Henry Hill mug shot in 1980
Scorsese's mother
GOODFELLAS A
USA (146 mi) 1990 d: Martin Scorsese
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.
—Henry Hill (Ray Liotta)
Completing the trifecta of TAXI DRIVER (1976) and RAGING BULL (1980), with this film Scorsese makes his case for the best and most powerful American movies in each of three consecutive decades, punctuating his career with this off-the-wall entertaining yet masterful portrait of the rise and fall of half Irish, half Sicilian (only full blooded Sicilians gain entrance to the exclusive protection of the mafia) wiseguy Henry Hill, a real life mobster who eventually entered the FBI witness protection program after testifying against several high ranking mobsters. Based on journalist Nicholas Pileggi’s 1986 book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, which was based on FBI interviews with Hill before the trials, where he would be sent to jail, and most likely immediate death, if anything was discovered to be untrue, it’s a searingly accurate portrait of the internal world of mobsters. From early age, all this guy wanted to be was a gangster, as from what he could see in a neighborhood of nobodies, they were the only ones who could do whatever they wanted. Unlike the other families, they always had money, the cops left them alone, and they were treated like royalty. Despite a scathingly violent opening that precedes even the opening credits, this film opens up like an American dream story, where a dreamy-eyed young kid runs errands for the brother of the local crime boss, soon earning at age 13 more than what most adults brought home. Realizing this was a full-time job, he simply stopped going to school and the wiseguys made sure the post office didn’t deliver any letters to his family about his absences. Using Ray Liotta’s first person narration as Henry, he uses the language and the mindset of the gangsters, where everything that they did made sense, at least in their eyes, as they saw themselves as working for a living, even if what they did was steal. It was all these guys thought about their entire lives, figuring out how to make the most amount of money by doing the least amount of work.
Using freeze frames, wall to wall 50’s jukebox music, and Liotta’s candidly amusing commentary, the audience is reeled into this slimy underworld of brotherhood, as Henry is treated better by this group of gangsters than he ever was by his own family, as he’s needed, appreciated, and paid handsomely for his services, so long as he never rats on his friends and keeps his mouth shut. Cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who used to work with Fassbinder, beginning with WHITY (1971) through THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN (1979) and LILI MARLEEN (1981 – though uncredited), creates these warm interiors where characters mingling together are bathed in dim lighting, including signature shots Goodfellas - Steady Cam Shot YouTube (2:28) where Henry is introduced to a night club filled with wiseguys, where the hand held camera swoops around in every direction checking out each table, following his line of sight as he soaks up the atmosphere, or the shot which represents the pinnacle of his success, where he (Liotta) and his new girl Karen (Lorraine Bracco) are finally treated like royalty, ushered through a separate entrance to the upscale Copacabana nightclub where in one shot we see them walk through interior hallways leading through the kitchen, which is a series of doors suddenly swinging wide open for them, until they arrive on the scene and a waiter hoists their own separate table placed in front of all the other tables, where a complimentary bottle of champagne is provided before comic Henny Youngman takes the stage. At this point, we’re sucked into the cameraderie of this life, as it’s been so easy for him. It all seems too good to be true. When they finally get married, every mobster pays a fitting tribute with an envelope filled with cash, as we hear the Harptones sing “Life Is But a Dream.”
