Goodfellas – Film Review

Goodfellas is a story about a lifestyle. The lead role is less of a character than a lens through which we experience gang life. Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) often disappears into the camera, or rather we seem to become him. Henry began associating himself with these “wise guys” at a young age and grew up around them, aspiring to be one of the crew. Along the way he meets Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and his mentor, Jimmy “The Gent” Conway (Robert De Niro). By the age of 21 he has more cash than he knows what to do with, yet he is always an outsider. He is half Irish so the boss, Paulie (Paul Sorvino) never gives him more information than he needs. He meets his wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), on a double date with Tommy. An hour into the movie and Henry is living the good life, it seems. That is, until things begin going sour for him. As his money and influence make their way down the drain, he is left face to face with the bloody actions he takes to maintain his lifestyle. He feels, perhaps for the very first time, remorse.

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The film opens with murder, bloody and disgusting to look at. When the deed is done the narrator says flatly, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” All we can do is wonder “Why?” Goodfellas sets out to answer that question. Our narrator is Henry Hill and after the introduction, the story is told in chronological order from his perspective. We get to know the gang from his bedroom window…

Henry watches the gangsters from across the street in awe.

…and we see first hand what tempted him about the mob life: girls, money, power, and impunity. For the first half of the movie, almost all we see are the perks of being a gangster. At one point he is busted by the police for selling stolen cigarettes, but on his way out of the courtroom he is congratulated by Jimmy who shares with him the two most important lessons from the experience: “Never rat on your friends, and always keep your mouth shut.” Outside the first door he finds a huge crowd waiting and cheering for him:

Henry’s gang friends meet him outside the courtroom.

After growing up among his friendly neighborhood Mafiosos, Henry gets to park wherever he wants, skip the lines to get into clubs, and he literally gets a table brought out from the back of the Copacabana specifically for him and his future wife, Karen. 

Scorsese follows Henry and Karen’s table until they sit down.

What more could anybody ask for? He has a loving family, plenty of cash, and plenty of influence. Of course, there is some dirty business that must be taken care of in order for this luxurious lifestyle to be sustained, but early on in the film Scorsese begins desensitizing us to it. He “toughens us up,” as Tuddy toughens up Henry, and it becomes “routine” for us. One of the ways he does this is by freezing shots at the most violent moments of scenes to remove the climaxes, and interposing the frantic dialogue with Henry’s monotone narration to ease the tension:

“But after a while he was mostly pissed because I hung around the cab stand.”

 

“That was it. No more letters from…”

“One day some of the kids from the neighborhood carried my mom’s groceries all the way home…”

Another way Scorsese desensitizes us to violence is by juxtaposing it with blatant banality. For instance, after Tommy and Jimmy brutally beat a man nearly to death, they shove him in the trunk of a Pontiac and stop at Tommy’s mother’s house for dinner on their way out to kill and bury him. Mrs. DeVito (Catherine Scorsese) teases Tommy about finding a woman and really settling down. Tommy jokes, “I find a nice girl every night!” All the while Billy Batts is bleeding to death in the driveway.

Goodfellas is scary because it works. Scorsese succeeds in explaining to us why Henry Hill became a gangster and why he never quit. After a while it seems normal, even to us: the robberies, the murders, the betrayal, and the blood. We become desensitized to all of these things. You walk away from this film feeling drunk on power and ready to reach for the revolver stuffed in your waistband if anybody gives you a hard time. At this point in the film these fellas really do seem like good fellas. And when you realize that, you are terrified.

About halfway through the film, the perks gradually start to melt away, and Henry begins to realize that the heaven he believed he was living in is actually a hell. When digging up the body he previously buried with Tommy and Jimmy, Henry is confronted by the stench of death, and the red lighting helps the transition from idealistic fantasy to hellish reality. 

Henry (left) retches at the stench they’ve dug up.

In this scene, mob life becomes a hell for Henry. It loses even more of its charm when he watches Tommy murder an innocent teenage boy; Liotta’s expression of horror on one side of the frame and the gun on the other is another device Scorsese uses to illustrate the shattering of Henry’s perfect world: 

Tommy shoots an innocent kid and Henry’s illusions of what mob life would entail fade further.

In this frame the gun seems as if it is pointed at Henry, shattering his fantasy land with its bullets. Henry begins to feel guilty for all of his actions, and so do we feel guilty for indulging in Henry’s fantasy for the first hour of the film. His delusion of being able to have a wife AND a girlfriend is broken when his wife stops allowing him to see other women behind her back. The gun pointed (this time really) at his face is a wake up call to reality for Henry.

Henry wakes up to find a gun in his face as Karen refuses to continue putting up with his cheating.