Amazing

Rating: 8/10 (8 December 2016)

To see an artist working at the peak of his power, everything extraneous stripped away, every element there for a purpose, is an extraordinary exhilaration.
Martin Scorsese gave us that pure, hot, unquestioned power last in "Raging Bull" and, in virtuosity alone, "GoodFellas" is "Raging Bull" squared. (It opens Friday at selected theaters.)
Scorsese has hardly been marking time in the 10 years between the two; "After Hours" and his "Life Lessons" segment of "New York Stories" showed just how much he has matured, grown more intelligently ironic and is even more astonishingly in command of his craft. "GoodFellas," which somehow mixes its horrors with a deep vein of mordant humor, flows with the exuberance of a filmmaker who has every detail nailed and a few new lovely moves he wants to show us.
His characters--a savage quartet that includes Robert DeNiro, a truly chilling Joe Pesci, Paul Sorvino and Ray Liotta--are the same ones he has been considering since "Mean Streets": the wise guys of his neighborhood, different from us in that pity seems to have been left out of their DNA and an off-handed brutality slipped into its place.
Obviously, this is Coppola's and Puzo's turf, too, but Coppola's grandiose characters, rubbing shoulders with senators and popes, are like figures from grand opera. Scorsese's gangsters, his wise guys, are pure street level, they're the stuff of popular song that Scorsese threads through his picture--Tony Bennett, Bobby Vinton, the Crystals.
"GoodFellas' " no-nonsense street tone comes straight from journalist Nicholas Pileggi's book "Wise Guy," a shrewd distillation of 30 years in the Mafia through the eyes of one of its sidewalk mechanics. Half-Sicilian, half-Irish Henry Hill (Liotta) began by running nimbly for the wise guys at the corner cabstand when he was 12; 30 years later, when it became clear that it was either them or him, he turned on them with exactly the same agility.