Three and a Half Hours

In the time it takes to see the movie "The Irishman", a minute under three and half hours, one can

• If suitably fit--under 35, and putting in reasonable mileage--run a marathon.
• See "The Marriage of Figaro", and depending on the length of the intermissions maybe make it out of the Kennedy Center parking garage.
• Read any one of Hadji Murad, A River Runs Through It, one of Plato's medium-length dialogues, or (aloud) two books of the Iliad.
• Walk from Alexandria to Mount Vernon, with time for lunch along the way.

It is only fair to say that running a marathon will leave one with sore legs for a couple of days.

"The Irishman" struck me as being in some ways an accumulation of the weaknesses of the 1970 generation of movie making. It has actors who were young in 1970 playing in 2020 the young men of 1950. It has a Mafia of near omniscience and omnipotence. It has notably asinine assertions about two generations of the Kennedy family. (In a different movie from this generation, the CIA would have murdered JFK for wishing to pull us out of Vietnam; in this one, the mob votes him into office to overthrow Castro, helps him to stage the Bay of Pigs, and perhaps shoots him for failing to carry it off.)

I have wasted a lot of equivalent chunks of time in my years, and will soon enough stop grudging the time lost to "The Irishman". The man who strikes me as having a legitimate grievance is Jack Goldsmith, who makes a compelling case that his stepfather has been libeled.