is ordered to kill the later by the former. Similarly questionable is how Dom cites a Psychology Today article that sociopaths are often created by environmental factors, which helps “explain Sheeran’s sociopathic behavior, since he was forced to commit unconscionable killings in World War II.” The author conveniently leaves out that the article’s use of the term “environmental factors” is almost entirely in reference to child abuse – not to soldiering during adulthood.

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The fact that Nero’s so-called “evidence” doesn’t really wash underscores how he doesn’t seem to understand what is actually evolutionary about The Irishman. Rather than making Sheeran into something alien or extraordinary, I would posit that it the far more disturbing prospect that Sheeran’s immorality stems from a far more common place: deep moral laziness.

It may seem like a stretch to say that a person could somehow help commit multiple murders due to laziness. But history is unfortunately littered with examples of this all-too-familiar human failing. Perhaps the most obvious one is Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi famously tried by Israel following WWII and immortalized in Hannah Arendt’s iconic treatise: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.

Arendt’s central theme in that book was that Eichmann was not a monster or a sociopath like Grobbels and Hitler. He was someone whose desire for success within the moral vacuum of Third Reich was combined with a deep intellectual laziness, and which ultimately led to a stunning level of rationalization for his actions. He accomplished this by eschewing analytical thought and absolving himself of responsibility via a reliance on cliched language about just “doing his job,” “following orders” and adhering to the letter of his country’s law.

Sheeran often seems to embody a similar form of banal evil throughout The Irishman. Over the course of the story, he moves through two violent, morally bankrupt subcultures – the military and then the mafia. His desire to excel within these structures also leads to him using canned language to rationalize his complicity and obfuscate his responsibility as moral actor. “It’s what it is,” is the oft-repeated phrase he uses when speaking about the murder and mayhem he doles out. It is an almost comical characterization of contract killing as simply a thing in itself that happens independently from his ethical or moral choices. This phrase feels as if it could serve as Scorsese’s thesis on both Sheeran and maybe even the concept of the gangster itself. These are not people who fundamentally lack empathy, but instead simply have convinced themselves that such considerations are irrelevant to the world in which they exist.

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When we factor all of this in, it becomes clear that Sheeran is not different from Scorsese’s other criminal characters because of his sociopathy. He’s unique due to his banality. To put it another way, Sheeran represents a step forward for the director not because he is defined by greater perversity but because he has greater relatability than previous creations. Few of us, for example, are so insecure and unpredictable that we may violently lash out when someone calls us something as benign as a “funny guy.” It is also relatively rare to encounter someone so lonely, angry and delusional that they think offing a few pimps is going to alter the course of an entire city’s disintegration. And of course, you probably (and thankfully) will go your entire life without meeting someone who will take an off-hand remark as evidence that their own brother is fucking their wife and then try to beat them to death because of it.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible to meet people who willingly participate in a culture that brutalizes people and then subsequently rationalize away such brutality. Just look at American political elites who prop up the American war machine. More than likely, most of these people would not qualify as sociopaths. But many of them are undoubtedly opportunistic like Sheeran and Eichmann. In addition, most of these people are just as morally lazy as these two men and can do little else but absolve themselves of responsibility for the carnage their actions leave in their wake.

The discourse around Ukraine is probably my favorite example of this behavior in action. From everything shared by mainstream political mouthpieces, Ukraine is just sorta’ something that happened: the product of aggression from the deranged, blood-thirsty country known as Russia. NATO’s endless expansion since WWII and America’s strident support for the 2014 Euromaidan Protests are nowhere to be found in this rhetorical lens or depiction of recent history. All of the granular background detail is papered over for vague platitudes and canned propaganda. You see, according to these deep state war mongers, we had to be involved in Ukraine for the purposes of “defending democracy,” not because we have calculated and immoral interest in containing other powerful countries and maintaining the American empire’s dominance. It is an utter cop-out of our culpability in the fate of that country. And it is no excuse for how our actions are likely going to leave it a depopulated, smoldering wreck.

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Scorsese’s The Irishman is not his best film. It’s way too fucking long for one thing. But despite this, it is still a powerful addition to his filmography that changes the director’s typical portrait of cinematic criminals and gangsters. It doesn’t do this, however, in the way that Nero claims. The Irishman does not treat Sheeran as something more extraordinarily evil or inhuman than the thugs seen in films like Goodfellas or Taxi Driver. Rather, The Irishman evolves the gangster by transfiguring him into something far more insidious: a figure of deep moral laziness. This complex characterization transforms Sheeran into a more relatable character than those from previous Scorsese crime dramas. It also turns the film into a substantive statement about how evil more often than not shows up in the world – from the ranks of the Nazi regime in the 30s to the upper echelon of the American empire in 2024. And so, Nero may have been right when he lauded the film as a step forward for its elderly creators, but not because it allows us to see the cinematic criminal as a sociopath. Instead, it is a great and important film because it uses that archetype to allow us to see ourselves.