Goodfellas (1990)

Much as he did a decade earlier in Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese delves into the lives of people you don't even want to know. Like Raging Bull, Goodfellas offers a unique and fascinating vision of America and American lives. It is at once an extremely personal film and one that is so in tune with its characters and setting that it has the comic yet horrifying impact of an epic Marcel Ophuls documentary--despite the famous actors sprinkled throughout. Critics voted Raging Bull the most important film of the 80s. While it may be premature to predict a similar status for Goodfellas in the 90s, it is certainly not too soon to recognize it as one of the most important films of 1990.

Based on journalist Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction book Wiseguy (the film's original title, changed to avoid confusion with the TV series of the same name), Goodfellas recounts the career of low-level gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who became part of the federal witness protection program after testifying against his erstwhile partners in crime. At the center of the book is Hill's insider's account of the $6 million robbery of a Lufthansa cargo facility at New York's Idlewild Airport. As might be expected of the director of Taxi Driver, Goodfellas doesn't even show the robbery. Instead it focuses on the bloody aftermath of the heist, in which all the participants are brutally murdered by Henry's partners, the lethally paranoid Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and the psychotic Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci).

Generally, Goodfellas is concerned with Tommy and Jimmy's climb up the mob ladder and its effects on Henry, but Scorsese's rich tapestry is both broader in scope and more detailed than a mere recounting of the events in the trio's life of crime. Because Scorsese is equally concerned with the minutiae of his main characters' world (most of which is provided by Pileggi's book) and with the grand design that appears to underlie that world (the director's contribution), the downfall of Henry and his associates seems fated.

As the film begins, Henry is a youngster (Christopher Serrone). His family lives across the street from a taxi stand that doubles as the local mob headquarters. Admiring the criminals' wealth and clout in the community, Henry begins hustling odd jobs from them, parking their Cadillacs during card games and running numbers. Selling untaxed cigarettes out of the trunk of a car results in Henry's first arrest, during which he maintains the mob code of silence. He is rewarded by being put on a Mafia "career track" under the direction of Jimmy, who, like Henry, is part Irish and therefore barred from ever becoming a member of the Mafia inner circle. A full Sicilian, Tommy begins working with Henry while both are still in their teens. But, owing to Tommy's homicidal temper, it emerges that his career outlook is also limited.

All three work for local mob overlord Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), a cold, manipulative bully who has little of the redemptive grace of The Godfather's Don Corleone. The difference between The Godfather and Goodfellas can be summed up in their catch phrases: "Make him an offer he can't refuse" is replaced in Goodfellas by "Fuck you! Pay me!" The brutality of this latter demand is usually enforced with the thud of a pistol whip to the head of someone unfortunate enough to be somehow beholden to Cicero.

Goodfellas encompasses so much that to adequately describe it would virtually require a transcription of the entire film. Many of the seemingly peripheral subplots are brilliant in themselves. Focusing on the one-woman war Henry's wife, Karen (wonderfully played by Lorraine Bracco), fights against his mistress, Henry's homelife functions as a raucous parody of the domineering husbands and quiet wives of The Godfather. But what is perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of Goodfellas is the way in which it radically rethinks the epic cinematic form. In traditional epics a long, complicated, linear narrative unfolds over an extended period of time, serving to draw the audience into the world of its characters, causing viewers to have an emotional stake in the joys, pains, triumphs, and tragedies of the people on the screen.

In this film, neither the characters develop nor does it invite audience empathy for them. The narrative is even more fragmented than it is in Pileggi's book--resembling bits and pieces of home movies spliced together rather than a traditional movie plot. Characters continually appear, disappear, and change drastically, usually without much explanation. Karen, so fiercely self-possessed early in the film, is cowed and exhausted by the movie's hellish climax, during which Henry has gone from a trim, fit, mob dandy to a wired, coked-up, misshapen mess in little more than a jump cut (Scorsese borrows much from Truffaut's and Goddard's bag of cinematic tricks in the film).

Henry's cocaine courier, Lois (Welker White), is not so much introduced as dropped into the action. He goes on to bring about Henry's arrest and induction into the witness protection program, leading to the film's final and most disturbing image--a suburbanized Henry appearing at the front door of his new tract home to bring in the morning paper. At just under two and a half hours, Goodfellas manages to feel as if it were cut from an even greater length. Moving with dizzying speed, it packs in so much information and observation, and so many New Wave-style "privileged moments" on so many levels that if virtually any other filmmaker had made it, the film would probably have run about twice as long.

An Italian-American who grew up in New York's Little Italy, Scorsese had to this point resisted the obvious career move of making a gangster movie, notwithstanding Mean Streets, which, while taking place against a mob backdrop, was not a gangster film in the strict sense of the genre. In the end, what most decisively damns Henry is also what makes him most accessible to the audience (in addition to Liotta's excellent performance). Despite being at the center of the film, he's often on the edges of the its most horrible events. He doesn't even participate directly in the Lufthansa heist. The only real violence we see him commit comes in revenge for an attack on Karen. Nonetheless, he's no hero because he has no commitment, finally, except to himself. That lack of commitment is the only unforgivable sin.

In Goodfellas Scorsese denies the gangster the single characteristic that has made him a viable screen subject practically from the dawn of cinema, his false tragic stature. Instead of growing over the course of the film, Henry shrinks under Scorsese's scrutiny into a spineless louse surrounded by violent sociopaths, fit neither for sorrow nor pity. It is thus ironic that, as religious fundamentalists did with The Last Temptation of Christ, Italian-American advocacy groups publicly condemned Goodfellas upon its theatrical release. However, even this condemnation is powerful testimony to Scorsese's artistry. A mediocre filmmaker can upset people, but it takes a real artist to get them hopping mad. Pesci won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Cast:

Performer, Character

Robert De Niro, James Conway

Ray Liotta, Henry Hill

Joe Pesci, Tommy DeVito

Lorraine Bracco, Karen Hill

Paul Sorvino, Paul Cicero

Frank Sivero, Frankie Carbone

Tony Darrow, Sonny Bunz

Mike Starr, Frenchy Frank

Henny Youngman, Himself

Catherine Scorsese (Marty's Mom),Tommy's Mother

Charles Scorsese,

Robbie Vinton, Bobby Vinton John

Samuel L. Jackson, Stacks

Production Credits:

Producer, Irwin Winkler

Executive Producer, Barbara De Fina

Director, Martin Scorsese

Screenwriters, Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese (based on the book Wiseguy by Pileggi)

Editor, Thelma Schoonmaker

Cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus

Composers, Too many to count. The soundtrack is another example of Scorsese's ability to use songs popular at the time the film's action is taking place. Check the film's internet sites for more information.