THE INDISPENSIBLES – #4: GOODFELLAS
“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.”
It’s not the violence, the riches, or the friendships both betrayed, genuine or otherwise that make Goodfellas so truly masterful. It’s the conjoined narration by Henry Hill (as sampled above) and his wife Karen. The narration is all but essential to the movie’s success and subsequent status as a modern classic within the realms of cinema history. It gives the film an insight that others of its type within the genre lack.
Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas is not an outsider’s view, but a point-of-view movie that manages to have us, the audience, fluctuating between a guilty desire to live this life and an utter repulsion to be as far away from it as possible. It is based on Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, Nicholas Pileggi’s factual book about a high-ranking mob foot soldier who turned federal witness against his long time friends and had to enter the Witness Protection Programme in the early 80s as a result.
Scorsese himself alleges it is equally based on his own memories of Little Italy, having grown up in and around these types of characters during the 40s and 50s.
We open on a teenage Henry Hill (played by Ray Liotta as an adult) who starts out as a ‘gofer’ for the local Brooklyn mob, after becoming intrigued by the goings-on at their ‘headquarters’ situated in a taxi garage right across the street from his childhood home. (As the director himself detailed in the famous Scorsese on Scorsese collection of interviews, the shot of Henry looking out the window mirrors his own childhood memories from Manhattan’s Little Italy neighbourhood, as does the sequence that follows, which uses subtle slow-motion for close-ups of the mobster’s shoes, ties, hair, rings and cigars – all things that used to stick in Scorsese’s mind about the local gangsters of his youth.)
Young Henry’s joy in his emerging career is barely controllable. By the time he has reached twenty-one years of age, he has enough money to tip lavishly, follow orders to the point of torching a used car and has earned the trust of his gangster bosses by getting “pinched” by the police for selling stolen cigarettes out of car boots but refusing to inform on whom he was working for. From earning such trust, Henry is welcomed further into the fold and partnered with the mob’s ‘big money earner’ Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and the diminutive Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), a psychotic ‘heavy’ who makes the mistake of continually over-exercising his clout.
During his time rising through the ranks, Henry meets and falls in love with Karen (Lorraine Bracco), has children with her, and ensnares her in the luxury of being part of the “family”. Meanwhile, the trio of Henry, Jimmy and Tommy become more and more entwined with one another and keep going for bigger and better paid jobs, leading to the now infamous $6 million robbery at the Lufthansa Cargo Facility at New York’s Idlewild Airport.
The story arc follows a simple three-act construction, with the linear-structure simply becoming mashed and twisted to fit the specific moods that Scorsese wants to elicit in certain scenes. Act one sees Henry’s movement up in the mob and Act two then sees his stagger down into prison sentences, before a closing third act that introduces bad deals, murder and ultimately betrayal.
Bad deals, murder and betrayal all soaked in gut-wrenching violence. Dialogue is constantly being interrupted with acts of sadism within the film. The brutality is so graphic and so ever present – especially when Pesci’s character of Tommy DeVito is on screen – that we watch the film with our hearts in our mouths or our hands over our eyes, always anticipating the next attack. Sometimes the threat without an accompanying attack is just as bad, such as in Pesci’s famous restaurant scene where Tommy wants to know what Henry meant when he said he was “funny”. Pesci improvised this scene and Liotta, on the receiving end of Pesci’s “funny how?” speech was just waved on by Scorsese to “go with it”. At one point you can see Liotta look off, away from the table. To an untrained eye he is looking in and around him to see if anyone has caught this as a joke before he suggests it is, he is actually looking off to Scorsese behind the monitor. As a result, this legendary scene was born!
In what has become the most famous shot of the movie, Henry takes [his future wife] Karen to the Copacabana nightclub. There’s a line at the front entrance, but Henry simply escorts her across the street, down the stairs and into the service corridors, through the kitchen area, and out into the main showroom just as their table is being placed right in front of the stage. This is not simply just a cameraman’s stunt or an example of technical genius, but also an inspired way to show how the whole world seems to unfold effortlessly for those with “strong connections”. In this one sequence, now much imitated (see Swingers for example), we come to realise that the saying “The world does not revolve around you” holds no meaning whatsoever with Henry.
This one majestic stedicam shot is our introduction to a note of central importance within Goodfellas; that Henry and Karen are quite narcissitically perfect for each other – they could settle themselves down and work an honest forty hour week and obtain some, but maybe not all, of what they want (as the ‘American Dream’ dictates) over several years. They just don’t want to. At heart they’re too just lazy and selfish for that. They want it all and they want it now. And this character trait becomes something that ties each and every one of the characters to one another: The rewards of unearned privilege become the heart of GoodFellas.
Read any retrospective review of this film and you can’t help but realise that cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, was robbed at the Academy Awards just as badly as Scorsese himself was. Scorsese not winning Best Director is quite possibly the biggest travesty in this history of Academy Award travesties, but it’s equaly frustrating that his DoP was ignored too! Ballhaus never allows his camera to be still; it is always moving, if only a little, and as is taught in many a Film Studies class, ‘moving cameras makes us not passive observers but active voyeurs’.
To make certain that we are nothing if not active voyeurs, Scorsese shares his enthusiasm for the material with us the viewer, and it proves so overwhelmingly infectious that we’re drawn right into the heart of his film whether we want to be or not. His direction matches that of the voiceovers perfectly so that the film has the rapid momentum of a drunk guy in a bar, knowing he has a cracking joke to tell but whose alcohol intake is pushing his words out of his mouth, faster then his brain can keep up with. The pace of the story is often so fast that we’re all but bouncing off the frames of the screen as it hurtles along.
Scorsese’s matching of music together with his images has always been great, but here it is at its best. Don’t believe me? Check out the scenes of Jimmy having his ‘crew’ from the Lufthansa heist killed (essentially because he does not want to share the loot with any of them) to the closing chords of Eric Clapton’s Layla.
On its own that one little “bit” is unarguably sublime. But Goodfellas is filled to the brim with scenes JUST like it. It’s that one modern classic that you can throw out there in a pub debate as flawless and nobody will disagree with you.
Renegade Motorhomes - Credit Card Consolidation - Debt Consolidation - Credit Consolidation
No comments yet - be the first to tell us what you think!
What's Your Opinion?