AVguide.com: Film/Music Recommendations: Film Reviews Film/Music Recommendations
 



Goodfellas (1990).

Martin Scorsese, director. Widescreen anamorphic (1.85:1), Color, Dolby Digital 5.1. Multiple commentaries, featurettes, extras. Warner.

Buy DVD
 
This jet-black 1990 comedy of Mafia morals and manners is arguably Martin Scorsese’s best film and certainly one of his most original. Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s non-fiction book Wise Guy (Pileggi also co-wrote the screenplay and, five years later, would collaborate with Scorsese again on Casino), it tells the by-turns horrifying and hilarious true-life story of mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta)—a soldier in Brooklyn’s Lucchese family whose sole ambition from childhood was to be a “wise guy.” By doing exactly what he’s told when he’s told, Hill realizes this ambition at the age of twelve; from then on, for the better part of three decades, he lives the life of a successful low-level Mafioso, until a drug bust forces him to turn state’s witness, testify against his boss Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and erstwhile best pal Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro), and go into a witness protection program as a civilian.
      Hill views this last turn of events as a tragic loss of good fortune: “We were like movie stars with muscle. I had paper bags filled with jewelry stashed in the kitchen. I had a sugar bowl full of coke next to the bed. Anything I wanted was a phone call away…everything was for the taking. Today, I have to wait around like everyone else. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”
      I’m quoting Henry at length because, in a brilliant coup de cinéma, the entire movie is narrated from this same dry, jaded point of view. Indeed, Hill’s narration (drolly delivered by Liotta) is so central to this film that Goodfellas parses less like a movie and more like an illustrated first-person novel—something that is told to us as much as shown to us and that gets its distinctive ironic tone from the way words rub up against images and images against words.
      The “quasi-literary” style of Goodfellas is established in the opening scene, which begins with a bang like no other: the gruesome stabbing and shooting to death of mobster Billy Batts (Frank Vincent)—a murder that is made even more horrifying by the fact that the already badly beaten victim is presumed to be dead and has been stowed in the trunk of Hill’s car to be carried to a Mafia dumping ground in Jersey. Before we can recover from the shock of Batts’ horrific slaughter, Scorsese dollies in and freeze-frames on a big close-up of Hill closing the car’s trunk on (the now really most sincerely dead) Billy and, with Tony Bennett’s lush upbeat version of “Rags to Riches” swelling improbably in the background, we hear him say, in a matter-of-fact voice-over, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.”
      This marriage of deadpan narration, ironic (because so often banally romantic) period music, and visuals that either grotesquely counterpoint or amusingly illustrate or simply dawdle behind the voice-overs is the stylistic formula of the movie. Like a tour guide to a particularly bizarre foreign country, Hill’s cool, funny, knowing commentary both distances us from and brings us closer to the bent, savage world of the Mafia—allowing us to see its colorfulness and camaraderie and freewheeling energy from an insider’s point of view, while simultaneously letting us see through the exoticism, as only an insider can, to its core greed, ruthlessness, and sociopathy. Along the way we meet characters riotous and heinous and sometimes, as in the case of Joe Pesci’s psychotic Tommy de Vito, both at once. Though everyone gives a sensational performance in this movie, Pesci is through the roof. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Goodfellas and deserved it. (The “I’m funny, how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you? I make you laugh? I’m here to amuse you?” sequence has justly become as famous as the “You talkin’ to me” sequence in Taxi Driver.) Although the film drags just a bit after Tommy’s demise (even as the pace of cutting and crosscutting is greatly accelerated), all is redeemed in the final courtroom sequence, where Liotta addresses the camera directly and gives his memorable speech about being reduced to a “nobody” (part of which I’ve quoted above).
      Hollywood, Lord knows, has made a lot of mob movies, but outside of The Godfather films, none is tougher, funnier, more caustic, or more entertaining than this look at La Cosa Nostra through the very dry eyes of Henry Hill. Warner’s new anamorphic transfer of Goodfellas will be on my DVD Transfers of the Year list. It clearly improves upon the old nonanamorphic one visually and sonically, and that’s saying something because, as non-anamorphic transfers go, Warner’s original release of Goodfellas was the best of the lot.
 


Advertisement