Scorsese/De Niro: Goodfellas(Dir. Martin Scorsese, 2h46m, 1990)

Goodfellas is, as the trendier, younger, more terminally online film fans say, "Peak Scorsese". It is Scorsese distilling everything that makes his filmography stand out, every element that makes his filmography one of the most beloved bodies of work in cinema, down into a single prime vintage; a single film that one can take off the shelf and introduce any new viewer to the films of Martin Scorsese.Goodfellas escapsultes all the key themes that dominate Scorsese's films up to 1990, here, depicting, through the real-life story of Henry Hill (played by the late great Ray Liotta), perhaps the ultimate tale of Italio-American power, brotherhood, sin, and redemption.

Based on Hill's biography, 1985's Wiseguy, whose author Nicholas Pileggi joins Scorsese on scripting duty, a partnership that we will return to for 1995's Casino, also based around true events, Goodfellas tells Hill's story of his life in crime, from his childhood in Brooklyn in the 1950s, where he is drawn by the allure, and quickly becomes part, of the local mob, headed by Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), Jimmy "the Gent" Conway (De Niro), and Tommy DeVito (Pesci). As they grow older together, the film moves into the 1960s and 1970s, the central trio becoming bolder, and their schemes and heists more elaborate, leading to the 1978 Lufthansa heist, and their crew's slow, but seemingly inevitable downfall, Hill's own precipitous fall by way of drug addiction, and his eventual decision to turn informant.

Good Fellas: Jimmy "the Gent" Conway (De Niro), Tommy DeVito (Pesci) and Henry Hill (Ray Liotta)

It's fair to consider Goodfellas as The Godfather for the 1990s. Certainly no mob movie of the interceding years can hold a candle to it in terms of pure scale and scope, aside from the De-Niro-starring The Godfather Part II. In the 34 years since Goodfellas, only The Sopranos, with which Goodfellas shares a large chunk of its cast, has come along as a successor to its stylistic take on the mob, and both in tandem continue to influence cinematic and television portrayals of gangsters in North America. In form, style and function, it is almost The Godfather's film's polar opposite: Scorsese's depiction is realist,matching Wiseguy for both its honesty in depicting the life of, and mundane day-to-day work of gangsters. This sensibility is on screen from the film's very first shots, the mundane drive, in which our triumvirate are first seen, slowly revealing, via the repeated banging, the still-alive man in the trunk.

His summary execution continues this vein of unflinching violence, and from here the film leaps back into Hill's childhood, through that oft quoted, Jules Et Jim (1962)-style voice-over. "As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster." Scorsese's filmic eye, though, does not stay in one place, or indeed time, for long-much of the opening half of Goodfellas is, via the adoption of ad-libbed dialogue and Thelma Schoonmaker's rapid-fire editing style-smartly paced vignettes. As a result, no scene outstays its welcome, laced together by Liotta's narration, so that the film moves with purpose, from Hill's childhood, and his first encounters with Conway and DeVito to their adulthoods, frequenting the Copacabana nightclub in which the trio hold court, and where Pesci's best scenes, depicting the unpredictability of the volatile DeVito take place.

Yet, when he needs the film to, Scorsese slows its action, its movement through time and space effortlessly; in comparison with the jump cuts over weeks, months or even years, the relationship between Hill and his wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco) is given time, and perhaps the greatest single shot of Scorsese's entire filmography, to develop. Much of the middle third of the film, before the increased presence of vice and the fallout from the heist rear their head is, essentially, her seduction into becoming, and life as, a mob wife. It is, after all, through her eyes that the lifestyle of the gangster is seen, and the iconic Copacabana sequence, a nearly two minute unbroken tracking shot through the kitchens, and out onto the restaurant floor, and her seduction into the lifestyle is complete. 

Let the bad times roll: Goodfellas sees De Niro arrive at the point of cinematic elder statesman.

It is also through Karen that we see both the human side of Henry-including his fallibility and extra-marital affairs-and, once in prison and, again once his downfall has been assured, and his friends and confidants begin to avoid, or, in some cases, actively plot against him, so she becomes his closest confidant. Yet, it is the interplay between the film's three main characters, and in particular between De Niro and Liotta, that the film is at its strongest. The backbone of the film is their work together, the ultra-masculine friendship, this brotherhood, recapturing the energy of Johnny Boy and Charlie from Mean Streets, together with the cruel, directionless, energy of Pesci. But, for the first time in Scorsese's filmography, De Niro gets to play not the lead-although Jimmy Conway is undeniably the film's other protagonist-but the film's elder statesman, the mentor, friend and eventual antagonist, a perfect foil against Liotta's gangster.

And it is in the elagic "Layla" montage, in which the aftermath of the Lufthansa heist, and Conway's ruthless offing of anyone who threatens to blow their cover, that once again, De Niro and Scorsese's use of montage indelibly marks a song from here on out; as the camera pans across pink Cadillacs containing corpses, and frozen carcasses of informants and gang members, and Hill narrates the fallout of the heist, the growing paranoia from his former friend. The good times are over. All that lies ahead is the paranoia of cocaine addiction, and the slow disintegration of the mob lifestyle he, and Karen, have become accustomed to.

Unlike Scorsese's other meditations upon crime, and the lives of the ultra-masculine, Hill, and Goodfellas sees his hero have to return to normality, to the life of a "schnook", and he, like the audience, is left on the outside, looking in-like few mob movies since, Goodfellas is equal parts exploration, and deconstruction of, the lifestyle and very nature of the mob movie; it is Scorsese entering the 90s in style.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Goodfellas is available via streaming on Apple TV, and on DVD and BluRay from Warner Bros.

Next week, we set sail to Cape Fear, Martin Scorsese remakes the 1962 noir classic, and Robert De Niro turns villain.

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