Some films you watch once, and their memory gradually fades into oblivion. Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990) is a film whose individual scenes linger in your mind like blissful memories from a more glorious time period. Indeed, Goodfellas ushered in one of the best decades in world cinema (the 1990s), which produced such groundbreaking classics as Casino, A Brighter Summer Day, The Emperor and the Assassin, Ju Dou, La Belle Noiseuse, Underground, Princess Mononoke, and Days of Being Wild. What makes Goodfellas such an essential film is its virtually perfect blend of various cinematic audio and visual techniques to give the viewer an immersive, ground-level portrait of the outlaw culture of the gangster lifestyle.
Goodfellas is based on Nicholas Pileggi's non-fiction book Wiseguy, which chronicles the rise and fall of the former gangster, later turned FBI informant Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his youth in the 1950s, through the turbulent and wild 1960s, and into the 1970s and 1980s. The film is grounded by career highlight performances of such legendary actors as Lorraine Bracco as Henry's wife Karen, Joe Pesci as the volatile gangster Tommy DeVito, and, of course, Robert De Niro as the cold-booded killer James Conway. Paul Sorvino also gives a memorably chilling performance as the gang boss Paul Cicero.
What sets Goodfellas apart from so many other gangster films is its genuine passion and commitment to the material. Scorsese didn’t just make a gangster film to introduce another familiar entry into the tried and true gangster genre. Rather, he created Goodfellas as an homage to all the gangster films he loved, and also as a memoir of sorts to the gangster lifestyle that surrounded him as a young man raised in the Little Italy area of New York. The tone of the film itself, depite its grim and ultimately nihilistic ending, is almost celebratory of this lifestyle, which has caused some to accuse it of glorifiying the violent lifestyle of the mob.
The truth is that Scorsese is not advocating the life of the gangster, rather he is portraying it without passing judgement on the admitedly morally corrupt characters he depicts. Yes, we see Henry and his cohorts living what seems like a grand and lavish parade of uninterrupted pleasure, but this is only a reflection of the reality of their lives at the time. From the instantly memorable opening of the film, when Henry proclaims over voice-over that he always wanted to be a gangster, Scorsese is making it clear to the audience that he is not making Goodfellas to outright condemn the protagonists of his film. Instead, he is providing us an immersive, ground-level, almost documentary-like portrait of the working grunts of the Italian mafia.
Henry, along with Tommy and James, are not the bourgeois and sophisticated royalty family of gangsters in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather films or even Scorsese's own Casino; they are more like working-class stiffs who are constantly trying to score the next big heist. The lifestyle that Scorsese depicts in Goodfellas is one of a brotherhood of associates who live each day like its their last. We see dynamic sequences of Henry and his close-knit group of outlaws partying at the Copacabana nightclub (which includes one of the most celebrated, uninterrupted, tracking shots in cinema history), staying up late at night after one of their many illegal schemes, and genuinely enjoying each other's company.
However, Scorsese knows that all good things must come to an end, so after Henry and his gangster associates eventually pull off their most lucrative scheme, the robbing of the Lufthansa vault at JFK airport, their lives start to fall apart due to jealousy, paranoia, and back-stabbing acts of violence. Scorsese tells this epic story of friendship and betrayal using a wide-range of cinematic techniques that have influenced countless filmmakers. He employs almost non-stop background music of various pop, rock songs, complemented by a lively voice-over narration by Henry Hill that serves to not only move the story forward, but also mirrors at times the hectic nature of what we see on-screen. The best evidence of this is the epilogue of the film, in which Henry narrates his increasingly frenzied and drug-fueled activities during the day in which he was finally caught by the FBI and turned over to witness protection as an informant.
Goodfellas is one of those films where every element, from the acting, to the directing, to even the smallest details in the set design, works almost perfectly to create a once-in-a-lifetime cinematic experience. Scorsese himself has tried to emulate this same experience in future films to varying degrees of success, from his follow-up film Casino, to his late career masterpiece The Wolf of Wall Street. Although these subsequent films are classics in their own ways, none of them match the passion and intensity of Goodfellas, which leaps off the screen as if it was something that Scorsese just had to make. With Goodfellas, Scorsese is showing us the visceral power inherent in cinema, a force which can reach unprecented heights with the right combination of talent and love for the material.
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