May Fold Under Questioning

Rating: Null/10 (6 November 2009)

"Goodfellas" is championed as a "gangster movie", but like most of Scorsese's pictures it's also a religious movie concerned about the destructive aspects of devotion. The film begins with one of its few moments of authenticity – a nightmarish sequence in which several gangsters knife a man to death in the trunk of their car - before zooming into the starry eyes of Henry Hill, a low level gangster who begins the film's narration with a heartfelt, "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."
But Henry's recollections are not meant to be trusted. He's so obsessed with "gangsters" that his romantic view of crime eventually becomes akin to Scorsese's own faith in both cinema and Catholicism. We watch as Hill devotes himself to the hoods above him, a criminal clergyman who worships at the altar of the Mafia's glamorous lifestyle. As a kid, he gazes longingly at the neighbourhood gangsters as if they were gods. To Hill, being a gangster is better than being the President. Being a low level mafia "somebody" is better than being a regular "nobody schnook". Of course, the irony is that Hill's Irish ancestry prevents him from ever climbing the Mafia ranks. He rises from alter boy to priest but is unable to climb any higher, stuck in the very "blue collar" life he deplores.
Released by Warner Brothers in 1990, "Goodfellas" follows the same "rise and fall" narrative progression as all the early Warner Brother "machine gun operas" of the 1920s and 30s. Films like "Little Caesar", "The Public Enemy" and "Scarface" all presented fairly simple critiques of crime, their first halves containing "heroes" who climb the ranks of the criminal underworld, crime aestheticized through the power of celluloid, whilst their second halves showed the "hero's" world collapsing inexorably around him. The message: crime is seductive but ultimately doesn't pay.
Scorsese disguises his simple narrative with a frenzied style that might be described as "anecdotal" or "documentarian", but it's the same tale. We, like Hill, are seduced by crime, by the sheer sexiness of Scorsese's technique, before being subjected to a long 30-minute tonguelashing in which Hill's life comes crashing down.
During this sequence, Scorsese revokes every technique he employed during the film's first two acts. Consider the way Scorsese shows us Hill's cocaine fuelled dash through the daily minutia of his life, the director's once lyrical long takes and smooth tunes now choppy, unsettling and paranoid. The point: Henry's life is a dream, a complete fabrication, the audience suckered into accepting the image-lie. Henry articulates this himself when he says he was "living in a fantasy", we the audience finally learning that our perception of mafia life is built upon artifice. Such a postmodern stance - "Goodfellas" is about the falsity of itself - is in many ways deeply pessimistic. The message isn't that "crime isn't seductive" so much as its "crime is seductive only because it has never been truthfully rendered".
The film ends with the image of a gangster firing his gun directly at the audience. This is a homage to "The Great Train Robbery's" final scene, which 90 years ago caused audiences to flinch in their seats with terror. Scorsese's choice of referencing this shot neatly encapsulates how cinema audiences are still captivated by the charisma and violence of the criminal. But the scene also has the unintentional effect of showing how impotent the gangster has become. Devoid of new ideas, the gangster genre requires escalating levels of violence, camera pyrotechnics and swearing to hook audiences. Simply pointing a gun no longer has an effect.
In "Projections 1", director John Boorman criticises "Goodfellas", writing: "Marty's camera caresses them, celebrates them, dances attendance on them like the most sycophantic fan. This sets up an uneasy tension in the audience. When a movie is as well made as this, we are seduced. Our moral judgement collapses."
But seduction is the very point. This is not a film about gangsters, this is a film about gangster films. It is a film about the seductiveness of technique. A TV series like "The Sopranos" would take this further, presenting gangsters who are so seduced by false images of themselves that they consciously act like the image. What this leads to is a continual distancing effect. We move further away from the "truth" of crime, instead getting increasingly hyper-mediated levels of "fake". What's problematic is that "Goodfellas" - which feigns sophistication by being upfront and ironic about its fakeness - always gets touted as a factual and authentic account of crime, when its actually got more in common with something like "Pulp Fiction", in that both films are relatively substanceless joyrides with a surfeit of style.
More interesting are the film's "religious aspects". Henry renounces his ideals and is promptly excommunicated from the mafia for heresy. For his sacrilege, the life he once worshipped so devoutly is taken away. The worship and devotion to something, the constant testing of one's faith and the inevitable disgrace that occurs when one cannot possibly live by an imposed morality any longer, are themes that permeate all of Scorsese's films. Harvey Keitel's "faith in his brother" in Mean Streets - a faith that is tested and then shattered - is very much the genesis of all these ideas.
7.9/10 – "Goodfellas" abounds with contradictions. It probes the fraudulent cinematic image of mob glitz whilst relying ("Funny like a clown? I'm here to amuse you?") on the very traits it undermines. But really, the film represents the inability of the maverick directors of the 70s to push cinema any further; most simply sought comfort in nostalgia. Luckily today's new wave of modernist crime films (led by "The Wire") make an effort to map our increasingly complex world, which is why they are so murky and labyrinthine, compared to, say, the easily resolved conflicts of "The Departed".