Goodfellas (1990)
Directed by Martin Scorsese

Film Review

Having made one full-blooded gangster movie, Mean Streets (1973), Martin Scorsese was in no hurry to make another.  Then he read Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy, an in-depth account of the life and career of real-life hoodlum Henry Hill, and had second thoughts.  The film that Scorsese developed from Pileggi's eye-opening book is widely regarded as the most authentic of all gangster films, one that dispenses with all the well-worn cinematic clichés and immerses its spectator, for just under two and half gruelling hours, in the real world of the professional mobster.  Goodfellas won Scorsese the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival in 1990 but failed to garner him an Oscar.  The film that inspired the hit television series The Sopranos and injected an electrifying jolt of reality into the gangster film at the start of the 1990s is not one that is easily overlooked.  It deserves to be considered Scorsese's masterpiece.

Taking his inspiration from the opening few minutes of Francois Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1963), Scorsese adopts a jagged narrative approach that employs voiceover narration, fast edits, sudden switches of location and freeze-frames to dazzling effect.  This is a jarring but compelling scrapbook style of storytelling, the nearest equivalent in film to a stream-of-consciousness novel in which thoughts and memories flow unevenly into one another, the tempo changing wildly to reflect the value the narrator attaches to the various events in his chaotic life.  Sometimes the pace is torturously slow, as languorous as that of a TV soap opera; then there are bursts of activity where it is impossible to keep up with what is happening.  For one memorable sequence, the one in which Hill and his wife make their way to a table in a swanky New York nightclub, Scorsese employs a long, unbroken take to convey the power and importance the two characters have suddenly acquired - they look like a prince and his consort taking their place as rulers of all they survey, a coronation in all but name.

More than anything, it is the blistering authenticity of the characters that makes Goodfellas such a viscerally charged journey into Hell.  Ray Liotta's conflicted Henry Hill appears positively well-adjusted and strait-laced compared with the borderline psychopaths and hard cases he rubs shoulders with.  As Hill's mentor in crime, Robert De Niro turns in another powerhouse performance, the familiar mix of controlled menace and avuncular charm that we have grown to love.  Through her desperately tragic portrayal of Hill's wife, Lorraine Bracco not only humanises the central character, she also solidly anchors his criminal proceedings in the real world.  These are not fictional archetypes but real people being slowly eaten away by a ghastly distortion of the American dream.  Most terrifying of all is Joe Pesci's Tommy DeVito, the seemingly likeable hoodlum who has a nasty habit of flipping from amiable drinking buddy to deranged bullet-pumping psychopath whenever someone offers the least offence to his hyper-delicate sensitivities.  DeVito is the nastiest of the nastiest, he delivers the biggest shocks the film has to offer, and yet, for reasons we cannot fathom, we can't help falling in love with him.  For this standout supporting performance, Pesci was the recipient of the film's only Oscar.

Epic in scope but relentlessly intimate in detail, Goodfellas follows one hoodlum's personal odyssey as he is lured at an early age into organised crime, becomes an effective criminal operator and ends up an emotional and physical wreck, driven to betray his friends to save his own precious skin.  There are some direct parallels with Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather movies, but Scorsese's approach is much closer to documentary than Coppola's grandly operatic style of melodrama.  Scenes of astonishing brutality are casually juxtaposed with scenes of humdrum banality, making us feel that gangsterism is just a job like any other.  By sticking remorselessly with the first person narrative, we have no choice but to identify with the central protagonist, portrayed with striking realism by Ray Liotta in what is easily the role of his career.  For once, we begin to understand just how seemingly ordinary men and women are lured into the gangster life and feel something of the heightened states of elation and desperation that take them over as the deadly drug of gangsterism does its work.  Scorsese doesn't want us merely to sympathise or pity his protagonists; he compels us to become them -  to experience, as fully as most of us are ever likely to do so, the ecstasy and brutality of mob life.  Once the shimmering rags of glamour and glory have been torn to shreads, Goodfellas takes a gruesome delight in showing the grim reality that lies beneath.  This is an unforgettable descent into Hell.

Film Synopsis

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950s, Henry Hill is easily seduced into a life of crime.  Lured by easy money and the glamour of the mob, he runs errands for local mobster Paul Cicero and before he knows it he is a fully paid up gangster, raking in cash with his associates Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito.  Henry's young Jewish wife Karen is at first anxious about his criminal exploits but is soon won over when she grows accustomed to the wealth and status it brings her.  By the 1970s, Henry's disillusionment with the gangster life has begun to set in.  A spell in prison puts a strain on his marriage but leads to another lucrative line as a drugs trafficker.  As Henry and his wife become hooked on narcotics paranoia begins to take them both over.  When a massive drugs deal goes awry Henry stumbles into the clutches of the FBI and has only one way out: to betray those to whom he has sworn an undying allegiance...