Broad and invigorating tale of organised crime and a general life of crime in the centre of last century.

Rating: 8/10 (5 March 2009)

Goodfellas quite effortlessly embeds itself near the top of the tree in terms of both the best of the genre and the best of a certain director. That director is Martin Scorsese; a man whose films, it seems, reach out to generation after generation because of their timeless studies of the male who's placed within a scenario of either psychological crisis or social misfit; often both. Scorsese's films are journeys, but they never seem to branch out beyond the constraints of a city or the small, designated and rather run down area in which they're set. There are no vast landscapes or set pieces involving glitzy cinematography; just down and dirty locales inhabited by people you wouldn't usually notice or want to pay much attention to, only Scorsese brings them to life in that way that he does.
Such is Goodfellas, an old fashioned yarn about the rise and consequent fall of a gangster who begins life at the bottom of the pecking order before working their way up and then realising that once you're in that groove you've been searching for, you become even more vulnerable than before. Goodfellas isn't the sort of film you revisit because you're tired of Scorsese's more recent efforts. From what I've seen following Goodfellas, he hasn't made a great film since his 1990 mob thriller but that's not to say any of his films since haven't been at least good to some degree.
The film tiptoes along that fine line that makes organised crime or indeed Mafia life look 'cool', or 'sexy' or the sort of lifestyle you might want to get involved in. It's important to recognise that, by the end, Ray Liotta's Henry Hill has become the one thing he feared most before even starting out in 'the life' and that's a regular guy who lives in a suburban house, with a mailbox and a newspaper on the doorstep every morning. It sounds like he ended up pretty well off considering the amount of blood, violence and death that awaits rather a few of the other characters that inhabit Goodfellas, but that's not to say it's a brain dead blood bath designed to appeal to the masses. Each and every death; act of violence - Hell, even every gunshot resounds with the viewer in a chilling and quite frightening manner; whoever the victim and whoever the instigator. Some are more jarring than others, but we feel a certain something toward each individual that is involved in a grizzly end.
Such is the power of the character study here. Henry Hill is young and on the brink of his teen years. He lives opposite a restaurant in Brooklyn, New York in the 1950s and doesn't look at but gazes at the activity that goes on down there on ground level as organised crime syndicates go about their business. The first time he sees blood or the results of acts of extreme violence is the first time we do, when one member stumbles back to the place of business in agony. Hill meets fellow Italian and Irish American alike gangsters in Jimmy Conway (De Niro) and Tommy DeVito (Pesci), both based on real life people whom, I read, are as akin to their real life persona's as possible. What follows is a study of life, love, theft, murder and honour all within a Mafia orientated arena.
Apart from most things, Goodfellas is a cracking ride. At two and a half hours, but never feeling like it, you have fly through the lives of these people in no time at all. Hill's voice-overs provide most of the toned down and grubby information required on how he lived as a child complete with violent father a truancy problems and when those switch to Karen (Bracco) and her, worried if anything perspective, it acts as a jolt to the audience as the mindset of a man in Henry who is slowly getting involved to the point in which he may assume himself invincible. Of course towards the end, he really does loose it as a cocaine deal and a large family meal clash on the same day in what is a sequence of events that work on several dramatic and humorous levels at once.
I think the most resounding reason Goodfellas comes across as so good and so memorable is its strength in depth in regards to individual scenes or moments. Just thinking about certain sequences, such as the long take in which Henry makes his way across a public street and breaks someone's nose with a revolver or the scene in which the guys sit around Tommy's mother's table and talk and eat casually, despite the fact there's a dying man in Tommy's car which is parked outside, just produce chills. One of the more famous scenes is, of course, Tommy's "Funny? Funny how?" tirade. Even when the film begins to remove us from the life of crime and more towards the older age that these characters approach, Scorsese does it in such a way that we're cool with the genre being manipulated and branching out into something else. Goodfellas is, and will continue to be, a very impressive and worthwhile film for many those who stumble across it.