A constant presence on all kinds of Best Film lists, Goodfellas represents a high-water mark for Martin Scorsese’s reputation as a visual stylist of the dark sides of the Italian-American experience. A critical and commercial success upon its release in 1990, the film has become an inexhaustible font of memes and quotable lines to such a degree that its reputation may have been eclipsed by its pop-culture profile. Yet it’s such a finely crafted story with exquisite set pieces, explosive performances and tightly ratcheted tension that it continues to enthrall and reward viewing experiences no matter how many times one might have seen it.
The script, developed by Nicholas Pileggi from his book, Wiseguy, and co-written with Scorsese, starts in media res with a violent spasm and then rewinds in the timeline of real-life wise guy Henry Hill’s initiation into mob life. Through the teenage Henry’s eyes, we see the glamor of the henchmen who run the neighborhood and seem to command respect, even from the police. As Henry (Ray Liotta) says in voiceover, “Being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.” Scorsese has often spoken of growing up a sickly child in the city, watching through the window as other kids played and caroused in the streets. Studying it all, he honed his powers of observation and storytelling through the cultivation of vicarious experiences. We perceive this longing in Henry, who finds a sense of belonging among the mobsters who take him in, make him a part of their world and imbue him with a respect that was otherwise out of his reach. The yearning that flows from Scorsese through Henry’s character gives this film a powerful engine.
Eschewing a standard three-act structure, Goodfellas builds instead as an accumulation of set pieces that showcase both the glamor and the depravity of the mob. It’s hard not to see Henry as a good guy even as he hustles and steals his way through New York City over the course of decades, beginning in 1955 and ending in 1980. Crucially, we don’t see him kill anyone onscreen, although he commits plenty of violent acts along the way, including a shockingly brutal pistol-whipping. That the real-life Henry Hill emerged from witness protection to soak up media attention and sell memorabilia when this film came out attests to the sympathetic nature of the portrayal, but Scorsese didn’t make a commercial for the mob. Instead, he documented the romance of the outlaw lifestyle and loaded it with sharp edges and sudden lurches into bad luck and worse. Thelma Schoonmaker’s razor-sharp editing heightens the disorienting speed of these twists of fate.
Scorsese has a way of drawing career-best performances from his actors, and this is partly due to the director’s commitment to the rehearsal process and trust in his performers. Much of the dialogue was improvised or suggested by the actors and built into the script, which is one of the reasons why there are 300 derivatives of “fuck” in the movie. Joe Pesci, who won Best Supporting Actor for the role, voices more than half of them. His character, Tommy DeVito, is a violent psychopath who cannonballs into every situation he’s in, either cracking jokes or cracking heads or both. That’s a strand that recurs throughout Goodfellas, and surely reflects Scorsese’s keen observation of this underworld: how violence and humor are both wielded as bludgeons to put people in their place and establish dominance. Witness the indelible moment when Tommy casts a deathly chill over a booze-up in the Bamboo Club, cutting off laughter demanding to know, “I’m funny how? I mean, funny like I’m a clown?” Tension spikes. No one knows if he’s kidding or about to kill someone. He might not even know himself until he melts into a grin and defuses it all. The claustrophobic camera angles on the actors emphasize how bewildering it must be to hang out with such characters.
As the senior mobster Jimmy Conway, Robert De Niro plays it cooler than Pesci, but still crafts a chilling portrayal of a sharp-dressed guy unafraid to murder anyone anywhere for any perceived slight. The unpredictable and reptilian underside to these characters lends a charge to even mundane moments, such as the scene when Henry, Tommy and Jimmy all end up in Tommy’s mother’s kitchen for a late-night dinner. Tommy’s elderly mother (played with aplomb by Scorsese’s mother, Catherine) dotes on the men and happily lends them her butcher knife, unaware that they’ve got a body in the trunk of their car. If she suspects what might be going on, she chooses to ignore it, focusing instead on how charming and respectable and promising these well-dressed young men seem to be. Henry’s first date with his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), spins this same web of illusion and seduction, with a thrilling one-take traveling shot as the camera follows the young couple through a back entrance to a club, winding through the kitchen as Henry slaps twenties into people’s hands, then emerging into the dazzling glamour of the Copacabana to a specially-placed table in front of the stage. Drinks are poured, backs are slapped and Karen is just as dazzled as the rest of us would be.
In fact, it’s hard not to be seduced by what feels like a celebration of a lost or dying culture of male camaraderie and well-guarded traditions: try to slice a clove of garlic after seeing this movie without recreating the razor technique. The film is a banquet of Italian home cooking and a jukebox of pop tunes, from the ’50s crooners of Henry’s early life to the scumbag rock & roll of his descent into the druggie underworld. Cocaine is what finally does Henry in, and that turn away from good, old-fashioned crime–numbers, bribes, robbery, arson–ends up sealing his ruin. The irony is that his downfall feels less a result of breaking society’s laws than a betrayal of the mob culture that elevated him in the first place. Young Martin Scorsese, watching the neighborhood kids playing in the street without him, saw it all: the romance of belonging but also the bittersweet feeling when good times come to an end.
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