Jumping between the 50’s and the 80’s, the mob hierarchy soon establishes itself, with Paul Sorvino as the soft spoken mafia boss Paulie, who is paid a tribute on each operation, as he provides money and protection should anybody need it. He’s the quiet, unassuming kind of guy who always has a wad of several thousand dollars in his pocket at all times. Henry works with a couple of other wiseguys who are full fledged criminals, Robert De Niro is Jimmy, the only all Irish mobster who serves as Henry’s mentor in the early years, and the short-fused wack job Tommy, Joe Pesci, who is a foul-mouthed barrel of laughs who would just as soon shoot you if you look at him funny. One of the best improvisational scenes develops between Tommy and Henry when after leaving the entire room in stitches with laughter as he tells an off color story about whacking a guy, you can suddenly hear a pin drop as Tommy suddenly goes bipolar on Henry and asks what does he think is so funny? This mood swing is a perfect example of why you don’t mess with these guys, as they take the smallest, most insignificant details very seriously, where people they have known for years are suddenly suspect, and there are no good guys and bad guys anymore, only a guy itching for a reason to pull the trigger, and what’s really scary is the guy doesn’t need a good reason at all—just whether or not he feels like it at the time. Pesci is truly horrifying in his role, as he’s a stone cold killer who backs down to no one. After nearly kicking a guy to death (GoodFellas Full "Billy Batts" Scene YouTube [5:04] to the music of Donovan’s “Atlantis”) for insulting him, he crazily decides to stop off at his mother’s house for a shovel, where in the middle of the night with the dead guy lying in the trunk of the car, who meets the three of them but Martin Scorsese’s real life mother who insists on feeding them a home cooked meal, where Tommy decides to borrow a gargantuan-sized butcher knife from his mother to finish the job. Pesci is drop dead hilarious and won an Academy Award for sheer outragiousness, but his character perfectly expresses the out of control dynamic within the so-called brotherhood.
Not to be outdone, De Niro is much more subtle in his role, where oftentimes he never has to say a word, where all you need to see is written all over his face, especially his eyes, like the moment he sits at a bar counter DE NIRO SMOKING: HIS BEST SCENE EVER. YouTube (59 sec) and the opening guitar riffs from Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” may as well have been grinding inside his head, as he is plotting and scheming exactly what to do next, where the slightest twitch of his eyebrows is sufficient to order a man to his death. As the music of the Rolling Stones grows more contemporary, occasionally switching to inner narration observations shared by Karen, the time shifts closer to the present and one thing becomes inevitable, that as these guys work their way up the mob hierarchy, they don’t have long lifespans. Either they end up in jail, get out briefly before doing another lifetime term, or they end up dead. All that family togetherness that was promised in the earlier American dream sequences turns out to be a cruel nightmarish hoax, as the so-called family friends are the ones called upon to whack those closest to them. Having grown up in New York City’s “Little Italy” neighborhood, this is a world that Scorsese is intimately familiar with. With meticulous precision, Scorsese reveals the gritty reality using such familiarizations as their clothes, cars, women, money, neighborhood hangouts, and language without exaggeration or artifice, simply by placing the viewer exactly where Henry Hill was and allowing the audience to draw their own conclusions. When Henry goes against the mob boss’s illicit instructions and joins Jimmy and Tommy in narcotics trafficking, as the money has never been easier, without realizing that the risks could never have been higher, as expressed in Scorsese’s day-in-the-life portrait of Henry shortly before he was arrested. Using a frentic jump cut editing sceme to match his fevered, coked up, paranoic state of mind, all the while knowing others are out to whack him, he tries to squeeze about two dozen different activities into one day, seemingly followed by a helicopter, this while Jimmy is openly being tailed full-time by the FBI. Life is not good, until the dream eventually ends once and for all, beautifully expressed in a death sequence of mafia hits set to the exact tempo of the piano coda from Derek & the Dominoes “Layla” Goodfellas - Layla (piano) sequence YouTube (3:44), a reflection of all that’s lost. GOODFELLAS was known as a movie that used the word “fuck” 300 times, more than any other film in its time. Nearly two decades later, even an animated film has more profanity and violence, SOUTH PARK: BIGGER LONGER & UNCUT (1999). But few films will ever offer such an intimate glimpse inside the minds of the guys that run the underworld operations of the mafia, and do so with relish, as it gives them a kick, a kind of prestige they would otherwise never know. Sid Vicious brings the dysfunction home with his deranged version of Frank Sinatra’s signature song “My Way.”
