"To be a gangster was to own the world."

Rating: 10/10 (17 January 2014)

"As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster."
So says Henry Hill in the opening moments of Martin Scorsese's "GoodFellas," a movie about the tradecraft and culture of organized crime in New York. That he narrates his own story--and is later joined by his wife, narrating hers--is crucial to the movie's success. This is not an outsider's view, but a point-of-view movie based on nostalgia for the lifestyle. "
At the end of the film, Henry (Ray Liotta) still misses the old days. His money is gone, most of his friends are dead, and his best friend was preparing to kill him, but after he finds safety in the federal witness protection program, he still complains. "We were treated like movie stars with muscle," he remembers. "Today, everything is different. There's no action. I have to wait around like everyone else."
Many of Scorsese's best films have been poems about guilt.
"GoodFellas" is about guilt more than anything else. But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code - guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it.