This Movie Is A Drug.

Rating: 10/10 (8 June 2010)

In the opening moments of GoodFellas, a movie about the tradecraft and culture of organized crime in New York, our storyteller Henry Hill says that for as long as he can remember, he always wanted to be a gangster, that it was better than being President. That he voice-overs his own life, later joined by his wife, narrating her side, is pivotal to the movie's ingenuity. Though the film refuses to judge its characters, it's not an omniscient portrayal, but a frame of reference rooted in yearning for the life. What's more, alternating dual narration causes us to see scenes in different ways. "These were blue-collar guys," Hill's wife rationalizes. "The only way they could make real extra money was to go out and cut a few corners." Their influence was, and is, exhilarating. "If we wanted something, we just took it," Henry says. "If anyone complained twice they got hit so bad, believe me, they never complained again." After all of his harrowing experiences, Henry, played by Ray Liotta in the stand-out performance of his career, still carps, still misses all the good times. And after literally having seen this film possibly a hundred or more times, I still watch.
The screenplay is both based on Nicholas Pileggi's biography of Hill, and Scorsese's own Little Italy recollections. The early scenes showcase adolescent Henry as an errand boy for the local Brooklyn mob. A shot of him peering out his tenement window reflects Scorsese's own schoolday reminiscences of the neighborhood. So does the reverse-shot which utilizes quiet slow-motion for closeups of mobsters' shiny shoes, slick ties, greased-back hair, ostentatious rings, smoldering cigars. In a movie legendary for violence that happens by surprise, one of the most jolting kicks comes when Henry's beaten by his father for missing school. He had to "take a few beatings" at home owing to his teenage professional pursuit, but it was a small price. Violence is like the tempo beneath every scene. The percussion is the fruits of unwarranted benefits. Henry's accomplice Jimmy Conway emerges into his first shot with Robert De Niro's special brand of broadcasted constraint. His mannerisms say, "Don't worry. You'll all get autographs if you're patient." Henry's other partner is the unforgettable Tommy DeVito, in an extraordinary performance by Joe Pesci, who oversteps his influence rather than letting it imply itself.
Henry's enthusiasm for his developing profession is tangible. In the movie's most talked-about shot, he takes his future wife Karen (Lorraine Bracco gives it her all) to the Copacabana. There's a line in front, but he squires her across the street, downstairs through service hallways, the kitchen area, out into the showroom right as their table's being set right in front of the stage. This uninterrupted three-minute shot is not just a cameraman's feat: It's a bold technique showing how the whole world appears to unravel readily before young Henry Hill. There's another particularly extended shot, as Henry acquaints us with his fellow gangsters. Henry leads the camera through a packed speakeasy, calling out names as the characters nod to the camera, mutter to Henry. The camera appears to track Henry, yet appears to be his POV; sometimes he's talking to them, sometimes to us. We're included in the scene. The cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, was a central accomplice. Cultivating Scorsese's trademark form, he quite rarely lets his camera be stationary. It's so often in motion, if just slightly, making us not cold bystanders but complicit witnesses.
Alongside the violence is an account of capitalistic striving. Henry and Karen come from circumstances that couldn't freely result in Cadillacs, Vegas excursions, fur coats. She rationalizes what he has to do to finance their prestige. The movie centralizes Henry's climb through the mob, then down into prison sentences and full-blown duplicity. Initially the mob looks to be an augmentation of his life, then eventually, after he begins selling drugs, there's a hemmed-in diminishing. The camera style in the earlier scenes ritualizes his network of control with all-encompassing grace. Near the end, in an intoxicatingly berserk segment huddled in one day, the form gets hectic and jerky as he hustles frenziedly around the neighborhood on family and criminal errands while a helicopter constantly feels like it's fluttering above. This is one of the most virtuoso film sequences I have ever seen.
What Scorsese does that makes GoodFellas so universally adored is infect us with his exhilaration with the material. It has the breakneck propulsion of a storyteller who can't wait to see your reaction. Scorsese's camera embraces these guys, listens to their shoes clicking, beholds the tailoring of their clothes. And when they're plotting the fabled Lufthansa job, he has them whispering together in a tight three-shot that has their heads bent low and close with the rush of their own awesomeness. What a rush it is for them to steal.
The film's way is to sever dialogue with brutality. We see some of cinema's most effective cries wolf, as in Pesci's legendary restaurant scene where Tommy would like to know what Henry meant when he said he was a funny guy. Other instants amplify abruptly out of the sheer mob environment: The way a mistaken drink order leads to blood. The way kidding around in a bar leads to a man being viciously brutalized. The way the violence bayonets the everyday lives of the characters is invariably enforced. Tommy, Henry and Jimmy, with a body in their trunk, stop at Tommy's mother's house to get a knife, and she insists they sit down at 3 a.m. for spaghetti. Scorsese feels so in control of his powerful talent here. It describes crime's allure for an insatiable young man who's determined from childhood beatings not to resent power, but long for it. When Henry talks to us at the beginning, it sounds like a classic Hollywood dream-come-true picture.