The Meaning Of The Mob

Rating: 9/10 (7 March 2007)

The more time passes, the better "GoodFellas" looks.
A decades-long examination of the Mafia lifestyle as seen through the eyes of minor Brooklyn hoodlum Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), whose secret to survival involves keeping quiet, "GoodFellas" puts you in the back seat watching with Henry as his pals steal, rob, burn, and kill each other off. One thing about living the good life is that it's never good enough. As Henry and wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) partake more in the money, they also become more exposed to the danger.
That's really the core of the story, though it's probable if you haven't seen "GoodFellas" you think more of it as the one where Henry's temperamental friend Tommy (Joe Pesci) wants to know why you find him so amusing.
"GoodFellas" is an amusing film, very much so at times, yet like with Tommy there's always a barb that comes with the laughter, and makes for a deeper overall experience. Director Martin Scorsese and co-screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the source book "Wiseguy," capture not only the violence but the lifestyle that undergirds and enables the violence, often in finely detailed and witty ways, like when Karen meets the other Mob wives and discovers their penchant for double-knits and beating their sons with broom handles.
Other organized-crime films either excuse the lifestyle in a relativistic way ("Godfather") or pump up the volume to an absurd degree (1983's "Scarface") in order to sensationalize and glamorize the experience. "GoodFellas," despite its bad-boy reputation, is really on the side of the angels, out to expose the vileness of Mafia living, people who kill each other over nothing and betray each other over nickles and dimes. It's hard to see Scorsese's claims of detesting violence in some of his other films, like "Gangs Of New York" and "Casino," because he goes to it so often there, but here you meet the people before you see what happens to them, reducing the pleasure of their demise, while the killings are quick and dirty, not exploited for cheap effect.
That and it's so damn entertaining. Scorsese puts on a clinic, one that is still ongoing, with his use of music, tracking shots, and slam-the-door editing, like when we still hear Karen crying from one scene while Henry and his pals walk through a door to start the next. Even when you watch this film again (and you sort of have to, there's so much to take in) you aren't bored because there's always some new thing to attract your attention.
The character of Jimmy the Gent (Robert De Niro) is a little confusing in the film, especially when he helps crazy Tommy whack a guy he should know better about. The book explains this better, but "GoodFellas" is one Scorsese-De Niro collaboration in which De Niro is often not the most important person on screen when he is on screen. He's good, but Liotta is classic in the central role, a performance for the ages in fact, while Pesci made for a deserved Oscar recipient with the way he inhabits Tommy the walking Id and delivers "GoodFellas" message of how the good life isn't all that good, that there's always something rotten beneath the surface that will reach up and grab you at the wrong time.