Honestly, this movie was too short.

This should have been a mini-series. I don't mean add filler just to fill an unnecessary quota like many Netflix shows do. I'd say about 7-9 half hour episodes would have done this story justice. Add about an hour of content to help connect more dots and develop more ideas and answer more questions, than divide it into episodes to let the story breath. There's too much material for a movie. You could feel it buckling under its own weight, often times zipping through plot points in one minute because there's thirty more that need attention. There's not enough time to let it absorb, and it became abundantly clear that Scorsese was relying on narration as a crutch for exposition. ]

There were so many complex relationships and motivations and back-stories that needed to be explained in order for the ensuing plot line and action to make sense to the audience, but because there wasn't enough time, he couldn't dedicate any more celluloide to make you feel it through visual story-telling, so he cheaply relied on the narrator to give you a quick bullet point break down of why this character is doing this. It lost a lot of its emotional impact as a result.