Goodfellas

Sorry about doing this late, I got hung up with a few things that I completely forgot about today’s review. No, it will not be “The King of Comedy,” because I have not seen that. Let’s just skip to 1990 with one of the best gangster movies ever made, “Goodfellas.” In this film, director Martin Scorsese does something simple and risky. He takes the guilt out of organized crime. The movie, a brutally open, part-comic epic about life in the mob, follows the path of Henry Hill, played by the great but creepy-looking Ray Liotta, an Irish-Sicilian Brooklyn kid who suggests himself into the local section of the Mafia and grows up to become a clever and devoted “wise guy.” Henry’s reasons for getting himself into the Mafia could not have been made any clearer. The local gangsters get whatever they want – money, women, respect. They wear great clothes, are treated like kings in the nightclubs, and spend most of their time in an independent dreamworld of pleasure and animal nature. Why shouldn’t Henry want to join?

Most movies about criminal figures have a serious arc. We watch the hero rise and fall, a victim of his own environment. Scorsese has brought off the rare act of making a legitimately dishonorable film. “Goodfellas” is 2 hours and 15 minutes long, yet it’s little more than a successful series of incidents. We watch the charming, know-how Henry persuade his moneymaking methods (most of them involve stealing huge loads of merchandise), marry a beautiful Long Island Jewish girl, played by Lorraine Bracco, who’s turned on by his criminal behavior, mess around to his heart’s content, assist in vicious executions, do time in an extremely comfortable jail, get hooked on drugs, fall into a final feudal war focusing on his trusted partner Jimmy Conway, played by Robert De Niro. Throughout, Scorsese maintains a tone of bright, driving objectivity. That is the film’s strength and its limitation.

Scene for scene, “Goodfellas” is often exciting. Scorsese, adapting from Nicholas Pileggi’s 1986 novel Wiseguy (the two of them worked together on the screenplay), draws us into the natural excitement of Henry’s world even as he shows us the shocking bursts of violence that push it. It shows a mob family, headed by Paul Cicero, played by Paul Sorvino. At one point, Henry is hanging out with the boys at the local bar when his gang, the slithering, bullying Tommy DeVito, played by Joe Pesci, decides to cause a little trouble. Pesci gives a masterful performance as a vulgarly fearless, paranoid shrimp that’s constantly in need of demonstrating his own power. Scorsese is better than any other director in bringing out the casual unreasonableness of those who live by violence. As Pesci beats a perfectly innocent restaurant owner the moment increases into brutal, slapstick humor. Pesci is also famous in this movie for tricking Liotta in the famous "How am I funny? You mean I'm funny like a clown? I amuse you, I make you laugh? Is that what I'm here to do?"

Owen Gleiberman said in his review, “Yet even as I was caught up in scenes like this, something stuck in my craw.” Liotta’s smiling; diplomatic Henry is presented as a smooth operator, a basically good guy who’s in love with crime because he wants to live high. A movie devoted to the pleasure-seeking tempt of criminality is all well and good (in a sense, anything else would be hypocritical), yet it’s essential that we understand how Henry reduces himself – to feel the price he pays.

Indeed, Scorsese takes the easy way out. It’s not just Henry who’s made inactive; the whole movie is made inactive. It shows us people being killed in bloody, awful ways, yet we’re never asked to respond to victims as human beings (as we were in “The Godfather”). In this sense, we’re “inside” the consciousness of a mobster only in a clinical, abstract way.

Scorsese got deep inside the vicious antiheroes of “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull.” Here, it’s almost as if he is inventing a schoolboy fantasy of ruthless evil. “GoodFellas” is brilliant surface moviemaking, but it’s hollow at the center. The trouble with the movie is that Liotta’s Henry has no inner life as a character. Scorsese borrows a great deal of narration for Pileggi’s book (in the final section, it sounds like the book is being read aloud), yet that’s not the same as performing your hero’s soul. “Goodfellas” yearns to be another great Scorsese film. What’s missing is Scorsese’s humanity.

With all this said, I would definitely give “Goodfellas” another 10, as it is another one of my favorites. Stay tuned next week for both the original version and Scorsese remake of “Cape Fear.” That’s going to be enjoyable to review.