Two aging men sit in a quiet prison cafeteria. They share bread soaked in juice, a makeshift sacrament for people who outlived their own myth. Their faces are worn down to the grain. On Netflix, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci deliver unforgettable, masterclass performances in Martin Scorsese’s deeply moving crime drama The Irishman — a three-and-a-half-hour reckoning in which every silent moment in isolation brings them closer to the only thing the life left them: memory. Behind those fragile gazes are men stripped of power, of crews, of the phone that used to ring with work. The poignant, heavy atmosphere of that frame is the film in miniature. The underworld was never going to give them a clean ending. It was only going to give them time.

Released in 2019 after a brief theatrical window, The Irishman is Scorsese’s late style at full stretch: the gangster picture turned elegy. De Niro is Frank Sheeran, a Philadelphia truck driver and World War II veteran who becomes a union enforcer and, if you believe Charles Brandt’s book I Heard You Paint Houses, the man who killed Jimmy Hoffa. Pesci, lured out of retirement, is Russell Bufalino, the Pennsylvania boss who takes Frank in like a younger brother and never quite lets him go. Al Pacino, in his first Scorsese film, is Hoffa — loud, wounded, convinced the Teamsters and the country still owe him. Around them: Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Harvey Keitel, Stephen Graham as Tony Provenzano, Anna Paquin as Frank’s daughter Peggy, whose silence is the film’s other verdict.

Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zaillian do not build the story as a rise-and-fall firework. They build it as a long drive. Much of the middle is Frank and Russell in a car, heading toward a wedding that is also an errand, talking about nothing and everything while the digital youth painted over De Niro’s and Pesci’s faces tries to persuade you these men were ever young. The de-aging was the talking point in 2019. The lasting shock is how little youth matters. Even in the “young” scenes, Frank already looks like a man waiting to become the nursing-home narrator who talks to a box of ashes and a priest who cannot quite hear the confession.

The high stakes of The Irishman are not a vault or a rival family. They are loyalty as a trap. Frank paints houses — mob slang for murder — because Russell asks, because Hoffa is a friend, because the work is there and the alternative is remaining a nobody with a truck. Pesci’s Russell is the opposite of the volcanic psychopath he played for Scorsese decades earlier. He is soft-spoken, watchful, almost tender. That tenderness is the weapon. When the film arrives at the act everyone came to see, it is not staged as triumph. It is staged as an errand a man cannot refuse and will never be allowed to put down.

Then the years do what crews and prosecutors could not. The cafeteria scene the caption invokes is one of several late passages in which the movie stops pretending crime is a genre and admits it is a way of using up a life. Bread in juice. A wheelchair. A hallway of men who once ran cities and now argue about the television. Frank tries to buy a coffin, to leave a door ajar in case Peggy comes, to explain himself to a daughter who learned early that some fathers come home with blood they will not name. Paquin has few lines. She does not need them. The look she gives De Niro is the moral bill.

Scorsese has always known that gangster films are American success stories told in the wrong key. The Irishman is the ledger at closing time. Rodrigo Prieto’s images are autumnal even when the plot is mid-century. Thelma Schoonmaker cuts for breath rather than velocity. The needle drops — “In the Still of the Night,” the old doo-wop ache — do not hype the killings. They mourn the fact that the killers liked the same songs as everyone else. Violence is blunt and quick. Remorse is slow and possibly fake and possibly the only honest thing Frank has left.

Netflix financed the film when the running time and budget made traditional studios flinch, and Netflix remains its home. The Irishman streams on Netflix and Netflix Standard with Ads across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and a long list of other territories, often in 4K. That is the platform the current campaign points to, and it is still the simplest way to live with the movie’s length as it was designed to be lived with: at home, without an intermission imposed by commerce, in the same quiet in which Frank sits at the end. The Criterion Collection later issued a special-edition disc for viewers who want the film on a shelf. Digital extras exist, but this is not a title that has been widely farmed out to rival subscription services. When people say they watched The Irishman, they almost always mean they watched it on Netflix.

What that prison cafeteria proves is that the ruthless underworld was never going to stay picturesque. It was going to become a tray, a stain on a shirt, two old men performing a ritual that looks like communion and is only lunch. De Niro and Pesci, who once made mayhem look like music, here make stillness look like a sentence. Forced to confront the inescapable consequences of a violent past, they have nothing left to enforce and no one left to call. Isolation does not redeem them. It simply removes the noise that used to drown out the question Peggy never had to speak aloud.

The Irishman is 209 minutes of that question. It is a crime epic that keeps subtracting until only regret is on the table. On Netflix, the bread is still soaking. The men are still sitting. And Scorsese, late in a career spent glorifying and diagnosing this world, leaves the door open — not because anyone is coming, but because Frank cannot bear to close it.