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I watched Martin Scorsese’s newest movie, “GoodFellas,” and for two days after, the characters’ feelings persisted in me. It was a feeling of guilt and regret, of rash choices that wasted lives, and of loyalty that was betrayed. However, there was also a subliminal nostalgia for bad days that shouldn’t have been missed but were.
Once you step back into the real world, most movies, even the best ones, dissipate like mist; they leave behind memories, but their reality swiftly vanishes. Not this movie, which showcases the best director working in America at the top of his game. No better organized crime movie has ever been produced, not even “The Godfather,” though the two movies aren’t really comparable.
The Mafia memoir “GoodFellas,” whose Chicago premiere is set for September 21, is told in the first person by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), an Irish-Italian youth whose only goal since his early teens has been to become a “wise guy,” or Mafioso. The Jewish woman who married him, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), provides narration as well. After learning that the Mafia had suddenly taken over her entire social life, she claims that the Mafia’s ideals eventually began to pass for normal ones. Mob wives never left their communities or interacted with anyone outside of it. She was even proud of her spouse for not spending the entire day in bed and for having the courage to go out and steal to support himself.
There is a real Henry Hill who vanished into the confidentiality of the federal government’s witness protection program and who over the course of four years revealed the reporter Nicholas Pileggi, whose book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family was a best-seller, everything he knew about the mob. In the end, the screenplay by Pileggi and Scorsese creates the same claustrophobic feeling Hill’s wife mentions: the sense that the mob world is the real world. It distills those memories into a fiction that occasionally plays like a documentary and contains so much information and emotion about the Mafia.
The only filmmaker who can do justice to this material is Scorsese. He fully understands it. Growing up as an outsider in Little Italy in New York City, unable to participate in athletics due to his asthma, unable to lead a normal childhood, and frequently overlooked, but never missing a thing, was the greatest formative experience of his life.
Early on in the movie, young Henry Hill, who is watching from the window of his family’s apartment, notices with awe and envy the bravado of the low-level wise guys in the social club across the street. He is impressed by the fact that they have money, cars that are hot, girls, and that the police never give them tickets. They are also impressed by the fact that even when their loud parties go on all night, no one ever calls the police.
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The narrator informs us that he desired to live that kind of existence. The memory may have originated with Hill and may have appeared in Pileggi’s book, but it also belongs to Scorsese. In the 23 years that I have known him, we have never had a conversation in which we did not bring up that crucial image from his self-portrait—the young child watching the neighborhood gangsters—at some point.
Like “The Godfather,” Scorsese’s “GoodFellas” is a long film that gives its ideas room to develop and leisure to be explored. It doesn’t have a specific plot; instead, it explores what it was like to be a member of the Mafia, both in happy and bad times. There is an amazing camera movement that tracks Henry and Karen on one of their first dates, to the Copacabana nightclub, when they were initially mostly having fun. People are lined up at the door, but Henry takes her in through the service entrance, past the security guards and the off-duty waiters, down a hallway, through the kitchen, through the service area, and out into the front of the club, where a table is literally lifted into the air and placed in front of everyone else so the young couple can be in the first row for the floor show. This is strength.
Karen is still unsure of Henry’s precise job description. She discovers.
The film’s strategy is a gradual ascent through the Mafia’s tiers, with characters appearing only incidentally at first and some of them not becoming fully realized until much later in the narrative. We meet the don Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), Jim (Jimmy the Gent) Conway (Robert De Niro), who steals solely for the love of it, and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), a likeable person who has a deadly temper that can erupt in a split second. We follow them for 30 years, first through a period of uncontested dominance, then a period of decline (although they have their own kitchen in jail, as well as boxes of thick steaks and crates of wine), and finally through betrayal and decay.
