Slick, flashy, often brilliant, yet cannot make you give a hoot about its characters

Rating: 7/10 (24 April 2012)

Goodfellas is a technically impressive film and interesting to review largely because of the huge following it has amongst film critics and Martin Scorsese fanatics alike, most of whom reverentially believe it is his best workand they may be correct.
The story based on a novel by Nicholas Pileggi chronicles the rise through the ranks of the Mafia of Irish-Sicilian Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who has always wanted to be a gangster since he was a kid, and finds his wish granted. We follow him from a rambunctious teen to his first arrest, his marriage to Jewish wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco) through to their fall into drugs, and finally as an informer prior to entry into the Witness Protection Program.
The film has a dry sense of humor and is technically and visually amazing. Scorsese loves the mobster milieu and is obviously working in his element here with a nicely picked cast. The attention to detail, the camera work, the costumes, the choice of music is all well thought out to the most intimate minutiae. The film is a fairly fascinating peek at life inside the Mafia. Scorsese allows events to unfold believably and the moments near the end where Henry and Karen become increasingly paranoid that they are under surveillance, complete with jittery, over bright intense camera work that heightens their unease, is arguably some of Scorsese's best work.
The acting is fairly solid. Liotta manages to hold things together as the focal character and he gets nice support from Bracco. DeNiro manages a dignified turn as Liotta's mentor and friend. Joe Pesci won the Oscar as the psychotic killer Tommy DeVito. He is utilized well enough here to overlook the fact that it is basically the same performance he gives in everything else.
Yet as amazing as the film is, it still has its drawbacks that prevent it from becoming the classic that many of its admirers would have you believe. As fascinating as Goodfellas is, I actually find Scorsese's similarly themed subsequent work Casino just as impressive technically, yet far more interesting in that it tells its tale using the backdrop of the formation of gambling mecca Las Vegas. I realize that I am in the minority with that view, but there it is.
Yet most notable of all is that Goodfellas seems utterly incapable of connecting on an emotional level with the viewer. The superior Godfather films featured similar themes and focused on characters capable of shocking acts of violence, yet managed to connect on an emotional level so that we had some concern for the players. By contrast, at the end of Goodfellas, as brilliant as I thought some of the direction and technical aspects were, I found that I did not give a damn what happened to any of the characters on screen, including Henry and Karen. I was completely indifferent to whether they lived, died, escaped, etc. And this issue makes for a somewhat empty viewing experience.
1990 was a very interesting film year. Coppola released his last Godfather film that year. Although it got an Oscar nod, critics largely overlooked it in favor of Goodfellas due to the fact that it is not on the same level as its predecessors. There is no question Godfather III is a flawed film, but it is also more emotionally rich than Goodfellas and any one of its flaws is more interesting to discuss at length than any of Goodfellas successes. Conversely, critics and Scorsese fans have spilled gallons of ink over the "injustice" of Dances With Wolves winning the Best Picture over Goodfellas, but it is not hard to see why it did. DWW in its own right is just as technically impressive as Goodfellas (maybe even more so considering its director was an amateur with a passionate vision), but DWW connects emotionally with the viewer in a far more powerful way than Goodfellas ever does. At the end of DWW and Godfather III, I had to know what happened with those characters. At the end of Goodfellas, not so much.
What Scorsese has achieved is certainly noteworthy and makes for a very good, solid gangster film, but most definitely not a masterpiece. It is slick, flashy and technically well done (sometimes even brilliant), but its inability to make me give a damn about any of its characters is a huge stumbling block.