Rogert Ebert Review
For two days after I saw Martin Scorsese's new film,
"GoodFellas," the mood of the characters lingered within me, refusing
to leave. It was a mood of guilt and regret, of quick stupid decisions
leading to wasted lifetimes, of loyalty turned into betrayal. Yet at
the same time there was an element of furtive nostalgia, for bad times
that shouldn't be missed, but were.
Most films, even great ones, evaporate like mist once you've
returned to the real world; they leave memories behind, but their
reality fades fairly quickly. Not this film, which shows America's
finest filmmaker at the peak of his form. No finer film has ever been
made about organized crime - not even "The Godfather," although the two
works are not really comparable.
"GoodFellas," scheduled to open Sept. 21 in Chicago, is a
memoir of life in the Mafia, narrated in the first person by Henry Hill
(Ray Liotta), an Irish-Italian kid whose only ambition, from his
earliest teens, was to be a "wise guy," a Mafioso. There is also
narration by Karen, the Jewish girl (Lorraine Bracco) who married him,
and who discovered that her entire social life was suddenly inside the
Mafia; mob wives never went anywhere or talked to anyone who was not
part of that world, and eventually, she says, the values of the Mafia
came to seem like normal values. She was even proud of her husband for
not lying around the house all day, for having the energy and daring to
go out and steal for a living.
There is a real Henry Hill, who disappeared into the anonymity
of the federal government's witness protection program, and who over a
period of four years told everything he knew about the mob to the
reporter Nicholas Pileggi, whose Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family was a
best-seller. The screenplay by Pileggi and Scorsese distills those
memories into a fiction that sometimes plays like a documentary, that
contains so much information and feeling about the Mafia that finally
it creates the same claustrophobic feeling Hill's wife talks about: The
feeling that the mob world is the real world.
Scorsese is the right director - the only director - for this
material. He knows it inside out. The great formative experience of his
life was growing up in New York's Little Italy as an outsider who
observed everything - an asthmatic kid who couldn't play sports, whose
health was too bad to allow him to lead a normal childhood, who was
often overlooked, but never missed a thing.
There is a passage early in the film in which young Henry Hill
looks out the window of his family's apartment and observes with awe
and envy the swagger of the low-level wise guys in the social club
across the street, impressed by the fact that they got girls, drove hot
cars, had money, that the cops never gave them tickets, that even when
their loud parties lasted all night, nobody ever called the police.
That was the life he wanted to lead, the narrator tells us. The
memory may come from Hill and may be in Pileggi's book, but the memory
also is Scorsese's, and in the 23 years I have known him, we have never
had a conversation that did not touch at some point on that central
image in his vision of himself - of the kid in the window, watching the
neighborhood gangsters.
Like "The Godfather," Scorsese's "GoodFellas" is a long movie,
with the space and leisure to expand and explore its themes. It isn't
about any particular plot; it's about what it felt like to be in the
Mafia - the good times and the bad times. At first, they were mostly
good times, and there is an astonishing camera movement in which the
point of view follows Henry and Karen on one of their first dates, to
the Copacabana nightclub. There are people waiting in line at the door,
but Henry takes her in through the service entrance, past the security
guards and the off-duty waiters, down a corridor, through the kitchen,
through the service area and out into the front of the club, where a
table is literally lifted into the air and placed in front of all the
others so that the young couple can be in the first row for the floor
show. This is power.
Karen doesn't know yet exactly what Henry does. She finds out.
The method of the movie is a slow expansion through levels of the
Mafia, with characters introduced casually and some of them not really
developed until later in the story. We meet the don Paul Cicero (Paul
Sorvino), and Jim (Jimmy the Gent) Conway (Robert De Niro), a man who
steals for the sheer love of stealing, and Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), a
likable guy except that his fearsome temper can explode in a second,
with fatal consequences. We follow them through 30 years; at first,
through years of unchallenged power, then through years of decline (but
they have their own kitchen in prison, and boxes of thick steaks and
crates of wine), and then into betrayal and decay.
At some point, the whole wonderful romance of the Mafia goes
sour for Henry Hill, and that moment is when he and Jimmy and Tommy
have to bury a man whom Tommy kicked almost to death in a fit of
pointless rage. First, they have to finish killing him (they stop at
Tommy's mother's house to borrow a knife, and she feeds them dinner),
then they bury him, then later they have to dig him up again. The worst
part is, their victim was a "made" guy, a Mafioso who is supposed to be
immune. So they are in deep, deep trouble, and this is not how Henry
Hill thought it was going to be when he started out on his life's
journey.
From the first shot of his first feature, "Who's That knocking
at My Door" (1967), Scorsese has loved to use popular music as a
counterpoint to the dramatic moments in his films. He doesn't simply
compile a soundtrack of golden oldies; he finds the precise sound to
underline every moment, and in "GoodFellas," the popular music helps to
explain the transition from the early days when Henry sells stolen
cigarettes to guys at a factory gate, through to the frenetic later
days when he's selling cocaine in disobedience of Paul Cicero's orders,
and using so much of it himself that life has become a paranoid
labyrinth.
In all of his work, which has included arguably the best film
of the 1970s ("Taxi Driver") and of the 1980s ("Raging Bull"), Scorsese
has never done a more compelling job of getting inside someone's head
as he does in one of the concluding passages of "GoodFellas," in which
he follows one day in the life of Henry Hill, as he tries to do a
cocaine deal, cook dinner for his family, placate his mistress and deal
with the suspicion that he's being followed.
This is the sequence that imprinted me so deeply with the mood
of the film. It's not a straightforward narrative passage, and it has
little to do with plot; it's about the feeling of walls closing in, and
the guilty feeling that the walls are deserved. The counterpoint is a
sense of duty, of compulsion; the drug deal must be made, but the kid
brother also must be picked up, and the sauce must be stirred, and
meanwhile, Henry's life is careening wildly out of control.
Actors have a way of doing their best work - the work that
lets us see them clearly - in a Scorsese film. Robert De Niro emerged
as the best actor of his generation in "Taxi Driver." Joe Pesci,
playing De Niro's brother in "Raging Bull," created a performance of
comparable complexity. Both De Niro and Pesci are here in "GoodFellas,"
essentially playing major and very challenging supporting roles to Ray
Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, who establish themselves here as clearly
two of our best new movie actors. Liotta was Melanie Griffith's
late-arriving, disturbingly dangerous husband in "Something Wild," and
here he creates the emotional center for a movie that is not about the
experience of being a Mafioso, but about the feeling. Bracco was the
cop's wife from out in the suburbs in "Someone To Watch Over Me," a
film in which her scenes were so effective that it was with a real
sense of loss that we returned to the main story. The sense of their
marriage is at the heart of this film, especially in a shot where he
clings to her, exhausted. They have made their lifetime commitment, and
it was to the wrong life.
Many of Scorsese's best films have been poems about guilt.
Think of "Mean Streets," with the Harvey Keitel character tortured by
his sexual longings, or "After Hours," with the Griffin Dunne character
involved in an accidental death and finally hunted down in the streets
by a misinformed mob, or think of "The Last Temptation of Christ," in
which even Christ is permitted to doubt.
"GoodFellas" is about guilt more than anything else. But it is
not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and
guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this
film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code - guilty of the sin
of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness
protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter
certainly doesn't know it.
What finally got to me after seeing this film - what makes it
a great film - is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just as his
wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the Mafia inner life that its
values became her own, so did the film weave a seductive spell. It is
almost possible to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being
good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their loyalty so
unquestioned. But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and
sometimes it's an effort to enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole
mythology comes crashing down, and then the guilt - the real guilt, the
guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately - is not that
they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again.