Goodfellas Quiz
When Henry Hill, Jimmy, and Tommy have to bury a man whom Tommy nearly killed in a fit of pointless anger, the entire wonderful romance of the Mafia turns sour for Henry Hill. They must first complete his murder (they stop at Tommy’s mother’s home to borrow a knife, and she serves them dinner), then bury him, and finally, they must resurrect him. The worst aspect is that their victim was a Mafioso who was considered to be immune, a “made” guy. They are therefore in extremely serious trouble, which is not what Henry Hill anticipated when he set out on his life’s path.
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Scorsese has always liked to use popular music as a counterpoint to the dramatic moments in his movies, starting with the opening shot of his first feature, “Who’s That Knocking at My Door?” (1967). In “GoodFellas,” the popular music helps to explain the transition from the early days when Henry sells stolen cigarettes to guys at a factory gate through to the frenetic later days when he is selling cocaine in defiance of Paul Cicero’s orders and using so much of it himself that life has become a paranoid labyrinth. He doesn’t simply compile a soundtrack of classic songs; he finds the exact sound to underline every moment.
In all of his work, which has included arguably the best film of the 1970s (“Taxi Driver”) and of the 1980s (“Raging Bull”), Scorsese has never done a more compelling job of getting inside someone’s head as he does in one of the concluding passages of “GoodFellas,” in which he follows one day in the life of Henry Hill, as he tries to do a cocaine deal, cook dinner for his family, placate his mistress and deal with the suspicion that he’s being followed.
This scene left the strongest impression on me regarding the tone of the movie. It is not a clear-cut narrative passage and has little to do with the plot; instead, it is about the sense of walls closing in and the remorse that one has for those walls. The drug transaction must be made, but the younger brother must also be picked up, the sauce must be stirred, and in the meantime, Henry’s life is spiraling out of control. This is the counterpoint, which is a sense of obligation or compulsion.
In a Scorsese movie, actors often give their best performances—the ones that allow us to see them plainly. In “Taxi Driver,” Robert De Niro established himself as the greatest actor of his time. In “Raging Bull,” Joe Pesci produced a performance of comparable complexity while portraying De Niro’s brother. De Niro and Pesci both appear in “GoodFellas,” basically supporting Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, who here clearly distinguish themselves as two of our best new movie actors. In “Something Wild,” Liotta played Melanie Griffith’s tardy-arriving and ominously dangerous spouse. In this film, he establishes the emotional core for a story that isn’t about the experience of being a mafioso but rather the feeling. In the movie “Someone To Watch Over Me,” Bracco played the suburban cop’s wife. Her sequences were so moving that when the main plot resumed, it left us feeling a genuine sense of loss. This movie is primarily about their marriage, as seen in a scene where he clutches to her in exhaustion. They committed for all eternity, but it was to the wrong life.
About the quiz
The finest of Scorsese’s movies frequently contain guilt-related poetry.
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Consider the characters from “Mean Streets,” played by Harvey Keitel, “After Hours,” played by Griffin Dunne, who were both involved in accidental deaths before being pursued by ignorant mobs, or “The Last Temptation of Christ,” in which even Christ is allowed to have doubts.
Guilt is the main theme of “GoodFellas” more than anything else. However, it is not a straightforward morality drama where guilt is the proper response to evil and where good is established. No, the protagonist of this movie feels bad for breaking the Mafia rule and committing the sin of betrayal. In the witness protection program, where no one has a name and the headwaiter definitely isn’t aware of it, he is banished as his punishment.
I eventually understood Henry Hill’s emotions after watching this movie, which is what makes it so great. The movie cast a seductive spell, much like his wife Karen became so totally engrossed in the Mafia interior life that its values became her own. Sometimes, it’s almost plausible to imagine the personalities as genuinely nice people. Their friendship is so strong, and they have such unwavering devotion. But eventually, the entire mythology comes crashing down, and the guilt—the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately—is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again. At that point, the laughter becomes strained and forced at times, and other times it’s an effort to enjoy the party.
For more personality quizzes check this: Fight Club Quiz.
