Scorsese's Ultimate Triumph

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2013)

There was a time in my youth when I really didn't appreciate gangster movies. Maybe it was because of the way I was raised or the amount of estrogen present in my mothers womb due to birth order but I never saw the intense violence of that lifestyle as anything but a cry for help. It wasn't until watching Martin Scorsese's The Departed (2006) that my notions of true- to-life crime dramas began to change. I then went back to watch Goodfellas (1990), a film I originally saw bits and pieces of when I was twelve.
Today Goodfellas remains to me a revelation. An honest portrayal of the Mafioso lifestyle told directly from the horses mouth.The movie itself takes the viewer through three decades of mob life. Our protagonist Henry becomes enamored with the lifestyle in early adolescence and is hooked with its excesses before costars Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci even appear on screen. Once they do, the trio become the focus of the film as they attempt to climb up the Lucchese family hierarchy. Ray Liotta serves as our narrator and double for real-life wiseguy Henry Hill a half Irish-Italian mobster turned informant who spilled the beans on the Lucchese crime family for the FBI and later writer Nicholas Pileggi. Pileggi would later release his book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family in 1986 which is around the time director Martin Scorsese got wind of the story.
The film is told through a series of episodes starting with the three protagonists driving in darkness and killing an unknown man in the trunk of their car. The film then linearly progresses through time, revisiting that gruesome scene halfway through. While the story structure diverges slightly from the traditionally linear, anticipating action, climax, resolution format, the movie keeps interest. This is to the credit of Martin Scorsese's direction as well as his habit of putting bubbly 50's and 60's pop songs over brutal acts of violence. Nicholas Pileggi should also take a bow both for the original book and countless rewrites that made Goodfellas possible. It was his authenticity that brought the characters dimension.
but while the writer gives characters motivations and plot, it is the actors that really make them flesh and blood. Robert De Niro's Jimmy "The Gent" Conway towers in every scene he's in with equal parts suavity and malice. While De Niro provides the group credibility in the yes of the mob and audience, Joe Pesci is pure id. A trigger-happy sociopath with a red hot temper and a gun; not a combination that leads to good things in a movie of this kind. Pesci would end up winning an Oscar for his work on Goodfellas; a role that was originally offered to Al Pacino.
One underrated aspect of Goodfellas is the character arch of Lorraine Bracco's role Karen Hill; Henry's wife. There are moments of the film narrated by the tragic heroine that provide the movie with a sense of perspective just as Henry's objectivity has gone off the deep end. She's an outsider who is at first overwhelmed but becomes seduced by the decadence of mob life and breaks bad. I would argue that the river runs deeper with Karen than with the dejected Henry. Henry wants the fancy cars, excessive Staten Island home and the most expensive artificial Christmas tree money can buy. But when Karen is handed a gun and told to hide it, right after a aberrant neighbor gets his faced smashed with the butt-end, she claims arousal. This is not a woman who craves simple security in the arms of the hero, she wants respect. That's why every transgression Henry or anyone makes is met with hostility. What isn't shown in the movie but detailed in the book was Karen's affair with mob capo Paul Vario while Henry was in prison; little more Lady MacBeth than Ophelia if you ask me.
Of course, Goodfellas as a whole is studded with set pieces of violence and cruelty that in a lesser movie I wouldn't be impressed with. But as with good food, its not just ingredients that make the meal, its how its presented. The violence of Goodfellas is presented with a matter- of-factness and purpose that isn't gratuitous. Scorsese doesn't want you to bask in the glory of outright gore, he wants you to experience the world as the characters do, a task which he largely succeeds in.
I love this movie if for no other reason than it breaks the mold and sets a gold-standard for other genre movies to inspire to. It features topnotch performances from actors and actresses at the top of their game, and it showcases the uncompromising vision and talent of one of the greatest auteurs of the late 20th century.
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