Goodfellas

Goodfellas; crime drama, USA, 1990; D: Martin Scorsese, S: Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Frank Vincent, Samuel L. Jackson

New York from '55 to '80: Henry Hill was fascinated by mafia gangsters as a boy and decided to join them. He smuggled cigarettes, but didn't snitch anyone when he was caught by the police, which made him popular in the mobster circles. As a grown up, his partners are violent Jimmy and small Tommy, who is even afraid to tell his mother what he does. The two of them sometimes kill their enemies like animals. Henry falls in love with Karen and the two of them get married. He gets two daughters and spends a few years in prison. After Tommy killed an influential mobster, Billy Batts, out of a personal grudge, the mafia kills Tommy, whereas Jimmy starts suspecting Henry might snitch details of a robbery. In fear for his life, Henry decides to become an FBI informant. He testifies on court against the mafia and gets displaced somewhere under the witness protection program.

When in 1990 "Dances With Wolves" triumphed at the Academy Awards by winning 7 Oscars while crime drama "Goodfellas" picked only one statue (outstanding Joe Pesci as best supporting actor) out of 6 nominations and 5 "empty" Golden Globe nominations, many complained that the academy made a terrible mistake and failed to recognize Martin Scorsese's precise talent. The BAFTAs even awarded "Goodfellas" as the best film and best director. Still, regardless of everything, that just proves that honest human emotions, the ones found in "Wolves", were always more genuine and superior than precise, but mechanical and cold stories that offer "Goodfellas". Namely, that mafia biopic about real ex-mobster Henry Hill and Scorsese's most famous film is excellent, but still a little bit overrated. Naming it even as one of the best movies of all times is kind of a stretch since there are equally as good, if not better gangster films present, like Coen's "Miller's Crossing" or Wellman's "The Public Enemy". It is at moments a virtuoso directed story about gangsters with a "God complex"—establishing a "Mafia dictatorship" with violence as their leverage of supremacy over others—and many details in the dark story are brilliant (mobsters turn with their car to the Zoo and threaten to throw a man in debt to the lions if he doesn't pay up; freeze frames; the "switching" of the narrator from Henry to his wife Karen...). 

The amazing Steadicam shots by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus show craftsmanship (the long, 3-minute entrance of Henry and his date into a restaurant, filmed in one take, is a remarkable trick that also underlines how time "stopped" for him by abandoning the previous style of fast cuts of the movie). The strategy of the film was to initially show the appealing side of gangsters—after all, that way the insignificant lower class became the upper class, which is addicting like a drug—and thus the first half is almost upliftingly energetic (Henry even narrates: "To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States! To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies."), but the second half turns bleak and depressive, to signal their eventual fall and collapse, with the opening murder of Billy Batts taken from the middle of the film, to mark the point after which everything went wrong, since this error will haunt Tommy and the gang. Henry is a peculiar character—he never kills anybody during the entire film, yet he aids and abets his superiors. The insight into the world of organized crime avoided to turn glamorous, since it depicted that with time even Henry himself didn't know whom he can trust anymore: the message is poignant—if you work for evil, don't be surprised if it turns evil against you, too. This sent subtle morals without turning preachy. Even the ending where Henry is hiding somewhere in the US in a small city leaves an impressive effect, but it seems Scorsese filled the whole film with always the same, repetitive variations of the murders of the mobsters, which somewhat exhausts the story near the end, that seems emotionally and spiritually empty: it only shows brute characters on the "lower" level of consciousness, not on the higher one. It's a brilliant film, but it has no likeable character.

Grade:+++