Goodfellas
Martin Scorsese (1990)
[Different impressions of the film from two viewings, in the mid-1990s and 2017 … ]
Take 1
In the first scene of Goodfellas, the three main characters – Henry, Jimmy and Tommy – are irritated to find that what they thought was a corpse in the back of their car is still alive and kicking. So Tommy (Joe Pesci) stabs it a few times and Jimmy (Robert De Niro) shoots it a few times, and that shuts it up; and Henry’s voiceover tells us that, ‘Ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be a gangster’. The nerveless violence is shocking but Martin Scorsese isn’t the kind of director who shows dispassionate killers and allows the viewer the security of as little emotional connection with them as the killers feel for the men they murder. (The victims are nearly always men: there’s one female fatality in the course of the film.) Scorsese humanises Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his confrères. We see that spilling blood is a part – albeit a sizeable part – of lives in which camaraderie, theft, jokes, family, narcotics, clothes, food, wine, women and pop music all count for something too. Scorsese doesn’t present the non-criminal elements as a hypocritical facade; they co-exist with the sociopathic aspect. (This is used to comic effect in Goodfellas‘ climactic sequence, as Henry narrates the hectic social and lawbreaking schedule of the day in 1980 when his brother came round for dinner and Henry was arrested for drug peddling.) Nor does Scorsese make the obvious satirical point that being a gangster is just a job: Henry’s work pervades and convulses his marriage to Karen (Lorraine Bracco) – more than that, he loves what he does. A life of crime confers material benefits and social prestige in the Brooklyn community in which Henry grew up. Becoming a ‘goodfella’ makes his wildest self-centred dreams come true.
The adolescent Henry (he’s a young teenager in the mid-1950s) is played by Christopher Serrone, a tall, willowy boy with humorous eyes and a quicksilver smile. You can see how he grows into Ray Liotta, who plays Henry from his mid-twenties onwards. It’s not a simple matter of physical resemblance: there’s a spiritual continuity from the younger Henry to the older one. The young man’s brutification is reflected by Liotta’s darker eye colouring and a smile that gets tighter, more perfunctory. Liotta’s too-loud laugh is just right: it combines aggression and defensiveness in edgy equilibrium and there’s not a trace of light-heartedness in it. Henry’s joyless braying not only signals that when a goodfella laughs out loud you can hear the violence inside him; it suggests too that Henry knows that, in his business, you need to take care of yourself even when you’re joking. (There’s an astounding moment when Tommy gets Henry really laughing. Henry cracks up and says what a ‘funny guy’ Tommy is. It’s an unguarded remark and paranoid Tommy is onto it in a flash: the interrogation of Henry that follows has terrific tension.) All the main characters are impregnated with violence but they express it in various registers. As Paulie Cicero, the local mob capo who takes Henry under his wing, Paul Sorvino no longer needs to be personally aggressive. Paulie commands respect and authority enough to get others to do the business for him – he doesn’t lay a hand on anyone except to give them a reassuring pat on the shoulder. The screenplay, by Nicholas Pileggi and Scorsese, is based on Pileggi’s 1986 non-fiction book, Wiseguy. The cinematography is by Michael Ballhaus. Scorsese’s choice of songs for the soundtrack is splendid: the sequence in which Henry and Karen – in one prolonged rear-view shot – enter the Copacabana night club, accompanied by the Crystals’ ‘Then He Kissed Me’, is justly famous.
[1990s]
Take 2
‘Basically I was interested in what they do. And, you know, they don’t think about it a lot. They don’t sit around and ponder about ‘Gee, what are we doing here?’ The answer is to eat a lot and make a lot of money and do the least amount of work possible for it. I was trying to make it as practical and primitive as possible. Just straight ahead. Want. Take. Simple. I’m more concerned with showing a lifestyle and using Henry Hill as basically a guide through it [1]’ .
This summary by Martin Scorsese of what he set out to do in Goodfellas seems honest and it’s certainly an accurate description of what he achieved. The film tells the story of the New York gangster-turned-FBI-informant Henry Hill, over a twenty-five year (1955-80) period. It does this through description of his behaviour – accompanied by a good deal of voiceover from Henry, which provides a limited explanation of what motivates him. Scorsese is open too about his own feelings on this: ‘The lifestyle is so rich – I have a love-hate thing with that lifestyle’ [2] . The love – as well as excitement – comes through in the sheer vibrancy of the film and in its gorgeous pop soundtrack, which echoes and expands the Mean Streets one (the expansion reflecting the broader timeframe). It’s natural to assume that, as in the earlier film, the accompanying songs in Goodfellas are personal favourites of Scorsese (a famous pop enthusiast); but they’re also the pulse to the life of his virtual contemporary, Henry Hill.
The film-making craft and élan in evidence here are exceptional. The six-minute tracking shot of Henry and Karen’s arrival at the Copacabana is only the most obviously remarkable camera movement in several highly dynamic sequences that take place in bars and restaurants. Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing pulls you right into the grimly funny helter-skelter of Henry’s exceptionally busy day in May 1980, which ends with his arrest by narcotics agents. The interior set decoration, the clothes and the jewellery supply a vivid picture of what it means to make it in Henry’s world. The story is sharpened by the implications of the characters’ ethnic differences: Henry’s wife Karen is Jewish but his mistress Janice (Gina Mastrogiacomo) is Italian; with their mixed Italian-Irish ancestry, neither Henry nor Jimmy Conway can be a member of the club in the way of men whose family trees are firmly rooted in ‘the old country’.
Yet the downside of Martin Scorsese’s observational style and ambivalence got in the way of my enjoying Goodfellas on this long-delayed return visit to the film. The lethal psychopathology of the gangsters is expressed in differently impressive ways – in Joe Pesci’s dazzling, scary portrait of Tommy DeVito, in the contrast between the impassive face and the ardent aggression in the eyes of Paul Sorvino’s Paulie Cicero. Tommy, Paulie, Henry and Jimmy aren’t glamorised exactly but the director’s cultural empathy makes him too generous towards the title characters, in spite of the irony of their name. And Scorsese, for all his laissez-faire approach, keeps having to up the ante in delivering stylish executions (there’s no denying he succeeds in doing this). Goodfellas, an exhilarating piece of film-making, is almost intentionally shallow. Whereas Charlie, the protagonist of Mean Streets, ties himself in knots trying to serve two masters (God and the caporegime), Henry Hill always knows what he wants and how to get it. (Ray Liotta gives Henry a convincingly inconstant quality: we come to realise that his sneakiness is an important aid to his survival. Born in 1943, Henry Hill died in 2012 of natural causes.) The complex family ties that inform, and conflict with, Mafia business in the Godfather films are replaced here by something simpler – a shared love of Italian cooking. This is a blood brotherhood of red meat and tomato sauce, of garlic sliced superfine with a razor blade. The weapon of choice to finish the job of killing the man in the car boot at the start of the film is a kitchen knife that belongs to Tommy’s elderly mother (Catherine Scorsese). All this is very witty but more worrying. I struggle nowadays to accept a corpse-fest like Goodfellas as bravura shocking entertainment.
24 January 2017
[1] Martin Scorsese interviewed by Gavin Smith, Film Comment, September-October 1990.
[2] As footnote 1.