Analysis/Opinion We are the eyes, ears, perception of Henry Hill.

Rating: 10/10 (23 March 2020)

Goodfellas is a voyage to the distant idiosyncratic existence of the mobsters in the 1970s. The movie achieves and excels in articulating a narrative that is rich with symbolisms that display a clear landscape of the philosophy that made the mobster families so efficient at crime. The movie gives you so much to work with in terms of description and metaphors that the viewer feels that you know the characters intimately. With good reason, in order to adapt properly Nicholas Pileggi's novel into a screenplay we needed to feel part of the mobster family. We are the eyes, ears, perception of Henry Hill in most of the movie, and it is conducted with brilliant detail that we immerse ourselves seamlessly into his phenomenology.
At the beginning of the movie we immediately get presented with a gallery of gestures that bring teenage Henry Hill's aspirations to life. For him anyone else that was not part of the mobster family was a nobody, and the dialogue did an accurate depiction representing the value that he placed on being someone. He wanted notoriety, respect, stability, wealth, blissful hedonism, and more than anything power. The mobster family gave him all that with the liabilities that he eventually discovered. We get entertained with one of those cautionary stories where a young person lives life too fast and is not aware of the consequences of his actions.
All throughout the movie we hear the excellent dialogue navigate us through the events of the protagonist's life. Scorsese used emotionally charged situations instead of descriptive statements to elicit a sensation from the viewer. For instance, instead of narrating: "I had gained the respect of strangers and acquaintances", he created situations that would demonstrate that event. This happened throughout the entire movie. The general tone and atmosphere of the crime family was of gratuitous irreverence. In this same tone he was able to introduce one of the best performances I have seen Joe Pesci deliver in any movie. In every scene, Tommy (Joe Pesci) was demonstrating to be an outrageous, sadist, amoral, macho, over the top, ruthless maniac.
The soundtrack of the film was also brilliantly used to solidify the tone of a scene. Scorsese masterfully navigated the viewers through various sensations using in tandem the soundtrack and the narrative in creative and diverse ways that immortalized moments within the film. Jimmy starts to descend into paranoia after the Lufthansa score, but before the viewer can begin to experience his degeneration, Scorsese shows us a scene of him looking suave, calm, collected, and reflective. This scene with the soundtrack attempts to mitigate his fall and preserve his status and gravitas.
We eventually see Henry cheating on his wife and degenerating into not being able to control his marriage and sleeping with other women. He starts to become reckless, dabble with drugs, fornicate and not abide to the mafia's ethos: We are not "animale" says "paulie" and tells him what to do to deal with the situation in an emblematic way that demonstrates that the crime family is always first than the blood family.
Jimmy, Tommy, and Henry carry the movie effortlessly, as is the attitude of the mobsters in the entire film. Their experience exudes sophistication, wisdom, proficiency, prowess, admiration. There are implicit and explicit gestures where we gradually get convinced that they indeed are worthy of admiration.